NYC is striking

It looks like I moved to Jersey just in time. The subways and buses are shut down due to a transit strike and 7 million people a day are out on their arse in the cold looking for other ways to get to work. Many are walking miles, others are biking and car pooling (only cars with 4 occupants are allowed into Manhattan) it's a strange sight to say the least.

If you have ever watched the movie "Working Girl" with Melanie Griffith or Terry Gilliam's "The Fisher King", you'll be familiar with the image of the kooky New York secretary who shows up to work in a smart business suit but rounded off with a pair of sneakers. Apparently this phenomenom is a leftover from the last transit strike in 1980 when the system shut down for 11 days. I've been seeing lots of suits and sneakers in the last two days. Thousands of people have been marching over the Brooklyn Bridge in the bitter cold.

I'm okay; I now ride the PATH train and it drops me 8 blocks from work. Owned by the Port Authority and not the Metropolitan Transport Authority, It is not affected by the strike other than being a bit busier than usual.

A lot of people are being affected though and not just the public and transit workers (who stand to get fined two days wages for ever day they are out). A lot of stores are closed because their staff cannot get into work, a lot of restuarants have no customers and some have no delieveries as commercial vehicles are also banned from downtown NYC during the day. It's the run up to Christmas, this is one pinch that has to hurt.

The other annoying thing is that the MTA who run the subways announced a billion dollar surplus this year and does not want to spread the money around to the workers! Also the union in this case stepped out from the blanket of it's international affiliate and called the strike without approval. This means support strikes are virtually non-existant and the local union which is being fined $1 million dollars a day will be bankrupt by the end of the week.

It seems to me, my paranoid eye that is, that this strike is the best thing that ever happened to the management of the MTA. They can kill the Union once and for all and once that happens they can do whatever they want! I'm a great believer in Unions and I think this would be an unspeakable tradgedy. Again maybe I am being paranoid, but I keep thinking about how it turned out in the Miner's strike in the 1980's in the UK when it was discovered years later that some of the Union's top executives were in fact secret service moles, and that the destruction of the union was just as inportant as the closure of the mines.

All I hope is that this gets worked out without too many people getting hurt any more.