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Christopher Caldwell: Labour lore has lost allure
By Christopher Caldwell
Published: December 23 2005 20:11 | Last updated: December 23 2005 20:11
Strikes are more important today than they were 30 years ago. This is not to say that the labour movement is more important. Obviously it is not. But much as labour unrest helped write the rules of the industrial workplace and wider society early last century, today it is helping unwrite them. The pointless strike staged by New York’s subway and bus employees during the freezing final days of the Christmas shopping season made this clear. The strike ended in a humiliating failure on Thursday, when the union board sent its workers back to their jobs, having won no concessions from the Metropolitan Transit Authority and no sympathy from the public.

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New York City has traditionally been sympathetic to organised labour and vulnerable to walkouts by public employee unions, as punishing rubbish collectors’ strikes in 1968 and 1977 showed. The Transport Workers’ Union is rich in power and tradition; its fiery founder, “Red Mike” Quill, wrung big concessions out of the city in a 1966 strike that is a labour legend. A stoppage in 1980 worked to the union’s benefit, too. Yet the New York transit workers ended last week’s strike in a weaker position than they began it. Clearly someone misjudged not just the power of the union but also its position in today’s labour market.
Public sector unions in big cities have traditionally presided over the corner of the US economy that most resembles the social-market economies of continental Europe. They have won airtight job security and extensive benefits. So it is not surprising that the run-up to the strike resembled recent workplace strife in Germany. The MTA argued that the generous pensions the authority had been paying, with a retirement age of 55, were unsustainable. It proposed creating a two-tier system, preserving most benefits for current employees but renegotiating them for future hires. It called for a 6 per cent worker contribution to pension and medical costs in future (although this demand was dropped before the strike) and sought to raise the retirement age to 62. Roger Toussaint, the union president, replied that “to even consider going backward to an age 62 pension would mean surrender forever”. He proposed lowering the retirement age to 50 and asked for a 24 per cent rise over the next three years.
The negotiations also had something in common with battles in France, another country where the labour movement has sought protection in the lap of the state. Everywhere, manufacturers have allowed their unionised workforces to wither by attrition and fled to places where collective bargaining is not the norm. Government does not have either option, nor is voter pressure quite so urgent as shareholder pressure. So a gap develops. Public sector employees’ rising medical and pension costs get paid for by private sector employees whose own benefits have been stripped. Unsurprisingly, the MTA now gets 30 applications for every job opening. This was crucial to the way public attitudes developed around last week’s strike.
The dynamics of a public sector strike are always delicate. There is no capitalist whose financial interests can be damaged, only a public that can be inconvenienced and subjected to hardship. Unions trust that, once attention is forcibly drawn to the merits of their case, information plus worker solidarity will produce sympathy for the strike. That did not happen last week.
What happened was rage. Naturally, the New York Post, a conservative tabloid, called the strikers “rats”. But the liberal tabloid, the Daily News, also opposed the action. An editorial in The New York Times, generally a measured supporter of labour, described the union’s grounds for striking as “ridiculous”. Letters to the left-leaning Newsday complained of “selfishness by a union demanding economic terms that very few in the private sector will ever get” and even urged firing workers and giving their jobs to unemployed victims of the New Orleans and Mississippi flooding. The union had to shut down a weblog set up to solicit public comments after it was filled with abusive letters. All this in the social democratic capital of North America.
The union and the New Yorkers whose support it had expected were inhabiting different intellectual universes. The people walking to work were living in the hard reality of the global economy. The Governmental Accounting Standards Board, a private watchdog agency, has called for transparency about the long-term costs of public benefits packages. Since many government agencies, including in New York, have begun budgeting according to its methods, voters have a much clearer idea of what public pensions cost them in taxes. A majority of New Yorkers do not have any health benefit at their jobs. Some of them were walking seven miles to work through the bitter cold, losing their pay, shut out of Christmas shopping – all to assure someone else an insurance, pension and salary package beyond their wildest dreams.
Unions, on the other hand, were living in a world of labour “lore”. Mr Toussaint told the public: “Your next-door neighbour is a transit worker – a bus driver, a cleaner, a station agent.” Much of his rhetoric was susceptible to being thrown back in his face. Were not his own neighbours waking at 3:30am to trudge to work?
The language of many formerly “progressive” forces has taken on a reactionary tone under current circumstances. One reporter summed up the grievances of the strikers by saying that “they live paycheck to paycheck, burdened with mortgages, many with children and ailing relatives to care for”. In other words, they inhabit the modern economy, just like teachers, shop owners, accountants and other members of the middle class. New York’s transport workers may be the first union to lose a strike by failing to appreciate how the less fortunate live, but they will not be the last.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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