Originally posted 12.20.2005
So, here I am, sitting at my desk at the DOH feeling slightly grimy in layers of running clothes and raggedy sweaters that I stuffed into a backpack early this morning before heading out for my first ever run-to-work. It was kind of neat, actually. Anticipating heavy congestion on the Brooklyn Bridge, I started out around 6:30 a.m. Most mornings, I shoehorn myself into a subway car for a brief but claustrophobic commute; today, I was powered only by my own steam, blessedly solitary for the first two thirds of my three-mile jog.
I’m one of the lucky ones. My options were to work from home; walk, bike, or run; or at the very worst, take a vacation day. I wonder how many of the 7 million commuters in this crazy city have so many choices. As usual, it’s the already vulnerable who will be hurt the most, the hourly wage-earners who don’t have vacation days, so many of whom live in the outer reaches of their boroughs.
My sympathies are mixed. On the one hand, I hear a coworker rant about the Transport Workers Union (TWU)’s lack of consideration for the people of New York, what Peter S. Kalikow, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) called “a slap in the face to all MTA customers and New Yorkers.”
“The MTA should just fire everybody and replace them,” said A. “Plenty of people out there would give their right arm to make, what do they earn? 50K a year?” A friend who earns far less at her various and sundry jobs, has no health insurance, pension, or vacation, feels the same. But E lays heavily on the education/wealth disparity: these working class people make a lot more than she, with her masters degree from a rather fancy institution, does, and yet they aren’t satisfied. How dare they.
The other take on it is that they’re fighting to keep what they already have. Not so much that they’re asking for more aside from reasonable cost of living raises (ahem, far more than any c.o.l. raise this city employee will ever see), but that they’re asking to maintain for future employees what current employees already have: retirement at 55, a pension contribution of 2% rather than the 6% the MTA is pushing for.
A pissed off guy in the Times was quoted as saying, “It’s ridiculous. If you look at what they’re asking for, that’s 50 years ago. Pensions don’t work like that any more.”
But why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why do we just acquiesce to this idea that workers get screwed and that’s just the way it is; things are worse than they used to be, we all work longer hours for a smaller dollar, and security is a thing of the past. That we should count ourselves lucky just to have a job at all.
I do count myself lucky to have a job. So, so lucky. But I like this job. I get paid as much as one of those blue-collar laborers mentioned above (and I don’t even have a masters degree. Just a bachelors. (Shhhhh.) I have benefits and…oh yeah, I’m a Teamster. I don’t really know what that means, but I think it has something to do with my rights being protected more than they would be if I wasn’t one.
Well. I know a lot of you who check in with spindlegirl live and commute in NY, and most (probably all) of you are more well-versed on this topic than I. So if there was ever a blog entry that invited your comments, this is the one.
What do you think?
