WWRD? He’d fire their asses!

NYC Transit workers are striking. Illegaly.

My bro Thom is in a fortunate position – he can take the day off and get his bearings, take his time getting a ticket for tomorrow’s ride on the Long Island Rail Road, but he’s watching the people shivering at Jamaica station, waiting in horrendous lines in the cold, waiting to buy their tickets, and he writes, “this is kind of cruel…”

It’s an illegal strike. Writes Thom, “Apparently, the International Union that oversees this local one was against the strike, and advised against it, but the local overruled them. And now there is a lot of legal wrangling going on. The International Union might take way the local’s certification. It’s going to get ugly. The big sticking point seems to be pensions. The MTA wants new hires to fork over 6% of their pay for their pensions.”

This daughter of blue-collared, dues-paying union members, people who wouldn’t cross a picket line, says Gov. Pataki, if he has the means, oughta take a page from the Book of Reagan, back when the air-traffic controllers went on strike.

Evan Coyne Maloney has some thoughts on the strike, and they’re worth reading.

I do not understand why unions aren’t considered illegal cartels. If I wanted to become a subway train driver, I could not do so without first joining the union, whether I wanted to pay the union dues or not. What’s the difference between that and being forced to pay protection money to the mafia? In either case, the mob or the union “protects” me (or my job), whether I want the protection or not.

Similarly, if a group of merchants got together to decide that they’re going to sell gasoline at $10 a gallon, it would be considered illegal collusion, and the merchants would be prosecuted. So why can individuals band together to fix prices for labor? They are in effect merchants of their work, and they’re colluding, via the union, to subvert the free market and set artificially high prices for what they are selling. And they are now effectively extorting the entire City of New York in order to ensure the perpetuation of their monopoly on the transit labor market.

It’s too bad that neither Mayor Bloomberg nor Governor Pataki have the power or the backbone to do what President Reagan did when PATCO–the (former) air traffic controllers union–went on strike. If the transit workers don’t want to show up and drive the trains, then the MTA should be free to hire people who do