The Only Corporate Media Story That I Could Find Siding With The Screwed Transit Workers...

MICHAEL POWELL AND MICHELLE GARCIA, WASHINGTON POST - As the 34,000-member Transport Workers Union edged closer to a strike that would close the nation's largest bus-and-subway system, many conductors and track workers, token booth clerks and bus drivers have spoken with a voice seldom heard these days in New York. This city tends to be viewed through the gold-leafed windows of Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, where the median income is twice that of the rest of the city and jobs come with white collars, where three-bedroom apartments sell for more than $1 million and several dozen restaurants open each month.

As Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, himself a billionaire, put it a few years back, New York is a luxury item -- and residents, he suggested, happily pay for the pleasure of living here. But the transit workers' voice is that of median-income New Yorkers, the millions who make $40,000 to $60,000 a year and who are ever more hard-pressed. Middle-class incomes in New York, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-funded group, have declined by 11.9 percent relative to inflation in the past 13 years.

By contrast, incomes for the top-fifth of New York earners have increased by 26 percent. Inflation runs close to 5 percent in the city, and housing prices have shot up 85 percent. Few middle- and working-class families can afford to buy a home or apartment, even in the most far-flung neighborhoods. . .

In New York, once a bastion of unionized labor, only 55 percent of private-sector workers receive health benefits, a figure that is lower than the national average. . .

The Transport Workers Union, whose militant roots reach back into the Irish and Italian migrations of the early 20th century, is a tough adversary. To speak of labor-management dialogue has often been an oxymoron; labor negotiations and strikes are approached as set battles. When a judge jailed transit union leader Mike Quill during a 1966 strike (it is illegal for public employees to strike in New York state), Quill responded: "The judge can drop dead in his black robes. I don't care if I rot in jail."
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