My Forrest Gump Education of NYC Transit Strikes

The New York Sun’s editorial yesterday said should the Metropolitan Transit Authority “reward the union’s illegal behavior” it would send a “message of appeasement” elsewhere. The Sun continues, that’s “how they used to work in the New York of the 1960’s and 1970’s.” But, the Sun said, “it is not a way to run a successful city in the competitive global economy.”

I laugh, at just 58, at another of my Forrest Gump moments. The Sun’s editorialist missed that this began, actually, back in the 1950’s, and I’m a witness to how.

It was 1958 or ’59, and my social studies assignment from P.S. 246, Walt Whitman Junior High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was a term paper about how local government works.

Not having much of a clue, I went to New York City Hall to find out and wandered about asking people in the halls. They all rushed by, with puzzled and frustrated looks on their faces how to quickly respond. In a big conference room, the famous, feisty, Irish orator who built and led the Transport Workers Union, Mike Quill, a genuine New York-style colorful character, was in one of his fascinating harangues of the press threatening a strike if he didn’t get what he wanted, and he’d bring the city and mayor to their knees as he beat them with his union shillelagh.

As the crowd cleared, I asked Mike Quill my broad question. He flashed his broad smile and said I looked familiar, probably thinking me Irish due to my red hair and freckles. I told him I’d seen him speak years before at the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, while my grandparents’ cousin, David Dubinsky, founder of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was bouncing me on his knee. I guess that vouched for my membership in the socialist workers movement that Quill had been active in since his youth, so Mike Quill invited me to join him and his crew at lunch, at a neighborhood restaurant on 14th Street that served heaping portions of the best corned beef and cabbage I’ve ever had.

At the table, Mike Quill explained to me how government works: It’s all just politics among friends, all out to make their constituents happy, and to hell with the beancounters, and tories, and other allusions to old enemies and battles.

When I turned in my termpaper, all I got was an incredulous look from my teacher, a shake of the head, and note that I’d missed the assignment’s requirement to discuss the structures and laws. I received a C.

After I told this story to a younger New Yorker last night, I checked my memory online, finding this entry at Wikipedia:

“Quill and the TWU became even more important figures in New York City politics in the 1950s. He was a key supporter of Robert F. Wagner, Jr.'s campaign for mayor of New York and became a lightning rod, based on his radical past, for Wagner's Republican opponent and unfavorable press attention. While the union repeatedly threatened to take the subway workers out on strike, it managed to settle with the Wagner administration short of a strike on each occasion.”

The ground was laid in the 1950’s, as the New York Times reports, that New York City’s current “pension outlays for the transit workers have soared to $453 million this year, triple the amount in 2002.” The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s director of labor relations summed its negotiation objective: “If you know a tidal wave is coming and you can still play around in the surf because it’s not here yet, anyone would think that’s foolishness.” A two-tier pension plan is offered, trimming costs of pensions for future workers. The current union president says that would “sell out the ‘unborn.’ “ A former NYC labor commissioner reflects the city “might have picked a union that was more willing to consider the subject.”

The Christian Science Monitor editorializes, “Public Unions On Trial in the Big Apple.” The current pension plan allows full retirement at 55, which the union wants lowered to 50, in addition to wanting a 24% pay raise over the next 3-years on top of the current base wage scale of $47-55,000. Commenting that, in addition, “healthcare costs for state and local government workers are almost double that of private workers,” the Monitor points out that, “Only the political will of elected leaders can resist the well-monied clout of unions and serve society as a whole.”

Sorry, but that’s not enough, as we here in San Diego have learned to our rue. San Diego has a $2-billion shortfall in meeting pension and healthcare contracts arranged cozily between our mostly Republican councilmen at the time and unions, in a city that spends 80% of its budget on labor costs and cuts back all other services. Only reaching that extreme, exposing the backroom deals, and the refusal by Wall Street to lend any more, has led to the problem even being addressed by our current leaders. They are still hemming and hawing, and their promised reforms only promise relatively minor future restraints. Two council seats up for election pit major union-funded candidates who may well win, against more moderate candidates who make hazy promises of reforms.

Sorry, but that’s not enough, even when a leader takes a stronger stand. California’s Governor Schwarzenegger was only able to mount a $35-million campaign for the initiatives that would restrain the public unions’ power that’s all admit controls California, versus their $150-million, and lost. That’s not terribly surprising, not only given the relative fund-raising strength of public unions and their fierce determination to maintain their power, but also that today in America there are as many net beneficiarees of government spending programs as there are taxpayers.

Such severe deficits are becoming the norm across cities and states. Most have more limitations on their tax powers than at the federal level, and their shortchanging of local services is more immediately evident and painful to voters. Most are dependent on Wall Street financing to meet operating and other needs. Over the next several years, both due to increased investigation and revealment of the huge unfunded liabilities the states and cities have ammassed, over $1/2-trillion and rapidly growing, and the new requirements to accurately carry these liabilities openly on their books, Wall Street may prove the savior forcing restraining runaway public union emptying of everyone else’s pocket.

That day is rapidly approaching at the federal level as well, and another trillion or so dollars of unfunded Social Security and Medicare promises come due over the next decade. Defense spending, even with our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a far smaller percent of our GNP than in the ‘80’s. Calls by supporters and critics for a larger military able to meet those and other commitments more effectively and at less disruption of reservists’ civilian lives are unlikely to be afforded. Other domestic programs will increasingly feel the scapel. Pork projects, loved by benefitting locals, and by the legislators who use it to get reelected, will have to be more restrained, causing evident discomfort to voters. Taxes will increase, as will interest rates affecting all consumers of everything. The increasingly competitive international economy does not permit the U.S. the luxery of crippling our economy under increased tax burdens on our productivity.

The “unborn” transit workers the NYC transit union president feigns concern for are directly in conflict with all the other unborn, not to mention all the born citizens of America who wish to earn enough and to retain enough of their earnings and public services to live in a reasonably comfortable society.

As my friend concluded our reminiscences and discussion last night:
“It is unfortunately the case that the ideas that were advocated as reforms in the early 20th century turned out to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The added nonsense involves taking the dead goose and running a car over it.”

The public employee union power that has been building since the 1920’s, that took off in the affluent 1950’s, is now bankrupting America and increasingly sucking the wherewithal out of the very social services that union-supported politicians love.