OK, the unthinkable (meaning the thing I just didn’t want to think about, like writing a check to the dentist) has been thunk and—as you surely know by now if you live in the U.S.—the New York City public transit system is down. The Transit Workers Union local has gone out on strike.
Can you say “Snow day!!!”?
Actually, this is going to be tough. It isn’t that I need to get to the office to blog (it’s 60 blocks south of where we live, about a two-hour walk). I can do that from home, or a local coffee house. The real issue is how Lisa and I are going to take care of cowboy Luke, who’ s just three and finished preschool last Friday. He went out on a high note, too, appearing, with the rest of his class, in the annual Holiday Pageant dressed as a lamb (unfortunately, after they sang their song, he got bored, ripped off his costume, and tried to dive off the stage as if it were a mosh pit rather than rows of parents sitting below). But that, as they say, is a whole other story . . .
Anyway, tomorrow, our beloved Jana is going home to the Czech Republic (only in New York, folks, can you have a beautiful, blue-eyed, six-foot tall model—and Sunday School teacher!—for a part-time nanny) for a few weeks, and our helpers, Luke’s former nannies, may not be able to make it in from Brooklyn quickly or cheaply enough to make it worth their while to pick up those valuable extra holiday bucks for looking after Luke. So I’m not sure how this will all play out.
I’m angry at the transit workers. The people who are really going to suffer will be those like our Brooklyn nannies, and others who can’t afford to lose money—especially during the holiday season. Nothing is quite as acutely boring as the back-and-forth of labor disputes, but I think the transit workers not only have a good deal already, I know that they are asking for far more than I ever got in the way of automatic raises, and that their pension package is through-the-roof great.
Beyond that, though, my gut feeling is that the transit workers thought that the prospect of a holiday season strike was so unthinkable to the city that MTA officials would cave at the last moment. They didn’t. I think the TWU workers played themselves. They’re hurting a lot of people, and I hope the courts slap them with the two-days-pay-for-each-day-out penalty—as before. For them to strike under these obviously less-than-exceptional circumstances is more than illegal, it’s flagrantly cruel to their fellow New Yorkers, and a serious, deep violation of their trust with the public.
Fire them all. I’d sooner crawl to work on my belly with my arms and legs bound now than give an inch—or dime—to the transit workers.