Here is Mayor Michael Bloomberg's take on the Transport Workers Union strike: "You've got people making $50,000 and $60,000 a year keeping the people who are making $20,000 and $30,000 a year from being able to earn a living. That's just not acceptable."
Like most of the media coverage that has focused on the inconveniences of stranded straphangers, the mayor has missed the true meaning of the strike: the future of the middle class in New York City and communities across the region.
The problem is that a family cannot really live on $30,000 in the metropolitan area, with housing and other costs skyrocketing in the five boroughs and on Long Island. For example, according to a detailed analysis prepared by the United Way, a family of one child and one adult needs earnings of $42,000 just to cover basic needs in Queens, while a family of four requires $58,000 a year.
New York's economy is growing strongly, butunevenly, with high-paying and low-paying jobs increasing while the middle class loses ground. From 2000 to 2004, U.S. Census data show, the middle class in New York City shrank at a rate four times greater than in the rest of the nation, a trend occurring on Long Island as well, but at a slower pace.
That's what makes jobs like those at New York City Transit - paying between $47,000 and $55,000 with good benefits - so vital to the region's health. At these wages, working families don't have to depend on publicly funded support like Medicaid or Child Health Plus that are dependent on an already stretched tax base. Transit jobs give Caribbean and Latino families the kind of opportunities that made Irish-Americans and other European newcomers a mainstay of the region's middle class. Low-wage workers generally support better paying jobs because they provide an attainable ladder to the middle class.
Do transit workers deserve these wages and a fair increase? Transit workers perform thankless, dangerous tasks. Bus drivers face hostile customers and murderous traffic. Subway workers toil in dark, century-old and vermin-infested tunnels. A misstep can mean the difference between life and death for riders or the worker. Basic needs most of us take for granted - like going to the bathroom - are often a luxury for transit workers.
Not only is their pay justified, but transit workers are exactly the kind of workers who should be able to hold on to a middle class way of life in the 21st century.
Knowledge-driven, high-wage, service-sector economies like that of the New York City region depend on a web of mass transit. The recovery of the subway from a period of being decrepit and crime-ridden has helped propel the rebound of the region's economy. Because of a surge in population and public transit use, the MTA has a nearly $1-billion surplus this year. The MTA can afford to sustain a living wage for the workers it needs to operate the system.
The union says the MTA's final three-year salary proposal was 3 percent, 4 percent and 3.5 percent. Inflation is running at 3.5 percent in Northeastern urban areas, so this salary increase would leave workers treading water. In exchange for a zero percent real raise, the TWU has been asked to accept cuts in retirement security and health care. It's the kind of offer that is not an offer at all.
If the MTA gets its way, we can expect a slide in living standards for a whole range of public-sector workers, as the TWU pact would be used as a model for other municipal contracts. And we can expect a race to the bottom in service areas like health care and building services that have a chance to pay decent wages to working people in a globalized age. If the New York City region's 21st century economy is to keep its middle class, we need the transit workers strike to end with a fair contract
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