Over it. Man, we are over it. And thank goodness it's over too. The Pershing Square Restaurant outside Grand Central had a sign posted in the window today: MTA STRIKERS NO LONGER WELCOME. The Daily News and the Post both had negative headlines about Roger Toussaint. The worms have turned against the strikers, so it's not a moment too soon for them to be calling it off. And it's no wonder. It's really the working people who suffered in this strike, despite the massive retail losses that Bloomberg has also cited. I've heard stories in the cabs on the way home of people spending $60-$90 a day to get themselves, their spouses and their kids around town. No working family can afford that. I've gotten off relatively easily at around $25/day for the last two days.
But I'm so exhausted that my good will and chipperness and sense of adventure have vaporized, even though tonight was a relatively easy commute. No line of the damned snaking up from the lower levels. No conga line from hell dancing around the precincts of Grand Central. Just a bit of a maze of crowd-control gates leading down to the same spot we went in yesterday. I got there early enough to avoid the line and just slid past the cut off for the 6:15 train, and got a comfortable seat (instead of the jump seats I've been sitting on) on the last car. My ride home from Fordham cost me $10 and I was home by 7:45. Since I left at 5:45, it was still two hours, but at least it felt earlier.
The union didn't make itself any friends with this strike, and though I sympathize the purpose of unions, I think part of the reason they're now so toothless is that they haven't grappled with the economic realities, one of which is that the cost of health care is draining our business economy and Congress doesn't care enough to do anything about it—and the insurance lobby would prefer they didn't. I think this is probably one of the driving forces of outsourcing, and it's certainly one of the driving forces of non-competitiveness. (Of course, corporate greed is also one of the driving forces behind outsourcing and non-competitiveness, too.) It would be great to see a general, European-style strike to force the healthcare issue. As a working stiff who buys my own insurance, I'd totally support that. I've always felt that, like education, healthcare is universal human right. It's inhumane and immoral to deny anyone either an education or available healthcare because of inability to pay; doing so is just another way to further feudalism. But I think until healthcare coverage becomes a non-issue for everyone, the unions are never going to be able to really address wages, job security, and pensions effectively.
Tonight, I'm just happy I'll have a bus or a subway to get on tomorrow.
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