New York transport strike

In the evenings these days, New York City is strangely silent. If it weren't for some rather gorgeous spring days, I'd be reminded of the great silence that fell on this city on Boxing Day of 1947 when 26 inches of snow buried the parked cars, turned the buses into sleeping polar bears and arrested, for once in our lives, the most characteristic sound of a city, that of the internal combustion engine. And this silence, on a brilliant following day, was a lovely thing so long as you could forget the enormous cost to the city by way of suspending all movement, all industry and the Herculean business of digging out.

The new silence is man-made and by no means complete, especially at about nine in the morning and five in the evening when more cars crawl into the city or crawl out than most people can remember. The simple reason is a transport – or what is here called a transit – strike. For the first two days, no buses, no underground, no Long Island railroad. Then the Long Island went back to work on an agreement to negotiate the terms of a new contract but the other so-called transit workers stayed out. I say 'so-called' advisedly, for certainly the men and women who sit in little booths and hand out the underground tokens which you drop into the turnstiles, they, too, are transit workers and have come to the point where £8,000 a year is not enough.

By the way, I wonder why the New York system isn't adopted in other metropolises. I wonder this even more when I'm in London and think of the expense and fuss and bureaucracy that goes into building and printing machines that issue tickets at different prices for a hundred or more different journeys, not to mention the clipping and collecting of tickets at every station.

In New York, there's a standard fare, 50 cents, say, 25p. You go to a change booth and buy a token, a special coin, for 25p. You slot it into the turnstile and that's it. You can go one stop or 40, half a mile or ten miles. In the beginning, New York experimented too with graduated fares, found the system cumbersome, slow and expensive and switched to the same token for all journeys. I suppose the answer from cities that issue tickets like railway tickets is that it's too late now to institute a simpler system that requires only two token sellers at each station. There'd be a hullabaloo from the ticket collectors and the ticket printers and the ticket machine designers and builders, the men who install them, the trucks that transport them. It's the now familiar story of what management calls 'over-staffing' and what labour calls 'forced unemployment'. I apologise, it was a passing thought and it won't be mentioned again.

The strike may well be over by the time you hear this but, pending a final comment on how it was settled, the issues are, to be cold-blooded about it, fascinating in that they are setting new aims, new assumptions for strikes in other trades and industries. The two theoretical enemies, namely the head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the head of the Transport Workers Union have seen pretty much eye to eye all along. The union leaders didn't want a strike but they had to call it, if only to show some dissidents on the union's board that they were asking more than they would eventually get or perhaps ought to get.

Well, at the start, the big issue, as it always will be so long as inflation is the thief of the pay cheque, was money. The union threatened to strike for a 30 per cent increase but, even before the strike was called, this demand was reduced to 15 per cent the first year, ten per cent the second. The Transportation Authority had offered a six per cent increase each year and tied it in with other concessions about welfare and health payments but, by the end of the first day's talks, the union leaders were ready to sign a contract for eight per cent a year, provided the Transportation Authority reduced its productivity demands and, at that point, money receded into the background and the real issue came forward, one which will become a central issue, more and more, in a period when productivity sounds to more and more people like a dirty word or a stretch system.

It's the issue of what is called 'give-backs'. The union leaders said last Monday, 'the reason we are now on strike is because of give-backs'. A give-back is a concession, usually to do with working conditions, the sacrifice of a work rule in exchange for a bigger wage increase. Obviously there are times when the fight to resist a give-back is more important than the wage issue and this is one of those times, for when the negotiations began more than a month ago, the union bristled and the dissidents fumed at 41 give-backs, all tied to productivity, which the Transportation Authority proposed as part of any settlement.

The chronic problem of the Transportation Authority is plain and brutal. It loses about one thousand million – one billion – dollars a year. Its proposed give-backs would save almost a half, 450 millions, of that. Among these give-backs the authority is requesting, two are crucial. The authority wants to use part-time drivers and part-time token dispensers during the rush hours, say for two to four hours a day. The unions ban part-time work. They make do as best they can, causing overcrowding and long delays between buses and congestions in the subways and get paid time and a half.

The other, perhaps the big bone of contention, is over what's called 'sick calls'. Maybe there are still people who do not know that when an American doesn't feel well, he says he feels sick. He's a sick man. It doesn't mean he's about to throw up, it can mean that he's got a headache or he's at death's door. The American word for English 'sick' is 'nauseated'.

Well, there is a wheeze or habit that has now become standard practice among bus drivers which is to call in sick on regular working days and then report for work on their day off when they will be paid time and a half. The authority wants to eliminate this practice and also its required remedy, which is the union rule that when a man calls in sick, he must be replaced with another driver, even if there's no bus for him to drive because of some maintenance failure, either at the garage or on the highway or wherever.

Now it's fair to say that the ordinary citizens looking on, the poor especially, are not sympathetic to these practices unless, I suppose, their own unions have equally devious rules. The give-back problem, I must say, is partly the Transportation Authority's fault. In previous rows and strikes, the authority has been only too happy, once the wage issue was settled, to shrug a shoulder and incorporate these practices into a new contract.

As a more flagrant example, former Mayor Lindsay once ended a police strike by incorporating in the settlement a new pension plan whereby after 20 years of work a policeman's retirement pay assumes his average earnings to be those of his last year of work. Now the city police earn on the average about $20,000 a year but in their last working year they will do any amount of double duty and earn as much as $45,000 – which is then the basis for their pension. And once a deal like this is made, management may look on it as an emergency concession but the worker is bound to look on it as a social gain and you do not rescind social gains.

In the meantime, an astonishing 80 per cent of New Yorkers turned up at their jobs, walking one mile or ten or roller skating or hitch-hiking or forming car pools and when they get home in the evenings, they turn on the telly to hear what happened to the Taylor Law. The Taylor Law is a New York State law which forbids strikes by public employees. Need I say that in this day and age it carries no force. People strike anyway and one of the regular ironies of the law is that once the union is brought to court to say why an injunction barring a strike should not be granted, the union leaders then turn to management, in this case the Transportation Authority, and say they won't sign a new contract unless it grants amnesty from any penalties imposed by the Taylor Law, such as the whacking fines that the law can impose and then never collects.

We found out years ago what successive British governments found out in the 1970s – that an industrial relations law is not much practical use when one of the first conditions of settling a strike is an agreement to suspend the law.

For New Yorkers, then, this has been a week of almost obsessive mending or limping and making do. Their ordeal provokes only mild interest elsewhere since, at any time, in at least a dozen cities of this continent, there are similar drastic strikes going on.

But there's one national issue which see-saws between two contradictory positions and which would make a pretty exercise for school children in elementary logic. It has to do with our participation, or non-participation, in the Moscow Olympic Games. The issue has bogged down in an argument over whether the games ought to be or ought not to be political. The fact, surely, is that 'ought' has nothing to do with it. They've been loud with political overtones since the Greeks started them. We skipped Tokyo when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. Nobody, I hope, cares to be reminded of the massacre at Munich. There were no Olympic Games in 1940 or '44; even the athletes who'd spent years of training had something better to do with their muscles in those years.

If there's any doubt on our side – and I mean on the side of the 25 countries that have backed President Carter's boycott appeal – if there's any doubt that the games imply political approval of the policies of the host government, there's no doubt on the Russian side. In two handbooks rarely quoted in the west, the Soviets make this very clear.

In their official sports handbook, they say, 'The view popular in the west that sport is outside politics finds no support in the USSR'. And in the Soviet government's handbook for party activists, which is distributed in its millions throughout Russia, the view of us that the Russian people will be asked to take is as clear as a desert sunset. Listen: 'The decision to give the honoured right to hold the Olympic Games in the capital of the world's first socialist state is convincing testimony to the general recognition of the historical correctness of our country's foreign political course.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.