Posted on 01/21/2006 1:50:27 AM PST by presidio9
Leave it to the transit workers to make the absolutely worst possible move for all the wrong reasons at every turn. In rejecting the deal negotiated by Transport Workers Union President Roger Toussaint by just seven votes, the rank and file yesterday snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They had blackmailed New York by shutting down the city for three days in an illegal strike, but they just couldn't take yes for an answer. So now they're going to demand heaven knows what behind a leader they have emasculated. The best Toussaint will be able to muster at the bargaining table is "pretty please."
The contract terms were fair - with one glaring exception. The agreement would have provided raises of 3%, 4% and 3.5% over three years, along with an added holiday on Martin Luther King Day. In exchange, the deal called for the workforce to contribute a reasonable 1.5% of salary toward the cost of health care coverage.
Where the pact went wrong was in a pension sweetener that would have entitled thousands of transit workers to one-time payments of $8,000 and up. That provision, wholly unjustified, was promised to the union in a secret side deal by Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials who had earlier vowed that the union would gain nothing by striking.
Now, everything is up for grabs again. To satisfy his members, Toussaint will push to eliminate the health care contribution. To which the MTA must respond, "No way, no how," in talks that are far more open and above board than the botched negotiations that produced both the strike and its flawed settlement.
Gov. Pataki, for one, must declare where he stands. He must stop trying to have it both ways by, on the one hand, posturing as the guy in charge and, on the other, blaming MTA chairman Peter Kalikow for the deal's stinkers. And Pataki should make himself clear, first, on whether he wants to take back the pension sweetener.
When that term came to light, the governor professed shock and announced that he would ask his representatives on the MTA board to vote against approving the contract. If the governor wants the sweetener gone, now's the time to say so.
Kalikow has a different pressing obligation. Before he makes a move at the bargaining table, he must come clean on the costs and benefits of every term of the contract that has just been rejected, and then he must continue to detail the costs and benefits of every item that's put on the table by either side from here on out. No more secrecy and no more surprises that blow up in everyone's faces.
Al Qaeda's real message
Osama Bin Laden and his top deputy surfaced in audiotapes for one simple reason: They wanted to deliver word to their followers that they are alive and committed to the fight after the U.S. killed four top Al Qaeda henchmen in Pakistan. But the tapes were also a reminder to Americans that this nation is still waging a war of self-defense against an implacable enemy. Incredibly, that's a fact that needs to be said loud and clear - and loudest and clearest in Washington, where too many politicians just don't get it.
How else to explain their stubborn opposition to reauthorizing the Patriot Act, whose necessary terror-fighting tools have been insanely depicted as gross threats to civil liberties? And how else to explain the uproar over President Bush's decision to eavesdrop without a warrant on suspect calls to and from abroad?
Listening in on chatter between, say, Afghanistan and Brooklyn that may reveal a terror plot is decried by many, most of them Democrats, as a blatant violation of the Constitution and the law. The most extreme are tossing around the word "impeachment." Hooey.
While constitutional scholars differ on the extent of Bush's authority, the President, to our way of thinking, has the better argument. Reduced to the basics, the Constitution vests the chief executive with the awesome responsibility of defending national security. To that end, the courts have said a President may conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman okayed bugging the conversations of suspected wartime spies in the U.S. One wonders whether today's Democrats would have risen up so vehemently against their own party's lions.
True, World War II was a conflict writ large, and this war is covert and easy to lose sight of. Until a reminder like the tapes comes along. But Congress should not need reminders. Even of this sort, of the harmless variety. Because the next one could be deadly.
That one made me laugh!
Personally I'm hoping that these glorified Metrocard salesmen take it too far and go on strike again. Sooner or later somebody in NY will grow a set and replace these jackasses.
This vomit inducing behaviour of the unions will not stop until there is an enmasse firing followed by hiring new workers. They have the city by the throat and they know it. All this jabbering about more negotiations in effect means more blackmail.
They only think they have the city by the throat. They become more and more replacable every year.
Yes, the city needs good little slaves who do what the "people" want, and don't complain, and bend over and take when told to... /"sarc to all"
I'm having a little trouble deciphering your sarcasm.
Gov Pataki needs to start shaving, act like he is a man, and smack the illegal activity of the unions down.
If he doesn't, then should just quit and go plop himself in front of a continuous 24 hour screening of "Bareback Mounting."
New York is a rat's nest run by unions and the mob. Until the rat's nest is cleaned out, NY will only replace one bad penny for another if they attempt to toss out the MTA.
Personally I'm hoping that these glorified Metrocard salesmen take it too far and go on strike again. Sooner or later somebody in NY will grow a set and replace these jackasses.
are you kidding? with littleboy eliot spitzer more or less annointed and appointed by the beast and lens lice (ms."head of the democrat plantation" hillary and chuckie cheese) as the next socialist leader of the state of ny, the future doe not bode well for any monetary restraint in municipal and state labor negotiations. wait till the teachers union contract comes up and our esttemed educators call in the markers from their whores.
computers and chimpanzees would be cheaper and better
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