Where’s Occupy Wall Street when you need it? Middle-class New Yorkers are about to be squeezed by the greedy, and OWS is nowhere in sight!
This time, the squeeze is coming from Long Island Rail Road union workers threatening to strike.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the LIRR, is offering the workers a 17 percent pay increase over seven years, including about $22,000 in average back pay.
In return, the MTA wants current workers to give 2 percent of their salaries for health care, rising to 4 percent for new hires.
Consider: On top of $84,000 average salaries, LIRR workers get pension benefits equivalent to $1.2 million in retirement savings, as Nicole Gelinas has noted on these pages.
Even so, the unions are rejecting the offer. They say they’ll strike this month if they don’t get a richer deal.
And they’ll get one, too, unless Gov. Cuomo, who runs the MTA, steps up to protect the middle class.
Here Cuomo might take his cue from Ed Koch. Back in 1980, Koch sided with commuters over subway workers who had illegally struck and shut down the system.
“You don’t want me to cave?” Koch asked commuters crossing the Brooklyn Bridge by foot, bike or car. No way, they answered.
True, the 1980 subway strike violated the Taylor Law — which forbids strikes by public workers — while under our outdated federal railroad laws a strike by LIRR workers would technically be legal.
But that’s an argument for updating the law to make such strikes illegal, not for letting 5,500 workers hold up the busiest commuter railroad in North America (with more than 300,000 riders a day) to further enrich themselves at public expense — even as riders deal with looming fare hikes and the MTA faces big deficits just a few years out.
Because federal law lets LIRR unions strike, and because they know the havoc a railroad strike would inflict on commuters, they think they have us over a barrel. Let’s hope Gov. Cuomo proves them wrong.