With just eight days left to avoid a Long Island Rail Road strike, we want to focus attention on the forgotten folks who would pay the biggest price.
Hint: It won’t be the one-percenters.
Wealthy workers can afford hotel rooms in the city. Or work from home, travel by car or take days off. Not so the other 99 percent — i.e., the middle- and lower-class workers (many of whom are also union members) who are the backbone of the local economy.
Think of the secretary from Mineola who takes the LIRR to Penn Station. She already shells out $242 a month for her commute into the city, and maybe another $100 a month in subway fares to get to her office. This secretary may not be paid if she doesn’t make it to work, and she has no realistic way to get there without the LIRR.
There are tens of thousands of people just like this Mineola secretary — hotel workers, cops, nurses, construction crews and so on. They are part of the 300,000 people who rely on the LIRR each day to get them where they need to go.
A strike would be grossly unfair to these hard-working people.
The irony is that many LIRR workers enjoy better compensation than the very riders they’ll be hurting: Average LIRR pay is $87,182, and last year nearly a third of unionized LIRR workers earned more than $100,000. LIRR workers also get free health care and not one but two pensions.
In short, a strike won’t improve the union’s popularity among Long Island commuters.
Meanwhile, LIRR riders are already facing average fare hikes of $118 a year in 2015 and another $122 in 2017. Many of them can’t afford more increases (much less cuts to service, maintenance or upgrades) to fund still better terms for LIRR workers.
At bottom, there is no good reason for a strike, especially with the MTA having put a reasonable offer on the table. Especially at a time when so many people are struggling in a difficult economy, it’s no time for the LIRR’s unions to hold them hostage.