Oh, and another thing about the strike

I forgot to mention that we were also discussing how slimy the MTA (the employer) is in all this strike business.

The Taylor Law in New York makes it illegal for public employees to strike. It was enacted (I think) after another transit strike many years ago that crippled the city. The MTA has beem making a lot of noise about how what the transit workers did was "illegal." The union leaders were threatened with jail time if they didn't call off the strike.

Meanwhile, the MTA has been pulling their own shady shenanigans for years, cooking their books, lying to the union and public, pretending to be in dire financial straits to justify a 33% fare increase to the public and then "unexpectedly" finding enormous budget surplusses after the fact, effectively lying to and cheating both the workers and the riders. The MTA leaders should have been fired and thrown in jail, end of story.

Meanwhile, they have this Taylor Law on their side and get to threaten the union with jail for taking the only steps they have to protect themselves.

My point is, while this Taylor Law makes sense because we simply can't have the city brought to its knees over things like this, shouldn't the employer have some sort of legal obligation to avert a strike as well? If you remove the ability to strike but don't balance it with an obligation on the other side, you're really putting all the power in the hands of the MTA. And we know from experience that that ain't good. Lying bastards.

Did you like it better when I talked about my cat?