{"id":954,"date":"2005-12-20T07:48:42","date_gmt":"2005-12-20T11:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/20\/oy-vey-2\/"},"modified":"2007-07-28T21:14:29","modified_gmt":"2007-07-29T01:14:29","slug":"oy-vey-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/20\/oy-vey-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Oy vey."},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p>The <a target=\"NewWindow\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/12\/20\/nyregion\/nyregionspecial3\/20cnd-strike.html?ex=1292734800&amp;en=649a0d5ae309db24&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">transit strike is on<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>And as an extra added bonus, it&#8217;s going to be super cold today.  Yippee!<\/p>\n<p>I actually sympathize with the transit workers much more than the MTA &#8211; The MTA has been cooking the books for ages (it was discovered last year that they actually kept two sets  of books), and they recently announced a billion dollar surplus.  Which they promptly gave away in discounted rides to tourists.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m pretty sure that the people who travel all the way to NY to look at a big Christmas tree at this time of year really wouldn&#8217;t care whether they had to pay $2 or $1 to get around.  But announcing such extra money, and basically giving it away just days before the TWU contract expires, and then crying poverty to a point where you&#8217;re demanding that workers (who work one of the hardest, dirtiest, most stressful jobs in the city) work an extra seven years before retirement?  Is just really bad form.<\/p>\n<p>If a private corporation had an underfunded pension system, they would be <em>legally required<\/em> to use the extra money to fund the pension before they started just giving it away.  So why didn&#8217;t the MTA use even a portion of the billion to shore up the very thing that they&#8217;re now claiming is the cause of their inability to meet worker demands?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not saying that the TWU wasn&#8217;t asking for too much in their initial demands.  But that&#8217;s exactly what they were &#8211; initial demands.  I don&#8217;t think they&#8217;re expecting to get everything, but I do think that the MTA isn&#8217;t acting in good faith.<\/p>\n<p>All I know is that I now have to walk to work.  Which sucks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The transit strike is on. And as an extra added bonus, it&#8217;s going to be super cold today. Yippee! I actually sympathize with the transit workers much more than the MTA &#8211; The MTA has been cooking the books for ages (it was discovered last year that they actually kept two sets of books), and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-new-york-city"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBi-fo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}