Strike Two

For the past week, Philadelphia has been in the midst of a transit strike. Workers at SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority) walked off the job in the early morning on November 3rd, over a wide range of grievances but primarily over issues pertaining to their pension and health benefits. All city bus service is suspended, as is service on the city's two subway lines and the "Subway-Surface" lines that connect West Philadelphia to our downtown, Center City. Regional rail, however, is running. From what I gather, Philadelphia is really in a snarl.

I say, "from what I gather," because I've been fortunate to have little need to move about the city. I live only a block from the edge of Penn's campus, and a scant four blocks from the Graduate School of Education building. I am able to accomplish all of my shopping and dining in the immediate neighborhood as well. So for me personally, the strike might as well be happening in Paris.

Nonetheless, like most of the city, I have little sympathy for the strikers. The average wage of a SEPTA employee is $52,000 a year. While this doesn't go as far in Philadelphia as it would in, say, the middle of Iowa, it's hardly a starvation wage--and let's remember that a lot of SEPTA workers earn a lot more, since this is only an average. Workers pay only 1% of wages toward their health care and have a pretty generous pension package.

This is not my first experience living through a major transit strike. In December 2005, New York was crippled by a three-day strike that forced me to stay home from work as there was no viable means of getting from where I lived in Brooklyn to where I worked in Rockefeller Center. A friend of mine who then lived in Queens but worked at a school in Brooklyn spent the first night of the strike with me. She had intended to stay until the strike ended, but after getting horribly lost on her walk to school the first morning, decided to go home for the duration. I can't recall whether she went in to work after that or not, but given her lack of transit options, I suspect she didn't.

When the transit strike hit New York, it galled me that the transit union could hold the whole city hostage in this way, with the complicity of the law. It turned out that the law was, in fact, not complicit in the strike; under New York's Taylor Law, public workers are given access to binding arbitration, supposedly in exchange for giving up the right to strike. The law fines public-employee unions that strike a million dollars a day. Apparently, the transit workers' union in NewYork somehow ponied up the fine.

The biggest difference I see between this strike and the New York transit strike of four years ago is the degree of reliance on the system. In New York, virtually everyone takes the subway at least some of the time, and over sixty percent use it for their daily commute to work. Even billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg is a straphanger. Philadelphians, however, are able to use their cars much more. Only one in three Philadelphians relies on SEPTA to get to work every day.

These Philadelphians are disproprotionately the poor. I realized this the other day when I walked into a Boston Market in our neighborhood to grab lunch. A sign in the window indicated that the store was opening on a delayed schedule because of the SEPTA strike. No doubt the restaurant's employees--many of whom likely earn minimum wage or not much more--cannot get to work on time during the strike. Workers earning an hourly wage are doubtless losing a lot of pay in this strike.

The strike's effect on Philadelphia's poor came home to me even more later in the week, when I called my new boss to discuss my work schedule. I will be starting work soon in the community relations department of a local charter school. Though located in Center City, the school's mostly black and mostly poor students commute in from all over Philadelphia. My boss told me that, for the duration of the strike, the school has managed to remain open but is operating on an 11-6 schedule. It strikes me as crazy that high school students should have to endure a three-hour-plus commute to school, remain at school until six o'clock in the evening, and then endure a three-hour-plus commute home.

Over the past few days, Pennsylvania Governor and former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell has gotten involved in the strike negotiations. He quickly gave up in response to the union's recalcitrance, which he described as something he had not seen the likes of in his 32-year political career. Personally, I think the best thing he could do would be to call out the state national guard to run the trains and buses until the union comes to its senses.

Perhaps then Philadelphia's transit workers would realize how much their workers' campaign is hurting other working people in the city.