Another Nail in the Coffin of the "Collective Good"

Last week's New York City transit workers' strike was, if nothing else, an interesting social experiment. In the crosshairs of the race-to-the-bottom global economy where all the trademarks of the middle class (pensions, health insurance, liveable wages) appear headed towards extinction, here was an organized group of workers willing to draw a line in the sand and refuse to be caught up in the avalanche of "concessions" that has buried so many of their private-sector neighbors. With millions of Americans seeing their health insurance, pensions and middle-class wages sacrificed on the altar of "globalization," would the bourgeoise's boilerplate anti-labor parlor tricks work the way they usually do, consolidating the public against the "greedy thugs" on the picket lines?

With deep regret, it appears that the answer is yes. On one hand, the "liberal" corporate-owned media went out of its way to caricature the strikers as gluttonous pigs who want to make $150,000 a year for driving a bus, and they made sure that the most hostile imbecile crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to work got their mugs on camera exclaiming that "they should fire all of those sons-of-bitches." Sources of mine who live in New York City told me the mood was far less hostile to the strikers than the "liberal" media portrayed. Nonetheless, even discussions among progressives led me to believe that the growing threat of full-scale working-class genocide hasn't altered too many attitudes in George Bush's America.

In George Bush's America, sacrificing for the collective good is tantamount to a heinous crime. The inconvenience of an individual who has to walk to work or (gasp!) hail a cab for a few days trumps the long-term good that comes when workers refuse to accept their own financial persecution. In George Bush's America, those who earn less than striking transit workers are driven not towards empowerment and ascendancy in their own industries, but towards resentment and envy of the people who get them to work every day. In George Bush's America, the Puerto Rican busboy is supposed to resent African-American subway operator because, through hard-fought collective bargaining efforts, the latter has attained a higher standard of living than the former.

Wishing poverty upon your neighbor as a means of avenging your own economic bad fortune is primarily an American phenomenon. In Europe, a strike among transit workers would most likely be met by corresponding strikes by other sectors of the economy, ultimately leading to better working arrangements for all. Perhaps that scenario is less utopian than it sounds as it undermines market forces, but the American extreme of class wars waged ON THE SAME SIDE OF THE TRACKS strikes me as considerably more devastating to the prospects of upward mobility.

Now, if the transit workers had quietly accepted the original contract offer of the MTA, would they have collapsed into immediate poverty? No. But the MTA was making the first bold move in what will become a landslide of concessions meant to "streamline," "adjust," or "reconfigure" the working conditions of transit workers so it would "better reflect the market forces of the private sector." Millions of workers in industries ranging from auto manufacturing, airlines and meatpacking have gotten caught up in the "concessions" landslide in the last few decades, and their win-loss record has been pretty comparable to the 2005 Green Bay Packers.

Even if their primary motivations were rooted in self-interest, the New York City transit workers were taking a bullet for the entire American workforce last week. If there's any hope of weathering the globalization storm with any semblance of a middle class intact, the American workforce needs to start blaming the gunman shooting at them rather than the person taking the bullet for them.