The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [39]
This time, the Transit Authority offered an additional $25 million; the union countered with demands for a four-day, thirty-two-hour work week, a 30 percent pay boost, and seventy-six contract improvements. Lindsay was outraged and determined to stand fast. It was war, and the young Mayor acted like a general commanding the public’s army. He denounced the “power brokers,” inspired the populace by stubbornly striding almost six miles each morning to City Hall and went on television to plead for, and win, public support—though he did perplex his troops by requesting that “nonessential” workers stay home.
The hysteria grew. Fiery union leader Michael Quill was ordered to jail. The Times, apparently on the verge of a nervous breakdown, editorially thundered at the judge for only throwing Quill in the slammer. Quill, his Irish brogue thickening, railed at “Mayor Lindsley,” dismissing him as a “pipsqueak,” called the Times “a meddler” and huffed, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes.”
Both sides stood eyeball to eyeball for twelve days—until Lindsay, and a weary public, blinked. On January 12, a suddenly subdued Mayor capitulated, announcing that the strike had been settled at a cost of $52 million. Privately, others said the cost would be at least $70 million—almost three times what one of the three mediators, Theodore Kheel, told me should have been the price.
“The cost of the settlement is high,” read the next morning’s Times editorial, “but not so high that it violates Mayor Lindsay’s pledge never to ‘capitulate before the lawless demands of a single power group.’ ” In Pravda-like fashion, the Times—whose editorial-page writers were members of the new mayor’s kitchen cabinet—conceded that the settlement violated the federal government’s 3.2 percent wage guidelines. But, scrambling to defend their mayor, they added, “the breach will not be significant unless other civil service unions misread the pact as a sign that the way to get more from the city is to match the Transit Workers Union in irresponsible disregard of the principle that public employees have no legal right to strike.”
Aside from the immediate $70 or so million price tag, the strike’s costs were steep. The city’s economy lost millions of dollars in sales and other taxes, and employees sacrificed an estimated 6 million workdays. The transit fare rose from 15 to 20¢; future deficits were guaranteed when the transit system lost 2.1 percent of its riders.
There was another price, harder to quantify. The transit strike was John Lindsay’s Bay of Pigs, his first real test. He flunked it, and in so doing set a pattern for future labor negotiations. “They went on strike—a violation of the law,” says former Mayor Wagner, “and yet as part of the settlement they were forgiven, with no penalties to any extent.” Instead, penalties were leveled against the taxpayers. Lindsay’s 1967 budget mushroomed by 24.3 percent—the largest budget increase of any year between 1960 and 1975. Appetites expanded, and over the next four years so did city budgets. According to the Temporary Commission, they grew at an average rate of 15.9 percent—almost twice the 8.6 percent of Wagner’s last term. Labor costs zoomed 89.9 percent—a full 60 percent above Wagner’s final four years. The public failed the test, too. At the end of twelve days, New Yorkers were exhausted and clamoring for a settlement. Lindsay was a general without an army, a point not lost on other union leaders. In a sense, as would be proven in later teacher and police strikes, New York didn’t have a government.
Also, Lindsay didn’t know what he was doing. Five years later, while digging through the transit pact, Richard Oliver of the Daily News made an important archaeological discovery: