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What I don't like is that everyone...every business suffers, but the acrimony should be targeted toward BOTH sides, IMO.

Wrong.

Every private sector worker contributes to their own health insurance, usually about 6% of each paycheck.

The TWU worker pays nothing. The city suggested that new hires, and only new hires, pay 1%.

The TWU's response: "We want increased benefits with no contribution from any worker."

The city wanted to shift retirement age from 55 to 62 for full pension benefits.

The TWU's response: "Not only do we reject a retirement age increase, we demand a reduction in retirement age to 50 will full pension."

The city suggested that future wage increases be tied to inflation.

The TWU's response: "Not only do we reject wage increases indexed to inflation, we demand a wage increase 8 times the current inflation rate."

The city was more than reasonable, but the TWU are unreasonable, disgusting, greedy, lazy, scummy bastards.

Period.

No rational person can possibly think otherwise.

Reminds me of the threatened BART strike here in the S.F. Bay Area last year. The Union put out ads of "money for political influence, no money for safety, etc., etc." and the BART officials simply put out news stories saying exactly what BART drivers earned, what their benefits were and what the officials were offering. It worked. When the commuters found out that BART workers got health care and transit passes for free for them AND their families, had higher wages than most of the people using the system, the commute crowd sided with management. Everyone said the same thing - "I'm quitting my job and working for BART!" Only exception of course, were the socialists from the People's Republic of Berkeley.

I heard on Glenn Beck yesterday that the N.Y. Transit Workers also want an 8% raise, but are willing to settle for a 6% raise and a 25% reduction in disciplinary actions. Nice. My salary hasn't gone up 8% in three years.

No rational person can possibly think otherwise.

Rational people can think otherwise.

This is how the NYT is reporting it today.

On the final day of intense negotiations, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, it turns out, greatly altered what it had called its final offer, to address many of the objections of the transit workers' union. The authority improved its earlier wage proposals, dropped its demand for concessions on health benefits and stopped calling for an increase in the retirement age, to 62 from 55.

But then, just hours before the strike deadline, the authority's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, put forward a surprise demand that stunned the union. Seeking to rein in the authority's soaring pension costs, he asked that all new transit workers contribute 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, up from the 2 percent that current workers pay. The union balked, and then shut down the nation's largest transit system for the first time in a quarter-century.

Yet for all the rage and bluster that followed, this war was declared over a pension proposal that would have saved the transit authority less than $20 million over the next three years.