The LIRR Strike
And the loss of leverage
As of this morning, it’s anticipated to take 6 hours to get from Long Island into “the city” (Manhattan). A union of 3,500 train workers are on strike as of Saturday at 12:01 AM. Now there are 275 shuttle buses from various malls and stations to schlepp 13,000 commuters to subway stations in Queens (only 5% of the 250,000 total commuters). Friends and family are devising strategies for how to get in and out. One plot involves driving east away from the city for 45 minutes to catch a Port Jefferson ferry up to Connecticut and then back west and down, still a 4-hour commute, but at least with water views. Another strategy I overheard is to drive in over the weekend, sleep in your building all week, in a cot, and then come back to recharge over the weekend. Others accept their fate and are simply leaving home at 3AM.
The LIRR is the biggest commuter rail in the country, and if this extends for days or weeks, it will be the most disruptive strike in Long Island history. The highways are already far under-loaded and lacking lanes, and now an additional quarter-million people will try to squeeze across three bridges that are already at a stand still on a normal weekday. When headlines say “commuter chaos” I imagine people pissing into gatorade bottles, running out of gas and abandoning their car on the LIE, until, like Lagos, the cars become permanent fixtures from which new bazaars form around, all while Uber surges to $500 a ride.
This is happening because the LIRR unions, the best-compensated transit workers in the country, want more. 10% of the union makes over $100,000, and 11 of them get over $200,000 in overtime, meaning several make north of $375,000 per year, more than Governor Hochul, herself at a $250k salary. They want a 9.5% retroactive increase, a 5% boost this year, and apparently better healthcare. The MTA (Metro Transit Authority) budged, but the union didn’t. Where will this money come from if not the taxpayers? This unsurprisingly is pissing off the locals, especially those who can’t work form home, and are making less than the conductors.
The timing also feels strategic and particularly evil, designed to inflict max pain, given it started during the Mets vs. Yankees Subway Series, and if it continues through the following weekend, it will wreck everyone's Memorial Day plans, tainting summer's kickoff.
This whole things feels like unions trying to seize the last bit of leverage they have left. Most workers don’t have an ability to hold their communities hostage, but since this union controls physical things, the circulation system that connects the outskirts to the city (the center of the world to boot), they can try to halt the infrastructure at the root of the suburban contract.
But Monday morning brings an anticlimax. At least, an anticlimax from my desk at home, with no need to be in the city today, or any day, as I am like many others now, a remote worker. My wife too, working in person most days, has this same flexibility. From 6am on I checked Google Maps every hour, and it seems not much more than a normal day of bad traffic. It says I can drive into Grand Central in 48 minutes if I go north and around, and only 55 minutes if straight through the bottleneck. My Google Maps may be wrong, broken, or lying, but they’re all back at the negotiation table now, and if this very revealing Monday was indeed a dud, we can imagine this all resolves by dinner. Let's wait for the photos and stories and evening news: either it was in fact a dud, or it was as bad as we all imagined, or the news will overplay it because it never resists a good half-crisis.
People thought it might be possible that Congress would intervene and kill the strike, just like they did in the 2022 freight train strikes. But that seems unnecessary, because all weekend, the island flashed “WORK FROM HOME” warnings on LED-bulbed highway signs. Aside for in-person workers with no choice but to commute, remote workers killed the plot—an eagerness for everyone to return to their pandemic posture, to WFH in PJs, but without the paranoia of the virus, might prove to strip all the leverage that transit unions once had. Travel is optional.
The larger theme has nothing to do with trains, but leverage. The failure of this strike, especially compared to the visions of disruption, may be something of a canary, a preview to the futility of all future labor protests. When there is no leverage anymore, when we realize the old constraints have secretly evaporated, what then can actually be affected? The whole reason we have labor laws, vacation, healthcare, and a 40-hour work week was because human labor used to be required, and so unions could hold production hostage. The only way we’ll protect ourselves through the coming AI revolution will be to find the unobvious forms of consumer leverage, but that would require a coordinated mass strike of the very things that bring us a convenience that is so existentially reassuring.