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Times Ignores Cost of
Union Strike for Commuters, City
Focusing on workers’ ‘dignity,’
reporters ignore cost of strike, generous pay for workers.
By Ken Shepherd
Free Market Project
Dec. 19, 2005
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New York Times reporters Sewell Chan and Steven Greenhouse relayed
complaints of “Little Dignity on the Job”
in their December 19 story on the Big Apple’s pending transit
workers strike. But on CNN’s “In the Money” December 17, host Jack Cafferty informed viewers that the threatened labor stoppage was
against the law, while co-host Susan Lisovicz reported that pay for
union transit workers is about double that of rookies on the city’s
police force. |
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 Â Â Â Â “Regardless of whether a strike is called or a settlement is
reached,” warned Chan and Greenhouse, the labor struggle over the
transit contract has “highlighted one fact: Many workers feel they
lack dignity and respect on the job.”
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But on CNN, business reporters were wondering where the dignity of
and respect for the law factored into plans for the labor strike.
Cafferty opened the December 17 show explaining that the city’s
Transit Workers Union had refused to go
to mediation with the city of New York, and, as a result, “there’s a
whole debate raging about whether 33,000 people should be able to
hold a city of 8.5 million people hostage over contracts that by law
they are not allowed to strike against.”
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Cafferty was referring to the
Taylor Law, which took effect in New York in 1967 and forbids strikes by most
public employees in the Empire State.
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Cafferty’s co-host Susan Lisovicz added that transit workers start
at “$52,000, close to $53,000-a-year” while
rookie
police officers and probationary
firefighters earn about $25,000. The Times’s
Greenhouse and Chan
similarly reported in a separate December 19 Times article that
transit workers “have an average base salary of $47,000 and average
earnings of $55,000, including overtime.”
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But while the Times portrayed well-compensated transit workers as
ill-treated civil servants, no mention of the Taylor Law was made,
nor were the viewpoints of city administrators or millions of
potentially stranded New York commuters included for balance.
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Chan and Greenhouse failed to report what Greenhouse wrote in a
separate Times article:
much of the contract dispute between transit union workers and the
city of New York centers on benefits to future employees in a
“two-tier” contract structure which saves labor costs over the
long-run without cutting benefits for current workers.
    The “two-tier” contract structure was
designed by city administrators to lessen the heavy burden rising labor costs place
on the city’s taxpayers.
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Media imbalance on labor disputes is hardly a new phenomenon. The
Free Market Project has
previously documented how the media have skewed stories in favor
of unions.
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