This is the funniest thing i have ever read.
From the Desk of Catharine Stimpson
Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
New York University
CC: Jackson Lewis LLP, Michael Bloomberg, John Sexton
“Subway: an underground railroad, metropolitanelectric railway or the tunnel through which it runs.” Webster’s New World Dictionary
Dear Employees of the MTA,
I hope that the front page of The New York Times deceives me, but, alas, I fear that every major media outlet could not be simultaneously mistaken: there are murmurs of a transit strike. Will someone gently awake me from a disturbing yet frighteningly realistic dream, or is it true, have the members ofthe so-called “Transit Workers Union Local 100” abandoned their legally binding responsibilities during this joyous holiday season? As an academic, one who has the privilege of being employed by New York University, a labor-free environment, my contribution to your current difficulties will be brief but purposive. NYU, a private university in the public service, would like to offer itself as a possible third party mediator. Would the TWU Local 100 consider ending the strike, disbanding, and forming a student club at NYU? As members of our community, you would have access to the Kimmel student center as well as to the bylaws of NYU, which protect student associations from the kind of penalties that the Taylor Law imposes. You would also receive student discounts of up to 10% at many of the fine merchants in historic Greenwich Village and cutting-edge Soho. NYU has several eminent labor historians, people with Ph.D.s who specialize in the inability of unions like yours to help their members in these trying times, who have expressed interest in assisting with these negotiations. Please consider this proposal a friendly entreaty and an effort to make New York City a more congenial and (I fear I may seem sentimental) special place than it already is.
Warmly,
Catharine Stimpson
Might I suggest that, upon accepting this wise proposal, the TWU donate their designated NYU club budget to the devastated city of New York as a way of making up for the estimated 300 to 400 million dollars the city lost because of this selfish strike. It's only fair.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to know, and i'll address this question as much to our billionaire mayor as to you, how a strike in which workers risk unprecedented and gross penalties for defending their right to collectively stop working as a means to keep a pseudo-public corporate monopoly like the MTA from forcing them to accept cutbacks despite a 1 billion dollar budget surplus, gets coded as "selfish."
ReplyDeleteI will add, as an aside, that the "300 to 400 million dollars" figure is pure speculation. It's impossible to calculate how much revenue loss is because of the strike, and how much is because of other figures, and moreover it's way too soon to gauge even how much was actually lost during the strike's duration. Finally, I question who is included in the "city" demarcated by such a metonymical device. Is the city only corporate infrastructure-- capitalists, investors, bankers, business owners (large and small), and the pseudo-public, corporatized Bloomberg administration's neoliberal state apparatus, the city imagined by countless inane and rabid Daily News editorials, or is it something more? Are the millions of workers, organized and unorganized, in this city, for whose right to strike and collectively bargain the members of TWU Local 100 were fighting for this week with the strike that the MTA could and should have easily avoided forcing, not a part of this city as well? Perhaps we need to ask what we gained from this strike with something more genuine than feined exasperation or self-righteous moralizing.
My comment was meant to be sarcastic. It was a response not only to the ridiculous claims made by the city in regards to the TWU struggle, but also to the patronizing lingusitic choices often made by NYU admins. Sorry for the confusion.
ReplyDeleteD'oh. Mea Culpa. Sarcasm is sometimes hard to pick up in pixelated formats.
ReplyDelete