The Spectacle Blog
Jed,
Most folks who live in New York or use public transportation regularly are supernaturally fluent in the routes — stop any native in that city for directions, and you usually get a treatise on the benefits of one line over another. Training will probably involve the financial aspects.
Yesterday, a judge ordered that for every day the Transport Workers Union continues its strike, it must be fined $1 million a day, which the union plans to appeal as “exorbitant”. $1 million sounds like a lot, that is, until you consider how much an apartment in New York costs, let alone just how large the union is (33,700).
Do the math. $29 a union member, per day, during an illegal strike which has crippled an economic giant of a city dependent on mass transit. Yet these strikers face no jail time, and as of this writing, no threat of losing one’s job. The fine should be $1 billion, not $1 million.
