Thursday - December 22, 2005

NYC Transit Strike: The Naked City

This is the Naked City. There are seven million stories in the naked city. Our story tonight is only one of them and concerns a one-legged man and an evil, despicable, hateful, mean-spirited, greedy, shameless, criminal ... transit union. So grab your crutches and let’s hop into this story ...

ONE-LEGGED MAN:
‘IT’S NOT THE WAY I WANT TO GET TO WORK’
December 22, 2005
(NEW YORK POST)

Jim Meek has only one leg. But he has a wife and a son to support, so he walked three miles to work yesterday. Using crutches, the determined 52-year-old TV engineer trudged over the Brooklyn Bridge from his home in Park Slope to a free-lance job at 14th Street and Fifth Avenue. “The cold wasn’t pleasant,” he said. He downplayed his torturous trek by saying he wore “long underwear and good winter clothes” to keep warm.

“I’m comfortable walking — I’m used to it,” said the native Midwesterner, who walked across the bridge for the first time yesterday. “I do it to keep myself in shape. But it’s not the way I want to get to work.” Meek, who lost his left leg in an electrical accident 30 years ago, said he usually takes the F train. Although he’s not the type to complain about his handicap, he was happy to gripe about the transit union’s decision.

“What’s the point of this strike?” Meek asked. “Elderly people can’t get home care. Their nurses can’t get to them. Meek, who took two hours to get to work yesterday, said he’s also disturbed by the union’s insistence that workers be permitted to retire at 55. The strapping 53-year-old said that would mean he’d be close to retirement — and he’d never consider throwing in the towel so young. Another commuter, Jason Gibbs of The Bronx, griped about his “horrendous” 6 hour and 15 minute trek to work in Jamaica, Queens.

The 29-year-old social worker left his home on Gun Hill Road in The Bronx at 5:45 a.m., met a friend and shared a cab to the Metro North station at 125th Street in Harlem. After catching a train to Grand Central Terminal, he took PATH trains to the World Trade Center. Then he walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and took the Long Island Rail Road to Jamaica ($4), where he caught a Green Line bus ($2) to his office.

“It was a real headache,” he said. Ginger Ware spent hours in traffic — atop a tour bus with 20 relatives, all of them from hurricane-ravaged Biloxi, Miss. “We had traffic problems from Hurricane Katrina, but nothing like this,” she said. “It’s a circus here.” Ware, 48, said she and her family “came to New York to get away from the mess at home. We had seen as much devastation as we could stand.”

But after sightseeing in Chinatown, they boarded a tour bus heading back to Midtown and spent two hours stuck in traffic. “And then one of the children had to go to the bathroom,” she said. “It’s been an unbelievable journey — it would be a wonderful experience, if not for the strike,” she said.

Posted by The Skipper     on 12/22/2005 at 02:03 PM   
Filed Under: • Unions-Labor •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks (1) • Permalink •  

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