NEW YORKERS must be at their wit’s end with transit workers, who have raised the prospect of a second subway strike after voting down a proposed contract with the MTA.
But there’s another group to be concerned about: businesses. Which provide jobs.
Just how much can they be expected to put up with?
Last time, they lost $1 billion. Retailers were devastated. Large corporations survived but not without disruptions. Countless workers never made it in. At one large accounting firm with some 7,000 employees, about 1,000 failed to show, Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, reports.
How can firms be expected to operate under such conditions?
A second strike isn’t even necessary: Just the possibility of a repeat is enough to cause major agita for companies.
Today, more than a few of them must be asking themselves: Why am I in New York? Do I really need this aggravation?
Actually, some do. Mayor Bloomberg was partly right when he once suggested that tax hikes wouldn’t cause companies to flee; for many, no single factor alone is enough to erase the city’s huge advantages.
Even a double-whammy transit shutdown is probably not enough to set off a huge stampede of firms out of New York.
But make no mistake: Every company has its tipping point.
And look at what they’ve been through already: In the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, soaring crime and oppressive taxes made the city nearly unbearable.
Strikes back then – by sanitation workers, teachers and transit workers – took their toll.
Then came 9/11, which made folks realize not only that terrorism was real but that Gotham is a key target. Many left Downtown, or the city itself, for good.
Plus, of course, there are the daily tribulations – noise, traffic, cramped and pricey apartments, beggars, dysfunctional and dangerous schools . . .
Eventually, an employer will notice that more and more of his staff commutes to work from outside the city. And that there’d be no need for even a commute if the firm just . . . relocated.
No wonder businesses have headed south and west, taking hundreds of thousands of jobs. No wonder Gotham’s population plunged 10 percent in the ’70s.
In 1965, New York was home to 140 Fortune 500 firms. Today, it’s less than half that. Plus, as Nicole Gelinas notes in City Journal, the city’s been slowly losing a key economic staple, the securities industry.
Now add one other major pain: labor.
Everyone knows New York is a union town. And as securities-industry market share shrinks and private-sector job growth lags the nation, New York is accounting for an ever-larger share of union activism.
Unions impose steep, direct costs on businesses and their customers. Public-sector unions impose indirect, hidden costs and increasingly make it impossible for firms to operate.
The health-care unions drive up medical bills, insurance and taxes. The teachers’ union has also fueled taxes, while standing in the way of real school reform.
Last month, the TWU shut down mass transit – at the height of the Christmas shopping season, in frigid weather.
Meanwhile, elected officials bow down to the labor bosses.
Drive away business? Union-run pols have virtually banned big retailers like Wal-Mart.
Bloomberg’s right: Gotham has so much to offer that many companies will shrug off the periodic tax hike and other indignities – maybe even disruptive back-to-back transit shutdowns.
But if nothing else, the TWU and its president, Roger Toussaint, have done a good job of reminding everyone that unions run New York – at the private sector’s expense. That they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And that they can even shut down mass transit (and much of the economy) at will, with impunity.
It’s enough to put the city’s private sector itself on an express train – right out of New York.