Reply #5: It's possible the MTA provoked the strike specifically for this reason:

[newswolf56]

back the TWU into a corner, force a strike, then use the strike as an excuse to nullify pension buy-outs, thereby saving the MTA $110 million that can then be used to further reward its already obscenely overpaid executives -- who in turn contribute some predetermined percentage of the loot into the Republican Party's secret bank accounts.

Meanwhile the avowedly bourgeois, reflexively fascist, maliciously anti-union voters in the outer boroughs -- the same knee-jerkers who put Pataki and Bloomberg into power -- wildly cheer their heroes for "bravely standing up to union tyranny." And the media, blinded by another of its periodic anti-union frenzies, refuses to investigate -- though the fix is so obviously in, the hookers on Third Avenue now call it "doin' an MTA" when they roll a john, and even the bums on the Bowery are laughing.

(Admittedly I haven't been in New York City since the mid-1980s, but some things -- especially the scheming greed and calculated savagery of the oligarchy -- never change.)

(Note to self: evolve a replacement term for "knee-jerk" that is implicitly fascist, incorporating the Strangelovian notion of a reflexive Nazi salute -- something like "heil-jerk" only still more vivid.)