Tuesday Links
Transit Union Walkout [NY Times] NY Slowly Losing Creative Set [NY Times] Spit and Polish: Lobby Reno Debate [NY Magazine] Review: Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies [Village Voice] Tax Credit for Energy Improvements [Bankrate] Profits Down for Ratner [Brooklyn Papers]
Transit Union Walkout [NY Times]
NY Slowly Losing Creative Set [NY Times]
Spit and Polish: Lobby Reno Debate [NY Magazine]
Review: Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies [Village Voice]
Tax Credit for Energy Improvements [Bankrate]
Profits Down for Ratner [Brooklyn Papers]
heads should roll but i’m not holding my breath. the TWU is going to get reamed.
Both the TWU and the MTA deserve blame. But ultimately, it shouldn’t have gotten this far – Pataki, Bloomberg, Bush (huh!), etc.
Heads should roll for this (and I don’t mean on the tracks)
TWU are saints compared to the MTA
There’s a lot of talk about the TWU’s benefits & salary, but nothing about how they compare to those of the MTA brass. If the guys making $200k+ aren’t paying for their medical benefits and pensions, why should the guys making $50k?
Have a link to that Times article, by the way? I did a search at the website and some online periodicals databases and I don’t find anything on transit workers and life expectancy.
No, the benefits of modern medicine not equally well distributed among the population. They go disproportionately to people with outstanding health and prescription plans like the TWU has. That said, I’ll scan the Times for the elusive stat.
it’s in the Times.
Actually, I’d argue that the benefits of modern medicine are not equally distributed amongst the population. Additionally, I’d imagine that the bulk of our gains in life expectancy occur towards the end of life.
Basically, if you’re making 45k annually and working in a hostile environment I wouldn’t bet on living to 75.
I’ve heard a lot of people on call-in shows, etc., throwing out different stats about transit workers’ life expectancy — 2 years past retirement, 5 years — but haven’t seen or heard any actual documentation. I’m way skeptical. If the retirement age has been the same for decades, and we assume that the life expectancy of transit workers was, like everyone else’s, even lower in the past (since they benefit from the same advances in drugs, tech, emergency care, etc.), then by these figures most of them must have been dying well before retirement age a decade or two ago. The pension fund would be bursting with cash — since it would have been paying out benefits to relatively few workers, while many of their colleagues paid into the fund for years and died without collecting a cent.
glad to hear evidence to the contrary but this sounds like a creative statistic to me.