The 2005 New York City transit strike was a strike in New York City called by the Transport Workers Union Local 100 (TWU). Negotiations for a new contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) broke down over retirement, pension, and wage increases. The strike began at 3:00 a.m. EST on December 20, 2005. Most New York City Transit Authority and MTA Bus Company personnel observed the strike, effectively halting all service on the subway and buses, except for routes operated from the Spring Creek Depot, where workers represented by ATU Local 1181/1061 had a contract in force after striking against the predecessor operator, Command Bus Company, the previous year. Millions of commuters were affected. The strike officially ended at 2:35 p.m. EST on December 22, 2005. Service was restored overnight, with all transportation systems fully operational by the morning commute of the 23rd.
On Tuesday, December 27, 2005 the executive board of Local 100 of the TWU accepted a 37-month contract offer from the MTA. The 37-month length was crucial, as the last contract ended on December 15, causing disruption of the New York City economy just in the middle of the holiday season. Now the next contract would expire in mid-January. (However, to the shock of many commuters, the union workers rejected the new contract by 7 votes – 11,234 to 11,227 – in a vote on January 20, 2006, but overwhelmingly approved it three months later, even though the offer had been legally retracted.)
This was the third strike ever against New York City's Transit Authority. The first was a 12-day walkout in 1966 which prompted the creation of New York's Taylor Law. The second was the 11-day 1980 strike. The 2005 strike, which took place during the busiest shopping week of the year, had significantly affected the local economy since many people had then chosen to avoid shopping in New York by either shopping online, or by postponing purchases.
On April 10, 2006, Justice Theodore T. Jones sentenced Local 100 President Roger Toussaint to ten days in jail and a week later, the union was fined 2.5 million dollars and the automatic deduction of dues from all members was suspended.
Read more about 2005 New York City Transit Strike: General, Pre-strike Negotiations, Demands and Counteroffers, Average MTA Salaries, Strike Consequences, Contingency Plans, Public Response, Resolution
Famous quotes containing the words york, city, transit and/or strike:
“New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.”
—Djuna Barnes (1892–1982)
“The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“There’s that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)