New York City recently resolved a crippling transit strike, and my sympathies are entirely with the workers. The transit workers might have been wrong—I don't care. Unions are human institutions, and it stands to reason that occasionally they take improper bargaining stances or become corrupt. People who fundamentally sympathize with management against workers like to wave every bad union in your face like it's O.J. Simpson's shrunken glove, but the reality is that unions work and people who aren't in them make less money than people who are.

The New York strike wasn't about pensions. If it was, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) would have demanded larger cuts, or introduced its demands earlier in the process than it did. As it was, the MTA's pension demands came so late in the process that the Transit Workers Union (TWU) could not possibly have compromised. The standoff was about busting unions, and more importantly, about turning the public against the TWU and organized labor in general.

For more than a generation, unions have been losing their standing in the public imagination as fewer and fewer Americans claim union membership. Simply stripping workers of their rights and protection wasn't enough for the plutocracy, however—your social betters had to convince you that unions were the root of your struggles and the source of every trouble that corporate America could possibly encounter.

Make no mistake: The Right wants to destroy unions as an institution. That is why Reagan sought not just to break the air traffic controller's union, but to legally bar it from ever operating again. It is why Penn, Columbia, and Yale sought not just better bargaining positions vis-á-vis their graduate student unions, but rather their permanent expulsion from the realm of labor law. It's why the fight against a baseball players group called the Player's Association has always had an outsized importance. The forces of conservatism have long yearned to use the law as a bludgeon with which to beat recalcitrant workers—the ones who refuse to accept new economic "realities"—into submission.

It is true that pensions are going to be a problem for the MTA, just as they are going to be a problem for countless other organizations, public and private, in this country. But ask yourself a question: Why is it that the budget always has to be balanced on the backs of the most vulnerable people? Why is it that we never ask CEOs and upper management to take a pay cut when times get tough? Why is that the real wages for most Americans have barely risen since the Nixon administration, but the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has skyrocketed from 42-1 to 431-1 in the last 23 years? If you think the answer is "bad unions," you and I might not be able to share a cocktail without causing a ruckus.

The trouble is that Americans want things without paying for them. They want cheap transit, health care, schools, roads, railroads, airplanes, gas and stereos, and they simply don't want to pay the taxes to make those things possible, or even the necessary direct costs. Here in Philadelphia, writers and politicians fell over themselves trying to condemn SEPTA workers who went on strike last year, claiming that they were "hurting the people." Well I certainly hope they were hurting the people, otherwise they would have about as much power as the Democratic opposition in Congress. A union without the power to strike is like a nuclear weapon without the capability to explode over its target. It becomes the biggest empty threat since Bush wagged his finger at the North Koreans.

It is entirely possible that SEPTA workers and TWU employees have a better deal, in economic terms, than some of the people they transport safely across their cities day after day. They may even have a better deal than you and I. But those are their gains to protect, not ours to seize. And who can really blame them for standing their ground when the rich continue to get richer and other ordinary Americans continue to lose ground?

In other words, don't blame the unions just because you're too stupid to organize.

David Faris is a Ph.D. student at Penn. If you would like to respond to this Slant or submit one of your own (750 words), e-mail duane@citypaper.net.