End of the Line

New York City's transportation system is a precarious mechanism. All that is needed to get it out of kilter is for somebody to stop when he should go, or go when he should stop. At cold dawn one day last week, 500 subway motormen (of 3,167 total) decided to stop, walked off their jobs. Within minutes the city's 237-mile subway system was disrupted, its 4,700,000 riders were disoriented. Within two hours the city found itself locked in the biggest, messiest transportation scramble it had ever seen. Commuters flooded to the streets, turning the surface transportation system as well into a cramped, cough-provoking cloud of chrome, curses and exhaust.

The cause of the strike lay deep in the troubled heart of modern unionism, where skilled laborers and craftsmen are fighting for their due in a world of monolithic industrial unionism. The Motormen's Benevolent Association, made up of 80% of the subway motormen, had been fighting the domination of the city's transit system by a powerful professional Irishman, Transport Workers Union President Mike Quill, and the determination of the mayor's Transit Authority to deal only with politically powerful T.W.U. Last year, when the motormen challenged Quill in a fight, a state supreme court enjoined M.B.A. President Theodore Loos and three other leaders from striking. Last week, knowing full well that 1) he would go to jail, and 2) the state's Condon-Wadlin Law forbids civil service workers from striking, Teddy Loos called his men out anyway. He and his three leaders were promptly locked up for contempt.

Macy's & Gimbels. The strike could not have been more critically timed. Heaped on the million people who normally crowd in daily on New York City's crammed acres were thousands of hot-eyed Christmas shoppers. The press and pandemonium were too much for many of the hardiest; on the second day, thousands of workers and shoppers stayed away. Retailers moaned over million-dollar-a-day losses in sales. Newspapers lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in pages of retail advertising. Macy's talked to Gimbels. Macy's President Jack Straus and Gimbels' President Bernard Gimbel conferred with Mayor Robert Wagner, posed for pictures as they rode the sometimes operative subway back to their monster department stores to prove that it could be done.

At week's end some discouraged motormen, threatened with dismissal, were shuffling sadly back to work. Subway service was clunking back to normal--and so was the city. Bedeviled Mayor Wagner (a "jellyfish," snorted the New York Herald Tribune), refused to discuss the issue until the M.B.A. canceled its "illegal strike." The motormen could only appeal to Democratic Governor Averell Harriman, who, many suspected, would only appeal to Bob Wagner, who would only appeal.

By the end of the week the strike had cost city retailers more than $10 million, the city itself $2,000,000 in sales taxes and $1,000,000 more in subway revenues. There was little doubt that, in spite of the tough talk and threatened firings, the subway motormen had made it pretty clear to the jittery city that they wanted to be alone.

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