Philadelphia Phillies, Election Day and Septa Transit Strike

I don’t usually write two blog posts in one day, but given the unusual circumstances of how my day started…I feel the need. I woke to the euphoria that the Phillies won last night against the Yankees (yeah!!!) – I fell asleep before the game ended (the score at that time was 8-2 so I hoped for the best and turned off the TV) . Morning alarm from KYW: final score: 8-6 (not too bad!).

Then I listened on KYW that Septa decided to strike at 3AM. I knew what that meant. Ug. Nooooooo! Long lines, standing-room-only regional trains, people stranded, frustrated, irate, etc. (in a city that’s already known for our lack of patience). My commute wasn’t too bad all things considered – others not that lucky. Annette (our General Manager) had a 3 hour commute, I heard people had to beg, borrow and steal to coordinate rides, companies pieced together “emergency” transportation solutions at parking garages and I saw a lot of bikes on my train this morning. My evening commute is fast approaching and from what I saw this AM in Suburban Station (cones, gates and those crazy poles that make mazes for forming lines) I have a feeling I’m in for a long commute home.

So…while I was working today and in between meetings and emails I read online a few articles about what the whole problem is with Septa and its transit workers. And, I’m getting more upset with each piece of information I’m reading. Average salary of a transit worker? $52,000 NOT including their benefits. Workers want at 4% increase in pay (or raises totaling 11.5% over five years depending upon the article you read) AND they want to keep paying only 1% of their healthcare costs. Uh, hello? We’re in a recession! “Salary increase” is a four-letter word to most of the people I know who are employed—they’re just happy to be employed!

And, on top of it all Septa decides to strike on ELECTION DAY! Brilliant! Whoever gave the “ok” at Transport Workers Union Local 234 for that idea should seriously evaluate their priorities. I mean you’ll “hold off” for the Game 5 of the World Series but not Election Day? Where is the logic in that? And, what kind of message does that send the thousands of transit takers to strike at 3AM and leave everyone scrambling for their morning commute?

So…as you can see my feelings on this issue are pretty strong and I happened to tweet to GL Hoffman (of JobDig and “What Dad Would Say Blog” and founder of a great job search engine aggregator LinkUp.com – full disclosure, I’ve written on their site before) that I felt this odd-ball combination of happy events and crazy facts would make a perfect “Gruzzle.” If you don’t know about Gruzzles, get on board. GL Hoffman creates them and FastCompany has featured Gruzzles and they can be downright LOL funny. So I proposed the idea, he liked it and drew up this formula that I think captures the essence of this debacle quite well: