"Schoolteacher", your points are well taken, but I do not have the time to spell out and prove every point. I have laid out the facts; to some degree I expect others to do their own homework. Between my schoolwork and my job I do not have a huge amount of time to visit this site and defend my union brothers and sisters as well as myself. My writing here earlier today was meant to be quick responses to those attacks at a time when I had other things I needed to do, but they were also careful on the facts.

Tonight I do not have much time either, but I’ll answer four of your questions.

(1) On New York, both cities, Santa Cruz and New York, are extremely expensive and New York drivers are apparently underpaid. Neither city is typical and both have fallen under the category of most expensive place to live in the nation in recent publications.

(2) The Sentinel has shown extreme anti-union bias in their coverage of the strike and other union issues. The purposeful omission of the cost of living in Santa Cruz when referring to the pay of Santa Cruz drivers is one of many omissions, distortions and lies. Another example would be an article on Saturday, October 1st, entitled "Metro Drivers Reject Proposal." Yet the drivers were not given any proposal to reject. This headline did its job in placing blame for the strike on the workers rather than on the Metro Transit Board. In fact it was the Metro Transit Board that rejected the no strike agreement that had been agreed to by the worker and Transit Board representatives.

I don't play games with words, I have been watching the Sentinel long enough to see their bias and I feel secure in calling their misrepresentations of the facts lies.

(3) As for your suggestion that workers go back to work with old pay without a union contract and without the Metro Board even negotiating in good faith, that would be a step towards ending the union representation that has benefited the UTU METRO workers so well.

(4) Bargaining in good faith means doing things the Metro Transit Board has not been doing like sending representatives to bargain that actually are in position to bargain, and not going on vacation at such a critical juncture in negotiations as the beginning of the strike.

Some progress by the Metro Transit Board towards trying negotiate a contract after rejecting the one that UTU representatives had agreed to would be one indication of good faith negotiations. This is also sadly lacking.