All tour guides in this Line of Gray must choose come the end of the year how they will begin employment in the next. It is Layoff time at 777 8th Avenue, how about a song for it!

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Living On The Layoff

Today in the Theater District played street theater by those Players for whom the theater distict is just one scene played in the district of theater that is New York City.

Management and Local Brass yukked it up, The Rat stood in line for the Downtown Loop. . .

The tour guides brandish their new contract in the face of Gray Line the way a disgruntled Italiano tourist does his All Loops ticket in the face of his Gray Line tour guide. Here yet again is reenacted the grand strategy of Union action, by beleagured employees in charge of this town’s biggest industry (aside from the fake handbags).

Ticketed passengers on line for the doubledecker took snapshots of the TWU 225 demonstration as if the Hare Krishnas outside MTV Studios.

In New York City, the Tour Guide Union has raised the flint to strike.

After a one-week deadline extension, negotiations for the new 3-year contract ended on Friday. This early eve, downstairs at McQuaid’s Pub on 11th Avenue and 44th Street, the contract discrepancies were given a rundown by Carlos Padilla, Transport Workers Local 225 President, to an audience of about 85 Union members “in good standing,” though many were stuck in the corner and ill-positioned on the steps and couldn’t hear over the racket of chuggers upstairs.

It was a cramped and chintz-lit space, a beefsteak room in the old parlance, a low gathering place, and New York City has always been a grand aged venue for public and private gatherings – even the Dutch sat colonial judges and merchants and patroonmen in taverns for the most civilized and grandiloquent of policymaking.  So McQuaid’s Pub – in the waterfront outland where once bustled Paddy’s Market – fit the bill for the brothers and sisters to caucus their wages and morals.

The contract technics are unprofound. Lunch money and bonus hours are being withdrawn.

And the claim that a guide’s pay will decrease by “$90 a week” rings like the phantom numbers cast upon the tax gap by candidates at political debates: a pragmatic argument only as drama, not as crux. Gray Line surely prioritizes not the welfare of its tour lecturers. This is one of the perks of the job! Responsible independence from authority! (most guides do not adhere to the dictates of the above number 12 – Gray Line knows it and so tinkers with the uniform vouchers).  If there was ever a company that merited a strike against, it is Gray Line, and if there is anything sinister in these mediations, it is not the attitude over lunch money and bonus hours, but the intimation of demobilizing the Union.

Gray Line tour guides need our Union. Perhaps solidarity among brothers and sisters is found just as proudly standoffish in the acceptance of slightly lesser terms than by walking off the job, taking the bus drivers and dispatchers along for the ride. Surely even the worst tour guide is more articulate holding a microphone on the Downtown Loop than when mumbling with a picket sign in a circle on the corner of 47th and 8 AV? Better for his or her tips. Depending on which news article one reads (there are nearly an infinite), we are in the worst economic downfall since either the Great Depression or 1981. Let it be mandated that this author loathes the commercialization of fear-mongering which the bailout has engendered just as much as the next average enlightened American galoot (they have been playing Christmas music in city-wide pharmacies since before I knew what I was going to be for Halloween, what the frig!) But one must weigh a tad gravely between relinquishing one’s job at a shysty rumbuckle of a company – in effect condemning that company for the skullduggery upon which one has either meekly or stoutly prospered – or taking a paycheck with a few more frillies than when tendered the duration of the last contract. This Black Friday an “Information Picket” is tentatively scheduled for conduction in Times Square, with the requisite boostering and bantering and flicking of flyers. At least for Local TWU 225, the Big Rat Balloon won’t float by Macy’s this Thursday for Thanksgivingsback – though the hullabaloo tonight at McQuaid’s would make a perfect exhibit sometime in the future at the New York Historical Society, where the hot air is first blasted.  .  .   and where the Uptown Loop so majestically makes an early hop-on/hop-off stop for the Museum of Natural History, ripe for jokes regarding Roosevelt and Republicans and Dinosaurs.  Upward and Onward, fightin’ the War On Tourism!

Meanwhile the Screen Actors Guild are strong-arming a new contract, and talks have broken down nigh Internal Combustion City. But puhleeeeease… these potential walk-outers pose themselves as performers under the duress of Labor’s bad faith? Do Saggers administer ponchos to rain-soaked bus passengers at 35 MPH while elucidating the Gothic mysterioso of West 72nd Street? Can they dash malarkey under the August scorch to unwizened Italians and bedraggled Wisconsinites?  The Hollywood actor is a knock-kneed nambypamb when juxtaposed with the NYC doubledecker fact-slinger!  The Saggers start and end their day in the trailer.  We tour guides begin and end in Times Square, the supreme fantasy factory. . . .