The Transit Worker’s Filthy Socialist Dream of Fair Wages and Decent Healthcare

“All this was city when I was a girl,” Bea said.
Bea walked briskly down the street, her back erect and waving her cane in the air beside her, the rubber end never touching the pavement. Portia struggled behind her grandmother, carrying two large bags of groceries.
“Really?”
“The Trade District went on for hundreds of miles in every direction. No a bit of green anywhere.”
“How did people grow food?” Portia asked the dutiful question, one that would prompt Bea to lecture on her favorite subject: How Portia had it so much better than her grandmother.
“We didn’t,” Bea said. “We had rationing all year long and in the winter, famine.”
A car skimmed along the surface of the road.
“But the population control?”
“Didn’t have that then. Earth was crowded, too crowded. Before the colonies…Well, the only thing to thin out the population was a war.” Bea pressed her lips together, a flat bright pink line across her face. “Kate and I joined up.”
Portia knew about the Great War, of course. It was glamorized in movies and games. She read about it in school. The war was horrible and violent and bankrupted the government. On the anniversary of Armistice every year, the city observed a minute of silence. But the veterans never talked about it.
“Is that where you learned to be a pilot?”
Bea nodded. It was the most she ever said about the war. “So many people volunteered for the colonies, great sections of the city were abandoned.”
“Now it’s all parkland.”
They walked past a Newsagent. The headlines pasted to the walls flashed. “Transit Works Threaten Strike!” “Trade District to be Paralyzed by Tomorrow’s Strike!” “Michael Connelly Demands Wage Increase!”
Bea halted and Portia crashed into her.
“Mind my eggs!” Bea was frugal when it came to foodstuffs. Stingy was more like it. She was always lecturing that in her time, they did not waste food. People starved in the famines.
“Do you know how much green space a chicken needs to produce an egg? A dozen chicken for a dozen eggs?”
“A lot,” Portia replied dutifully.
“That’s right, a lot of space and feed. Eggs are a luxury.” Eggs were a luxury. When Bea was a child, seventy years ago, the planet was over populated and not enough green space existed to support the critical mass of people. Famines were prevalent every year. Algae were harvested as a source of cheap protein. Large farms covered the oceans in a thick green scum.
As a small child, Portia had a school science project of growing and harvesting her own algae. As she remembered, the paste form was disgusting and the dried algae just as disgustingly unpalatable.
“Do you think they will strike?” Portia asked.
“I hope so,” Bea said. “Fair wages for a fair days work, I say. Do you know, I only joined the military so I could eat something other than Algae?”
Portia adjusted the weight of the bags. Bea was obviously not going to be easily distracted from her lecture about wasting food and how privilege she was that her generation grew tall and fat with so much nutritious food.
“My growth was stunted! That’s how hungry we were.” Bea took off down the pavement again. “Me and my sister joined up so we wouldn’t be hungry.”
“That hardly seems fair.”
“I wasn’t but that was the Bad Old Days. There was nothing but city as far as the eye could see. Nothing but city all over the planet.”
“But Colonization solved all that.”
“The hell it did! They tried to let us starve to death, to thin out the population, but that didn’t work. So they dreamed up the newest horror: Colonization.”
Bea turned towards her house. It was an old fashioned home, part of a long row that lined the street. Half of the buildings were empty. Across the street, the empty builds were torn down in an act of urban un-development and left as an open green space.
Bea neighborhood use to be part of the larger city. Now, because of the decline population, large sections of the abandoned city were replaced with forest and green parkland. The neighborhood now had the sleepy feel of a rural hamlet, safely separated from the city by a barrier of green.
“Hurry up and open the door if you don’t want me to drop the luxurious eggs.”
“Don’t sass me, girl.”
The door swung open, Portia hustled through to the kitchen in the back and set the bags on the counter with a grateful sigh. The bag sat on the corner of a square of paper.
The kitchen was bright and warm. Stiffly starched white curtain hung in the window.
Bea smiled warmly, unloading the bags. She set each item on the counter like it was a prize. “Oranges, can you imagine.” She held the fruit to her nose and breathed deeply. Satisfied, she the placed it in a bowl.
“What this?” Portia picked up the thick white square of paper. She didn’t know paper could be so heavy and tactile.
“An invitation to a retrospective art show, the Art of the War Years.”
“And they need a speaker?”
“Well, I think it’s more along the lines of a relic, actually. Now, would you like a cup of tea?”

The transit workers did strike. For the first time, Portia walked to work. It was not a long journey but it was unfamiliar. Her path skirted the outer rims of the reforested, Deurbanized section of the Trade District. She turned up the volume on the Pod and admired the vivid autumn colors and the brisk air against her cheeks. The strike was fairly pleasant so far.

The images of the strike leader speaking passionately, red faced from the cold and passionately moving his hands, filled the vid screens. Supporters formed a solid body clothed in the rough blue work shirts. Picket signs with flashing messages flitted into and out of view. The signs read: Fair Wages for a Fair Days Work and Healthcare for Everyone.
The volume was off but Portia knew what the news channel talking head was saying: Charismatic leader Michael Connelly spoke to a gathering of his fellow strikers today at the rally in front of City Hall…
A waitress with bright synthetic yellow hair was mesmerized by the images.
“I don’t suppose you or Michael Connelly could bring me a cup of coffee, sweetheart?” The man at the counter laughed at his own witticism.
The waitress turned away from the screen with a sign. “I just might go on strike, you know,” she said, absently tipping the coffee carafe to cup, “and then where you be?”
“Having a better cup of coffee, I know that much.”
The waitress snarled and moved over to Portia’s table. She set the coffee carafe on the dingy linoleum surface a fished a table out of her apron. “Ready, honey?”
Portia usually did not have lunch in a diner like Daisy’s. She normally took the Elevated to the food pavilion in the next building over, maybe to a better café if she was spoiling herself. Now that the transit workers were on strike, she went the ground level and walked two blocks with the vague sense that she was heading to food. Portia rarely spent anytime on the ground. Only the cheapest stores and businesses operated in the low levels of the city’s buildings. The ground belonged to Stationer’s.
Portia hated to think she was prejudiced, but she wandered the city streets with a thousand other Shareholders, lost in a new aspect of their city and a little frightened. The tall buildings of the Trade District, which seemed so graceful and clean from her office’s vantage, looked ominous from the ground and blocked the sunlight. Like a beacon in a storm, she saw the bright pink neon lights of Daisy’s Love-In Diner, Home of the Sexiest Food in Town.
“I’ll have the special,” Portia said.
The waitress folded her arms. “We don’t normally get your kind in here.”
Portia glance quickly over the dingy linoleum tabletop and the plastic vinyl bench so tattered with patches it was a multi-colored checkerboard pattern. “I suppose not.”
“Drink?”
“Excuse me?”
“What type of beverage would Madame prefer? We don’t have a wine cellar, but I’m sure there’s something suitable…”
“Coffee would be fine.”
The waitress smirked as she poured.
Portia pulled out her Data Pad. The message from the Crosby played again. She couldn’t stop watching the little figures of the people moving about the screen, trying to illustrate their mystery. She couldn’t tell them no help was coming. They probably already knew. All the Corporation had to offer the colonists was an icy wall of silence.
They probably already knew that, too.
The Special arrived, which was standard cheesesteak and greasy fries. Portia smiled a thank you.
“What do you think of the strike?” the waitress asked.
“Me?”
“Yeah, Missy, you. Work for a living, don’t cha?”
As a matter of fact, she did work for a living. “Of course.”
“So where do you stand on worker’s rights?”
“Where do you stand on worker’s rights,” Portia repeated cautiously.
“I think that when it comes down to doing what’s right and turning a profit, the companies will always take profit.”
“I think Corporation’s provide for their employees by giving them a job. It’s a good citizen’s duty to work and deserve promotion, to excel and honor the Corporation.” (Or some such other Social Darwinist crap.)
“You’re Corporate!” The waitress said it as if being a Corporation employee was a crime.
“I have to work for a living,” Portia replied meekly.
“Don’t we all.” The waitress left without refilling the coffee. Not that Portia minded; it really was a lousy cup of coffee.
She turned her attention back to the Data Pad. It didn’t seem right, all those people…
The volume of the vid screen suddenly increased. “The Transit Authority released a statement earlier this morning announcing that they would not be holding talks with the self appointed representative of the workers, Michael Connelly. It looks like the strike could continue for another day…”
The waitress stalked back to Portia’s table. “Let me tell you something about the Corporation…”
“What? What bad news about the Corporation could you tell me that I already don’t know?”
“I work all day and all night and I can barely pay my rent. There’s no rent control because that would infringe on a landowners commercial right to earn profit. I pay a fortune for a crappy little box. And Mr. Fabulous here,” jerking her thumb over her shoulder, “offers medical insurance at a sixty percent co-pay. I can’t afford sixty percent of nothing. What do I do if my little boy gets sick? And he gets sick a lot?”
“Take him to the Clinic.”
She barked with laughter. “I ain’t got that kind of UGOs. My husband’s a good man, he works hard, but he got hurt real bad at the plant and do you know what the kind and benevolent plant management did for him? Sent a bill for damaging the machine that sliced off his right hand and hired a replacement, that’s what. No job, just a huge amount of debt. And does the Corporation help? No. Tells us to be self-sufficient. Tells us to be good citizens.”
“If it’s that bad, why don’t you colonize?”
“Why should I have to leave!” the waitress snapped. “This is my home as much as it is yours.”
“I was just thinking of your debts…”
“Colonization. It’s a easy solution you Consumers are always selling, shuffling the Stationers away to some Debtor’s jail in the stars.”
“I didn’t mean…Look, you’ve got me all wrong. If you work hard, I’m sure…”
“Easy for you to say. Hard work. You’ve got an education.” She spat out the word like it left it bad taste in her mouth. “All I’ve got is tired feet and the lunch shift.”
The bill was tossed on the table, the hard plastic case clattering. Portia took her UGO credit stick and inserted it into the bill. She tapped in the exact amount, paused, zeroed out the previous amount and entered the payment including a higher tip. She was trying to pay off her guilt, she knew, and a few UGOs would not solve the waitress’s deeper problems. Portia suspected the waitress gave the same song and dance to every Shareholder who ventured in to Daisy’s, trying to guilt a higher tip. Today it worked.
Hopefully the strike would work and solve the transit worker’s deeper problems.