I'm not sure how much you know about the relationship between Unions and city/state government in NY, but an example of the increased costs of such a relationship include the fact that unions outsource the jobs to non-union subcontractors and the city budget is $84 Billion, 10X that of Los Angeles.

> Union workers are safer than non-union workers

More accurately, unionized working relationships enforce safer working conditions (both by contracting for conditions better than the legal minimums and providing better avenues for addressing situations which don't meet the legal and contractual minimums) than non-unionized relationships.

America has been sending a lot of dangerous manufacturing jobs to oversea competitors for decades now. The data likewise show that about 2/3 of all occupational fatalities are caused by transportation incidents ("road incidents") or by "persons or animals," not by unsafe, dangerous working condition we often associate with industrial manufacturing (and already outsourced to poorer nations).

I don't see why we need the union today -- especially when the NYC city transportation employees are known to earn more than $100K in wages alone.