by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Imagine you could legally hold a whole city for ransom. In this scenario you're a diabolical Dr. Evil, where you - in the understandable aim of personal enrichment - stop people from getting to work, separate friends and lovers and keep the cash till precariously empty for small shopkeepers. Best of all, you don't even need a laser beam satellite gizmo aimed down from space, all you need is to be a Montreal Transit Corporation card-carrying unionized employee.

Now for those of us who remember the bad old days, bus strikes seem a throwback pain-in-the-ass anachronism that we assumed went the way of banks that made your cash unavailable after 3 and grocery stores that shut on Sundays.

But we were wrong to assume that the bus strike plague had been put down. There hasn't been a bus strike since '89, but in the 25 years prior we endured 40 such irritants, only 10 of which were of the legal variety.

So now the downtrodden proletariat of the 20-bucks-plus-per-hour variety are on the picket line asking you to honk your horn and wave. But why on earth would we want the MTC employees to earn more money? Heck, they almost surely make more than you. It's not like they have nine kids to support, as we know Quebecers don't have children. And half of any raise they get will go to taxes anyway. So is it legitimate for a few hundred well-paid workers to strand millions just so they can earn a few extra bucks to pay the Seadoo off?

And hey... you want more money too, but has the MTC union chief ever called your boss and demanded bigger paycheques for you?

There are two worlds of labour in Quebec, the non-unionized dregs and the 40 per cent of workers (compared to 28 per cent in Ontario) who have their union cards. They're both radically different cosmologies.

As unionized Bell Canada employees, my gang was paid heaps more than those doing an equivalent non-unionized work, yet in one of those pervasive paradoxical peccadilloes, we were generally miserable, unknowingly wallowing in a self-pitying culture of entitlement and resentment. We'd spend half our days trying to imagine some management slight that we could file a union grievance about.

Economically speaking, unless somebody is making scandalously little pay, there's no burning reason to hope a union wins a strike. If too many local workers start earning higher wages, inflation goes up. Thus you've also got to get a pay hike just to keep up. And when wages get too high, investors plant their cash elsewhere, so the whole economy sags.

It's no fun to strike either. As an activity, picketing is akin to standing hands in pockets outside the Old Brewery Mission all day, although you might have to occasionally holler "So-li-dar-itay," which seems embarrassingly dumb as far as slogans go. Plus it's hard to generate much self-righteous adrenaline. After all, hardballing for more long weekends ain't exactly as exciting as rioting in the "three shillings or blood" Beauharnois canal-diggers' strike of 1843.

And money doesn't buy happiness, if you believe The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser, which details the Deci experiment. In that study, two groups were asked to fiddle with a Rubik's cube. The unpaid group kept gleefully twiddling away after the experiment was officially over. The paid group grumbled, reported less enjoyment from the affair and knocked off immediately at quitting time.

So my advice to the MTC strikers: life's too short to make enemies with everybody on the island. Take the money and get the buses rolling.

• • •

A remembrance for a good friend and bright guy once mentioned in this column: L.M.D. was a witty intellectual with a love for cold beer and hot women. The soft-spoken bon vivant and author of a novel espousing the violent separatist overthrow of Quebec leapt to his death off the Jacques Cartier Bridge Monday last. The faster they put up suicide barriers around that span the better.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca