As more details of the Transport Workers Union contract emerged yesterday, political observers and the men and women who walked off the job last week began questioning whether it was the workers or the government that “won” after the three-day strike right before Christmas.

The agreement the union’s executive board endorsed Tuesday night does not appear to be significantly better or worse for workers than the proposals on the table on the eve of the strike.

According to the memorandum of understanding approved Tuesday night by the union’s executive board and obtained yesterday by The New York Sun, the 37-month contract would give workers a 3% raise the first year, a 4% raise the second year, and a 3.5% raise in the last year, substantially more than the 6% raise and $1,000 lump-sum bonus the workers received under their last three-year contract.

The union did succeed in convincing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to take the issue the strike was waged over – pensions – off the table. Not only did the MTA abandon its hope of forcing new workers to retire at a later age, but future members of the TWU will be required to pay into the pension system at the same rate as current members, rather than increasing the percent pay-in to 6% from 2%, as the MTA had hoped.

But, according to the memorandum, the union made a series of concessions. First, the workers would have to start paying 1.5% of their wages toward their health care, a percentage that can increase along with health care costs. In the past, transit workers have not had to pay any part of their health care costs.

The union also conceded that the new contract would expire in January, making a strike less economically damaging than one falling in the middle of the holiday shopping season.

Also in the negative column for the union members is the loss of pay for the three days they were not working and fines of two days’ pay for each day they were on strike.

With the financial victor of the strike remaining unclear, the issue of the long-term symbolic winner and how the strike could impact future negotiations is also murky.

Authorities yesterday had a number of answers to the “who won?” question.

A professor of history at Cooper Union, Fred Siegel, said: “It’s a complicated question. Clearly Roger Toussaint is a loser. If his members take a good look at what they got, they’ll see that they led him down a dead end. The question is: Is the MTA and even the city, eventually, a winner for establishing partial co-payment on health care?”

Mr. Siegel said some TWU members might hold the strike and the results of the negotiations against Mr. Toussaint.

“What they did was give away 1.5% of their own healthcare in order to” protect the pension benefits of workers not yet hired, he said. “If I’m a current union member, this looks like a very bad deal … Do I assume that people are going to be rational enough to figure that out? Yes. Does it produce a coherent response? That remains to be seen.”

A political consultant, Norman Adler, who for 11 years was the director of political action and legislation for the city’s largest union, District Council 37, said “winning” in contract negotiations depends on whether going out on strike gave the members of the union something they would not have won had they not walked out. In the case of the transport workers, each member who went on strike lost about a week’s worth of wages.

“The question is was it worth sacrificing a week’s wages? Whatever you get, you have to get back your week’s wages,” Mr. Adler said.

He said the mayor “won” in the sense that there were no major problems in the city during the strike, and he predicted the mayor’s language during the strike – saying the union behaved “thuggishly,” for example – would not have any lasting impact on the mayor’s political capital.

The senior attorney to the Straphangers Campaign, Gene Russianoff, said as far as he’s concerned, it was the public, not the union or the government, that won.

“Some people may say the MTA wins. Some people might say the TWU forced the MTA to take pensions off the table, so they win,” he said, adding, “I’m content riding on my subway car and think I’m the winner. After walking from Park Slope across the Brooklyn Bridge, I don’t know how many more days I could have put up with that.”

The executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, Richard Boris, said the union president, Mr. Toussaint, had more to lose in this year’s negotiations than Governor Pataki, who oversees the MTA, or Mayor Bloomberg, who was only nominally involved in the negotiations.

Mr. Boris said it seems that the union won because it was able to force the MTA to take the pension issue off the table.

Even among workers, there was not agreement yesterday on who “won.”

A train conductor, Robert Kelley, 72, said the strike was worth it.

A bus operator, Clarence Patterson, said he was better off because of the strike.

“I don’t think we would have gotten as much as we did without the strike,” he said. “It grabbed the city’s attention. It swayed public opinion.”

A conductor on the A line, Richard Stevens, 54, said, “If we had stayed out longer, we would have gotten more.”

But Mr. Stevens was critical of the strike, saying he thinks the union leadership caved in to the MTA.

“Everybody keeps saying we got screwed,” he said when asked to describe the mood of his colleagues.

A labor historian at City University of New York Graduate Center, Joshua Freeman, said that when the next round of negotiations comes up, there may be some impact from this strike.

“The possibility of a walkout will be taken more seriously,” he said. He said that sort of “spillover” effect came into play in 1968, when the Transport Workers Union won a generous settlement from Mayor Lindsay, who was hurt hard two years before during the strike of 1966.