A dissident faction on the executive board of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 broke ranks with the union president, Roger Toussaint, and urged union members to vote against the recent tentative contract agreement, which they called “a complete betrayal to labor.”

Two union vice presidents, Ainsley Stewart and John Mooney, and one executive board member, Martin Goodman, denounced the agreement yesterday at a press conference, saying a “secret deal” Mr. Toussaint made with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority violated both the law and the workers’ interests.

“We cannot allow secret deals to be worked out between the union and management between closed doors,” Mr. Mooney said. “It was a violation of federal law by not presenting the secret deal to the executive board on Tuesday.”

The Daily News reported on Saturday that the MTA had agreed in a “signed, secret side deal” that, should Governor Pataki veto a pension refund bill in the state Legislature, it would pay for refunds of up to $14,000 a worker for pension payments that close to 17,000 union members made between 1994 and 2000.

Mr. Pataki has vowed to veto any such bill, and said that he did not know of the deal. MTA officials said they did not mean for the agreement to be kept secret.

If the MTA were to pay the refunds, he said, they would be subject to 49% taxes that would not apply to state payments, Mr. Mooney said.

He suggested in a telephone interview yesterday that the MTA and Mr. Pataki might have engineered the deal in order to reduce the amount of money the union members received.

“I believe he knew about it,” Mr. Mooney said. “This plays right into Pataki’s hand. If there were no side deal … he would have to [pass the legislation]. This is a way for him to get out of it.”

Because the payments could total up to $200 million, Mr. Mooney called the deal a “$100 million give-back.”

“How many more secret deals are out there?” he added.

Newsday reported on Sunday that Mr. Pataki said: “I was briefed completely on what was to be in the contract. I never had any briefing or knowledge that there was a side agreement, and I have to say it’s extremely upsetting to me. I made it plain from the beginning: You don’t reward illegal strikes.”

The dissident executive board members also opposed the deal’s requirement that workers pay 1.5% of their salary for health care costs.

“If transit workers agree to pay for their health benefits, it will open the door for the Bloomberg administration to start making other municipal workers pay for their health insurance,” Mr. Mooney said at the press conference. “We cannot allow that to happen.”

They complained that the proposed 10.9% pay raise over three years is inadequate.

“The agreement does not keep pace with inflation or make up for past injustices, including a first-year zero in our last contract,” Mr. Goodman said.

The board members also criticized the movement of the tentative contract’s expiration to January 15 from December 15. Mr. Goodman said the change removes “the pre-holiday leverage we’ve always had.” A strike during the holiday season can increase the economic damage to the city.

They also denounced Mr. Toussaint for ending the strike without getting amnesty for workers from penalties under the Taylor law, and condemned the law more broadly.

“If you don’t have the right to strike, you are a slave in this society or any other,” Mr. Goodman said.

In a statement released yesterday, Mr. Toussaint said: “There are a few disruptive individuals within our union who … represent less than a handful of our executive board members. At every turn they have taken positions that would hurt our members and the union only to further their own ambitions. Once again, they are working hand-in-hand with management to further the MTA’s goals.”

He added: “As the overwhelming support for this proposal in our executive board shows, this contract is a fair and equitable end to this round of negotiations with the MTA.”

Messrs. Mooney, Goodman, and Stewart, who were joined at the conference by several other union members and officials, announced they would hold an emergency union meeting tomorrow, and said another strike might be appropriate.