Ratify Contract, Union Tells Members

The union representing bus and subway workers voted overwhelmingly last night to recommend that its 33,000 members ratify a new three-year contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, ending the standoff that led to a crippling three-day transit strike last week.The vote by the executive board of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union was 37-4 with one abstention. The contract now must be ratified by the union’s membership by mail-in ballot, a process that could take as long as a month. It is likely that the members will approve the contract.The new 37-month contract, if ratified, would provide workers with a 10.5% wage increase, with a 3%, 4% and 3.5% raise in each of the contract’s three years, the president of the union, Roger Toussaint, said at a news conference after the vote last night.The contract expires January 15, 2009, heading off another potential transit strike during the holiday season.The union was able to fend off efforts by the MTA to get new workers to contribute more of their wages toward their pensions, an issue that brought both sides to the impasse that led to the city’s first strike in 25 years. Mr. Toussaint said no changes to the pension plan would take place.As a concession, however, union members will begin paying 1.5% of their wages toward their health insurance premiums, the first time transit workers will be asked to contribute toward their health care costs, possibly setting a precedent for other municipal unions.Mr. Toussaint said the contract proposal also includes: a paid holiday for workers on Martin Luther King Jr. Day; some paid maternity leave for women; additional payments to bus and subway drivers and conductors who are victims of assault; improved disability insurance for workers injured on the job, and an increased benefit to family members of workers who die on the job.The contract, Mr. Toussaint said, provides “a greater degree of respect and appreciation for the sacrifice our members undertake in this city everyday.”Mr. Toussaint went on to thank the workers and riders in the city for their “patience, forbearance, and understanding” during the tumultuous past week.Mayor Bloomberg, who had scathing words for the union’s leaders during the strike, praised the contract proposal, saying in a statement that it “mitigates fare increases and allows for vital investments in our transportation infrastructure.”It may be too early to judge whether the strike for the union was worth the cost – which includes $3 million in fines plus six days lost wages for workers, and possibly jail time and other fines a judge could mete out in January.But it is clear that the strike, waged over pensions, forced the authority to remove its demand that new workers retire later or pay more into their retirement fund.“The union managed to roll back an essential demand of the MTA,” a labor historian at City University of New York Graduate Center, Joshua Freeman, said. “And it’s hard to imagine they could have done that without going on strike.”MTA officials, Mr. Freeman said, could have taken the demand off the table and avoided a strike but chose instead to make it part of their “final offer,” which was publicly unveiled by the chairman of the MTA, Peter Kalikow, just hours after the initial strike deadline of 12:01 a.m. on December 16. That move set the stage the strike.The MTA had originally asked new workers to retire at 62 instead of the current 55 in order to receive a full pension and put in 30 years of service before being able to retire instead of the current 25. Transportation authority officials eventually scaled back all of their pension demands, except for a request that new workers pay 6% of their salary toward their pensions, a percentage similar to an amount workers paid in 1999, before a new contract reduced most workers’ pension payments to 2% of their salaries.There have been only three transit strikes in the city’s history and each has had its own causes and context. In 1966, union boss Michael Quill called a strike at 5a.m. New Year’s Day, five hours Mayor Lindsay became the city’s 103rd mayor. In 1980, the 11-day strike was waged over demands that workers receive pay increases that had been denied them during the city’s fiscal crises. The union wanted 30% wage increases over two years and a holiday to commemorate their founder and fallen labor leader, Michael Quill. They eventually received 9% and 8% raises. The MTA’s demand for future employees to contribute to their pensions was an attempt to turn back the clock to 1999, when most workers paid 5.2% of their wages toward their pension. As part of their 1999 contract, the number was rolled back to 2%.Complicating negotiations for the MTA was the presence of a $1 billion surplus, $50 million of which was earmarked for a fare discount program for the holidays. MTA officials attempted but failed to keep the surplus form being used in negotiations. Despite the fact that $705 million of the surplus came from nonrecurring resources that could not be used to pay for recurring costs such as wage increases, the union members made the surplus an issue in the public relations war that broke out between the two sides.

Ratify Contract, Union Tells Members

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