Strike in Effect, Subways Closed

Officials from the union representing 33,700 bus and subway workers ordered an illegal strike early Tuesday morning that immediately shut down the citywide transit system because of labor unrest for the first time in 25 years.The president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, Roger Toussaint, emerged from a three and a half hour closed-door meeting with the union’s 47-member executive board early Tuesday morning to issue the strike order. He blamed the impasse over contract negotiations on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg.“With a $1 billion surplus, this contract between the MTA and the Transport Workers Union should have been a no brainer,” Mr. Toussaint told reporters at 3 a.m. today. “That was not the case.”Mr. Toussaint ordered the city’s subways and buses to be shut down “immediately,” though workers had been told to complete the runs for all trains and buses and not abandon them.Mr. Toussaint left the union hall without answering questions.Attempts to resolve the union’s contract dispute ended an hour before a midnight deadline, leaving the union to vote on whether to strike. The union rejected the authority’s final offer of wage increases of 3.5%, 4% and 3.5% for each year of a three-year contract. The union also refused to concede to the authority’s demand that pensions for new transit workers include a later retirement age.After an intense 12-hour round of contract talks broke off with no resolution, union officials met at the union hall on the West Side of Manhattan where the executive board’s voting members voted 28 to 10, plus five abstentions, to strike.Earlier yesterday, the executive director of the Public Employment Relations Board, James Edgar said the board would order the MTA to begin docking workers two days pay for every day off the job if the union went on strike. Strikes are prohibited under the state’s Taylor law.The small handful of dissenters included the president of the Transport Workers Union International, the union’s parent organization, Mike O’Brien, indicating internal fissures within the union that could deepen as the transit strike continues. Those who attended the meeting of the executive board said Mr. O’Brien urged Mr. Toussaint to hold off on calling a strike, arguing that contract talks were heading toward an equitable resolution for the union.Mr. Toussaint, who at one time represented a possible challenge to the international’s leadership and came to power at Local 100 five years ago as a militant, argued otherwise. He portrayed the strike, in an appeal to the public, as a struggle of workers to attain the middle class.“New Yorkers, this is a fight over whether hard work will be rewarded with a decent retirement,” Mr. Toussaint said. “This is a fight over dignity and respect on the job, a concept that is very alien to the MTA.”A spokesman for the MTA, Tom Kelly, emerged after contract talks ended around 11 p.m. to say the authority was still interested in continuing negotiations. “The MTA has put a fair offer on the negotiating table,” Mr. Kelly said. “Unfortunately, that offer has been rejected by the Transport Workers Union.”The city’s strike contingency plan immediately went into effect. Cars entering Manhattan south of 96th Street between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m. must have at least four passengers. Commercial traffic is prohibited during these hours. The task of helping to transport the more than 7 million riders who use the subways every day has fallen, in large part, on the drivers of the city’s 12,000 Yellow cabs, who are authorized to pick up multiple fares. Upon hearing news of a strike, cabbies early today were not excited about the prospect of gridlock and frustrated commuters struggling to get to work in freezing temperatures.“It will be very hard,” a cabbie, Julio Riofrio, said. “People are very demanding.”Inside the union hall early today, the mood was sober. A feeling of fatigue from the protracted contract talks was palpable. Despite being surrounded by pictures and collages that celebrated past strikes as emblems of the union’s radical beginnings, Mr. Toussaint appeared tired when he made his announcement. A wall hanging contained a quote from union’s preamble, written by its founder, Michael Quill, that read: “TWU is the only militant union on the all city traction lines.”Mr. Toussaint has often been equated with Mr. Quill, who led the union during a system-wide strike in 1966. Over the past days Mr. Toussaint’s fiery rhetoric seemed to invoke Mr. Quill’s past.Though Mr. Toussaint and Mr. Kalikow returned to the negotiating table early yesterday, most of the talking was conducted at press conferences and rallies designed for a television audience.“It’s like bluff poker,” a deputy mayor from the Giuliani administration who was involved in past contract negotiations, Randy Mastro, said yesterday. “They’re each trying to get the other side to show their final and best offer.”Early yesterday morning, the war of words began with comments by Mr. Toussaint, who called on the mayor to allocate more city funds to transportation and criticized the governor for not getting involved in the negotiations.“We have two words for the governor, which is ‘respect us,'” Mr. Toussaint said.His comments came as he stood at the Queens depot of the Triboro Bus Company, one of the two private bus lines that went on strike yesterday, foreshadowing what happened today.Almost immediately, the Mayor Bloomberg fought back, using language like “intolerable” and “disingenuous” to describe the union’s bargaining posture.At a Monday morning press conference, Mr. Bloomberg said a strike would not force the MTA to offer a better deal.“If anything,” he said, “it’s probably going to dig them in. There’s plenty of time to negotiate. You don’t have to negotiate a deal between now and tonight. We have municipal unions that have gone two or three years negotiating and eventually they did get a contract. The strike is illegal. It would be reprehensible.”Mr. Bloomberg called the union’s no-compromise position on the retirement age and medical benefits “intolerable,” and said it is “disingenuous” for the union to argue that any changes in pension plans could have a negative impact on other workers.He also said the transit workers have already hurt businesses.“I talked to the head of the largest department store chain in the country over the weekend,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Sales at the big New York City department stores were off 30% or 40% on Friday just from the uncertainty of people not knowing whether they could get to work.”A spokeswoman for Federated, America’s largest department store company, said the company does not comment on sales by store or division.Mr. Bloomberg postponed his annual holiday party for the press at Gracie Mansion to focus on being ready for a possible strike.Meanwhile, the Governor Pataki — who jetted to Iowa, New Hampshire, and Puerto Rico to raise support for a possible 2008 presidential bid as negotiations proceeded in New York — maintained yesterday that he would not involve himself directly in the negotiations.He emphasized that striking is illegal under the state’s Taylor law.“I said it before: It is illegal. It has dire consequences,” Mr. Pataki said. “First of all, there is a reason it is illegal. Because of its impact on the 8 million plus people who need our mass transit to get around, not just to get to work, but to get to see a doctor or respond to an emergency, that’s why the law makes it illegal, and that’s why the law has very real penalties for those who break it.”Mr. Pataki’s comments were not enough to appease the transit union.It held a rally outside the governor’s Manhattan office. It was the third rally in a week. The union also began airing television commercials, claiming that union members didn’t want to strike and that they were being forced toward a strike by the uncompromising position of the MTA.“They want to cut my pensions and benefits and raise your fares,” one worker says in the commercial.As the two sides battled publicly, neither seemed willing to make concessions to reach a compromise over what has become a central issue: the MTA’s desire to raise to 62 from 55 the age when new employees can retire and receive a pension equal to half their salary based on the average of their best three years. The pension is adjusted for the cost of living.The union had hoped it could force the MTA to take the issue off the table by filing a petition on Sunday with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board. But the MTA did not respond by yesterday afternoon, effectively forcing the union to engage on the pension issue.The employment board’s executive director, James Edgar, said that if the transit workers strike today, the board will order the MTA to begin docking their paychecks: two days’ wages for every day off the job.The looming strike created an atmosphere of uncertainty as riders wondered if they would wake up to gridlock and a commute turned upside down, as many Queens residents did yesterday when 700 workers from two private bus lines in the borough walked off the job, leaving the lines’ 57,000 daily riders in a lurch.Many of the commuters piled into commuter vans to get to work or into a subway that would take them into Manhattan.Mohammed Ahmed, 51, who was on his way to Manhattan from his home in Long Island City at noon yesterday, said he waited for nearly 45 minutes without a bus, commuter van, or livery car offering him a ride, unaware that a strike had been initiated. He had 20 minutes to get to work.“I can’t make work on time,” Mr. Ahmed, a Bangladeshi immigrant, said. “Maybe I’ll walk, after I call my boss. I don’t get the bus; I don’t get a taxi. What can I do?”Pensions, health care, and wages are all at issue in the negotiations.The last New York transit strike, in 1980, lasted 11 days.The MTA has said that in the event of a strike it will take steps to prevent sabotage and to keep certain trains running without passengers to keep the rail infrastructure from seizing up.

Strike in Effect, Subways Closed

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