The radical leader of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 yesterday portrayed his strike as a battle in a larger war over the structure of pension benefits for government workers – and a conservative former aide to Governor Pataki said he hoped the labor leader is right.

Private-sector workers have been shifting into pension plans that they contribute to themselves for years. But taxpayers still pay most of the cost of pension benefits of public employees at the state and local levels.

“If it were not for the pension piece, we would not be out on strike,” the president of the Transport Workers Unit, Roger Toussaint, told New York 1 yesterday.

He said that the MTA and Mayor Bloomberg want to create “a new and inferior pension tier” that would have required new hires to pay 6% of their wages toward pensions. The current maximum is 2%.

“Bloomberg has an agenda with respect to pensions,” Mr. Toussaint said.

If the Metropolitan Transportation Authority succeeds in its demands, it could set new precedents affecting other groups of government workers.

“I think it absolutely will have an effect on other groups of workers,” a labor historian at the City University of New York, Josh Freeman, said.

Overall, New York’s pension plans are relatively generous in comparison with other municipalities, prompting a Citizens Budget Commission study released in April to urge a redesign of retirement benefits for the city’s public employees.

The MTA’s plan could be a key step to the type of redesign the report recommends.

“If somehow, someway, the MTA was able to get its employees to agree in principle to allow new hires to be part of a less generous pension system, that would be a tremendously important and positive precedent,” said the director of the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy, E.J. McMahon. Regardless of the outcome, a ripple effect will likely happen, said Mr. McMahon, the former Pataki aide. “Even if management doesn’t succeed in this case, the mere fact that they’ve given the issue so much visibility may provide an important push for the issue in Albany, which is the only place where pensions can actually be changed,” he said.

Mr. McMahon, a conservative, authored a report in 2003 that stated: “Skyrocketing pension expenses have been a major factor in the fiscal problems afflicting every level of government in New York State.” Of municipal employees, he said, transit workers are in about the middle, with the police officers, firemen, and sanitation workers receiving more generous plans.

If an agreement does not work, the next step, he said, is for the governor, who has not formally taken a position on pension reform, to act. “We need to see a comprehensive public pension reform proposal from the governor not limited to transit workers and we need to see the legislature respond to such a proposal,” he said.

DC 37, New York City’s largest public employee union, would not comment yesterday, because it is currently in contract negotiations.