---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 23:55:43 -0500 (EST) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Village Voice on New York City Transit Strike
Village Voice on New York City Transit Strike 1. MTA Strike: The Politics of No-Tomorrow (Wayne Barrett) 2. Transit Union's Family Spat (Tom Robbins) ====== MTA Strike: The Politics of No-Tomorrow By Wayne Barrett | December 20, 2005 http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/powerplays/archives/002210.php Would this strike be happening if Governor George Pataki were running for re-election next year? Would Mike Bloomberg's city be shut down if the expiration date on the Transport Workers Union's contract were September or October, when he reached pre-election settlements with half a dozen city unions? If your answer is no to either question, then you believe, as anyone with a memory in New York knows, that politics is the only explanation for this maddening and destructive strike. Think back to 2002. To buy himself a third term, George Pataki delivered a billion-dollar giveaway to Dennis Rivera's health care workers and a multi-million dollar state subsidy to finance the largest salary increases in history for NYC teachers. Two years earlier, on July 11, 2000, he signed legislation that was a $36.5 billion boon to state and city unions over 10 years. The legislation awarded cost of living increases to 550,000 state and local retirees at a billion dollar a year cost. As much as the MTA was demanding a new tier of less costly pensions in these negotiations, the 2000 legislation scrapped the special tier created during the 70's fiscal crisis and freed a half million public employees from making pension contributions. When the city followed suit, the cost of this pension giveaway doubled to another billion a year. Another $16.5 billion in pension sweeteners for cops, firefighters, teachers and others brought Pataki's re-election pension tally, even benefiting transit workers, to a budget-busting crescendo. Now, with a foot in New Hampshire on his way out the door, George Pataki has discovered that New York has a pension crisis and that 34,000 transit workers who earn half of what Ron Lauder pays Libby Pataki a year should be enlisted to solve it. Up to almost the final hour of negotiations, Pataki's MTA wanted the transit workers to agree to support legislation extending the retirement age of future workers from 55 to 62. Then, they shifted to a demand that would require these workers to contribute 6 percent of earnings over their first ten years of employment to their pensions. With starting pay for car cleaners, for example, at $29,958, the union was not about to trade an $1819 pension cut for half that in 3 percent salary increases. Especially when the MTA was waving a billion dollar surplus in the union's face, and especially when it may well be a violation of the Taylor Law for the MTA to use collective bargaining to try to rewrite pension legislation. The same governor who could find unimaginable billions in pension goodies when he was still running in this state was ready, once he knew he'd never run again, to provoke a devastating strike over a few million in pension savings. Such is the personal politics of no- tomorrow. Deferring one more time to this Albany partner, Mike Bloomberg kept calling the MTA offer "generous" even when the authority was demanding a new 62-year-old retirement date. It apparently did not occur to him that he'd never pressed for raising the pension date in any of the politically productive deals he'd cut just months earlier. Trading in the Mayor Merit title of his early first term for the Mayor Mouth nickname often applied to his Brooklyn Bridge union-busting predecessor, Bloomberg even appeared to forget that he'd agreed in October to push for retirement at 55 for teachers. The crucial pre-election settlement he reached with the teachers union creates a labor/management committee to develop a pension bill that would do the precise opposite of what the MTA sought: changing the retirement age from 62 to 55. The mayor has once again become a tabloid hero by demanding pension reductions, but no one in the media pack is demanding that he explain why that's only his post-settlement and post-election position. If dramatic change in public employee pensions is needed, the only people who can deliver it are Bloomberg, Pataki, the next governor, and the legislature. The good government groups, editorial boards, and business interests who believe this is vital should be chasing a broadbased solution to a broadbased problem, not targeting a single union and bringing the city to a halt. ========== Transit Union's Family Spat By Tom Robbins | December 20, 2005 http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/powerplays/archives/002217.php As if the striking transit workers didn't already have enough enemies, bad blood between Transport Workers Union Local 100 and its national parent body spilled over into a Brooklyn courtroom today where a lawyer for the national union condemned the ongoing walkout as unreasonable and unauthorized. Appearing before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Theodore Jones who was considering whether or not to levy massive fines for the walkout, lawyer Peter DiChiara said that TWU national president Michael O'Brien had argued long and hard early this morning to convince the executive board of the 34,000-member local not to go on strike. "President O'Brien did his very best to persuade the local board that striking was not a good idea. He presented a number of arguments," said DiChiara. Under the union's constitution, DiChiara told the judge, the walkout had to be approved by the national president. But O'Brien had refused. "Mr. O'Brien told the local he was not approving the strike. It is unauthorized." The national union went a step further, posting a statement from O'Brien on its web site, and emailing it to members, that the only road to contract victory was "not strike but continued negotiation." By disassociating itself with the illegal walkout, the parent union managed to get itself off the hook for fines for violating Judge Jones' December 13 injunction barring a strike. Lawyers for state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who are charged with enforcing the state's Taylor law, agreed that they had no gripe with the national union, and dropped it from its lawsuit. A few hours later, the judge imposed a $1 million a day fine against the local, and then scheduled another hearing for tomorrow to consider more sanctions against individual leaders of the union as well. But the unusual bad-mouthing of the local union by its national leader is only the latest episode in an ongoing feud between the two organizations that began with the election of Roger Toussaint in 2000. Toussaint won election < http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0047,robbins,20034,5.html> by campaigning against the old guard which was personified by former TWU Local 100 president Sonny Hall who had gone on to head the national union. Toussaint decisively beat a Hall-backed candidate, claiming that the union had squandered both its finances and its clout by playing footsy with transit managers. Once in office, he sliced his own salary by $15,000. His slate of dissidents made similar cuts in their pay. He eliminated an extra pension that local officers had awarded themselves, and also dropped an expensive health plan for officers, putting them on the same plan as members. One year after his election to the leadership of Local 100, the largest unit in the 120,000-member union, Toussaint challenged Hall for the presidency of the national body. He was roundly defeated. But the election opened a window on the kind of bitter divisions that were wracking the union. Occurring at a union convention just a month after the 9-11 attacks, the campaign against Toussaint's candidacy included distribution of flyers that called Toussaint an ally of Osama Bin Laden. In 2002, during the last round of contentious talks < http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0251,robbins,40623,5.html> between the local and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Toussaint and his allies were haunted by the possibility that should they strike, they faced not just the legal sanctions by the state and the city, but the likelihood that Hall would place the local under trusteeship, firing the elected leaders. In the midst of those talks, those suspicions were fueled by on-air comments by Hall's friend ex-Senator Al D'Amato that Hall would be there "to save the day" in the event of a strike. There was no strike in 2002, but the threat of a potential takeover by the national union has continued to haunt the local, and has made Toussaint's tightrope walk even more precarious. The division reflects more than just styles of leadership. The election of Toussaint, a native of Trinidad, represented the culmination of years of racial change among transit workers who were once largely Irish-American. Younger minority workers charged that the old ethnic leadership were more interested in preserving perks for older members than protecting them from the MTA's often draconian disciplinary system. After his election, Toussaint further outraged Hall and his allies by challenging past local fiscal decisions, including a decision by the union to sell its old headquarters on Broadway for $13.5 million. Six weeks later, the site was resold for $29 million. Records dug up by the union < http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0346,robbins,48572,5.html> indicated that the local's former attorney had collected a brokerage fee for the building's resale. Toussaint challenged the deal in court, though Hall said he knew nothing about the deal and that it should be investigated. O'Brien, who earns $216,000 as president of the national union (Toussaint's current wage is $102,000), openly told executive board members last night that he believed that progress was being made at the talks and the union should take the reformulated MTA offer which called for 6 percent annual pension contributions for new employees. Toussaint countered that the offer was a poison pill, one that would burden new members with inferior benefits and which would quickly become a cudgel used against other municipal workers. At the court hearing in Brooklyn, as soon as the judge dismissed the national union from the lawsuit, its lawyers quickly packed their leather legal satchels and bustled out onto Court Street. _______________________________________________________ portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. For answers to frequently asked questions: http://www.portside.org/faq To subscribe, unsubscribe or change settings: http://lists.portside.org/mailman/listinfo/portside To submit material, paste into an email and send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (postings are moderated) For assistance with your account: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To search the portside archive: https://lists.mayfirst.org/search/swish.cgi?list_name=portside
