New York City Transit Workers Strike

Lower Pension Benefits For New Hires Causes Strike

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At 3:05 am on Tuesday, December 20, 2005, Roger Toussaint, the President of the New York Transit Workers Union (TWU) announced that the transit workers who operate the New York City buses and subways, were on strike. This is the first transit strike in New York City in the past 25 years. The last strike lasted 11 days and was in 1980.

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Drudge Report. New York Times: "Shivering, intrepid and occasionally befuddled this morning, New Yorkers faced down the first citywide transit strike in a quarter-century by walking, biking and carpooling through their frigid city as the transit workers and the state agency that employs them remained deadlocked over a new contract."

Toussaint said that the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), which is in charge of the transit system, has a $1 billion surplus (The MTA has a history of hiding their surpluses and keeping different sets of books. See for example). Yet the contract offer the MTA made provides little of a wage increase and is a contractual cutback in health and pension benefits, as new hires would be required to pay more for their benefits.

An important issue that has caused the strike is that the MTA contract offer would pay new hires lower pension benefits. This is a strategy to divide the union and weaken it by creating a two tier system, with one set of workers having better benefits than another set. Also such a system provides a material incentive for management to harass older workers and to try to get rid of them, so as to replace them with lower paid employees. A serious grievance of transit workers is that they are already subjected to unjust disciplinary actions by management.

This is a fight over whether hard work will be rewarded with a decent retirement -- over the erosion or eventual elimination of health benefit coverage for working people.

Roger Toussaint.

The President of the Transport Workers Union of American, the parent union of the TWU, is reported to have said he wasn't in support of the strike and that the union should return to the bargaining table instead of striking. Without a strike, though, workers felt there was not much of a reason for the MTA to change the hardball tactics they were using against the workers. Toussaint explained:

The MTA knew that reducing health and pension standards at the authority would be unacceptable to our union. They knew there was no good economic reason for their hard line on this issue - not with a billion dollar surplus. They went ahead anyway.

Roger Toussaint

Toussaint also noted that the Mayor and the Governor have encouraged the hardline tactics of the MTA rather than supporting a serious effort to settle the contract dispute.

The Union initially asked for an 8% wage increase each year, but reduced that to 6%. But they were committed to maintaining the same pension benefits for new hires as for older workers. A small wage increase of 3%, 4% and 3-1/2% in the 3 years of the contract was offered but as the new hires would have to pay more for their pensions, this would effectively give them an even lower wage than other union workers.

A rally was held on Monday in support of the transit workers. Some of the issues raised by transit workers as problems they have been faced with include the closing of toll booths and the reassignment of workers to cleaning and other chores, the large number of disciplinary actions against workers, and the proposal to eliminate the conductor on trains who is there to monitor what is happening with the train and the passengers. The sentiment among union members in the city is that they are fed up with management insisting on 'givebacks' and continually cutting workers' wages and benefits. Other unions said they would do what they could to support the transit workers.

There is a law called the Taylor Law which prohibits public employees in New York from striking. The MTA has gotten a preliminary injunction from the New York State Supreme Court that will allow it to impose large fines on the union, and fine each worker two days pay for each day they strike. Also Mayor Bloomberg has filed a lawsuit asking that the workers be fined $25,000 each day they strike.

The transit workers feel that if they don't stand up for better working conditions when there is a surplus in the budget, that they will only be agreeing to ever worsening working conditions. The transit workers are in a stronger position than other workers in the city in terms of their ability to fight for better conditions. If they win the strike, that is a support for other workers in their fight for higher wages and better working conditions. If the transit workers agree to accept cutbacks in their benefits and even poorer working conditions, that encourages other employers to lower wages and benefits.

Toussaint said that the transit workers did not want to strike. They had let the deadline for the strike on Thursday pass, and continued to try to negotiate. The response of the MTA, however, was to continue to demand cutbacks from the union. The transit workers have called on all in the city to recognize their importance of the strike and "to rally in solidarity to show that the TWU doesn't stand alone."