In December the
New York City Transit Strike was a major inconvenience. It hurt retailers during the height of the Christmas shopping season and made life very hard on commuters for three days. One thing it did not do was point out the
unfairness of the Taylor Law.
Last week a judge sentenced Roger Toussaint from Local 100 of Transportation Workers Union to ten days in jail!
This week a state judge hit the union with fines of $2.5 million and then in a blatant attempt to bankrupt the union, removed the union's right to automatically collect dues from the workers for at least ninety days.
To add salt to the wound, the most ridiculous bureaucracy in this nation, the MTA has announced that they will not honor the contract that the union just ratified, calling it an "empty gesture" and demanding binding arbitration.
Under the Taylor Law and the union busting atmosphere in America today, why should the MTA make peace?
For a less biased story of the transit strike than the press gave, please see below the fold.
It is a bit odd that in this free market economy where no member of the MTA went to jail for lying in the previous year about running a deficit but Roger Toussaint gets ten days in jail for causing a major inconvenience. The reason the MTA claimed a deficit was to push through a fare hike when the truth of the matter was that the MTA has a one billion dollar surplus.
It would seem like a mitigating circumstance in Roger Toussaint's favor. The fact that the union went into negotiations after reading the previous years headlines, armed with the knowledge that they were sitting across the collective bargaining table from a bunch of lying, cheating stealing executives who didn't deserve the public trust. Can the union be blamed for wanting pay raises and the maintenance of their health care benefits when they knew about the billion dollar surplus and the fare hike caused by the MTA's lies?
Another mitigating circumstance was the fact that management was trying to force the workers into signing the contract with an amendment that was in violation of the Taylor Law. The MTA had insisted on requiring negotiation of pensions as a condition of negotiating of a new contract although the Taylor Law prohibits this. This insistence by management was not removed by management until the strike deadline had already passed.
At the time the press had long forgotten the MTA's embezzlement. There was no coverage of management's attempt to break the same Taylor Law that is now being used to break the union. The New York commuter was given stories about outrageous demands and counteroffers by the union. There were news stories about the union insisting on retirement at age 50 but almost nothing on the misdeeds of the MTA or the fact that management was trying to raise the retirement age.
The MTA called for the retirement age to be increased seven years (from 55 to 62) and for the amounts received at retirement to be reduced dramatically through the creation of a new "tier" (Tier V) of workers.
Collective bargaining sessions ended in a stalemate early Dec. 16, when the union walked away from what the MTA called its "final offer" but in good faith the TWU extended the deadline to December 20th. As they were unable to reach an agreement, and unwilling to accept the eleventh hour offer of a 3.5% per year raise and no change in the retirement age, with the caveat that new transit workers pay 6% of their wages into the pension fund, a strike was declared on December 20, 2005.
After three days, outside of very bad press, it looked like a success story for the union; .
The strike ended with an improved contract. It succeeded in stopping a two-tier pension system that hurt new workers. But for the MTA corporate/banking fraternity, there are no contracts, no rules they can't break to serve their class interests.
All of the local papers vilified the Union action but this was only buried in the fine print or left out entirely;
New York Gov. George Pataki then pulled a double-cross, refusing to honor the promise to repay $131.7 million in pension overpayments to the workers. When--partly influenced by Pataki's betrayal--workers rejected the contract by only seven votes out of 22,461, the MTA bosses tried to take advantage of the situation to reopen the contract talks and insist on binding arbitration, something usually damaging to union interests.
And now the MTA claims that because of the union's delay there is no reason to accept the contract that the union has finally ratified. No surprise there with all of the press on their side and any response of the workers certainly to be buried there may be a chance to dish out a little more pain.
With a contract in hand that both sides negotiated the M.T.A. is claiming the proposed contract has been dead since the union first voted it down and it sent the talks to binding arbitration. The process will probably drag on for months, risking and a backlash from employees and posing a treat to riders' confidence. But there is good chances it will work in managements favor so why close old wounds.
Now four months after the strike and one day after the MTA took back the upper hand the local news is silent. The effort to sway New Yorkers is no longer needed. The damage is already done.
The Media never explained the position these public unions are in with the Taylor Law tying their hands. The law was put into effect in 1967, the year after the big 1966 strike. It is a very unfair law that gives the MTA the power to say "Take it or leave it!" By leaving it the union is now being torn apart by the courts.
It is no surprise that the total screwing the Transportation Workers Union is being covered by the New York Press as though the bad guys are the workers.Newspaper owners have to deal with their own unions and don't take kindly to the protection that unions afford their workers. Besides, ever since Ronald Reagan screwed the air traffic controllers, it has been open season for unionized labor.
But even when the effort was in full swing, not everyone was fooled;
THE MEDIA'S bitter denunciation of the strike and obsession with interviewing disgruntled commuters was in contrast to the situation at any picket line, where shows of support buoyed the spirits of strikers. More than one New York City teacher commented that they should have struck, too, rather than accept a contract filled with further concessions late last year.
Both the misinformation out of the press and the bad behavior out of the elected officials greatly divided this city.
The strike changed the political landscape in New York City, polarizing the public and giving previously invisible workers a national platform. Every morning, as commuters were planning their alternate route, they were also forced to consider the demands of transit workers--and, inevitably, take a side.
The city's political elite certainly took one, and so did almost all of the New York and national media. Former Mayor Ed Koch called for the city to "crush the union," the top-selling New York Daily News newspaper called strikers "foolish," and current Mayor Michael Bloomberg topped them all when he called TWU members "greedy thugs."
How did the workers feel about New York's most famous billionaire, Mayor Michael Bloomberg's use of epithets like "thugs" and "greedy" to characterize the mostly Black union leadership?
"This guy's a billionaire, and he says we're overpaid," one picketer in Brooklyn responded. "They're trying to work us to death. Then to add insult to injury, he calls us thugs. I get up every morning to go to work in nasty tunnels with rats, breathing in toxic fumes. And they say I'm a thug."
And the MTA's dirty little secret. Why didn't the press ever print this one?
In fact, one of the MTA's dirty secrets is the awful conditions employees work under. The average transit worker dies two to three years after retirement at age 55, so the MTA's original demand that the retirement age be raised to 62 would literally mean working TWU members to death.
Roger Toussaint reputation hasn't improved much since the strike;
In Toussaint's current plight, he is taking shots from both sides of the city's political divide--from those who think December's three-day transit strike was an outrageous assault on a helpless citizenry, as well as from those who think he stood up to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority bullies, giving organized labor its strongest shot in the arm in a generation.
The New York State AFL-CIO and the New York Central Labor Council have called a rally to support Toussaint and the TWU at Brooklyn Borough Hall at 4 p.m. on April 24.
If you can make it, please do. If you have friends in New York, please tell them.
As we've seen from the recent Immigrant Rallies, demonstrations can make a difference.
What is needed is for the spirit of the immigrant workers to spread to the entire workforce of New York City and bring out a strong show of support. What the MTA-Pataki-Bloomberg gang need is a big surprise from labor.