What's at stake in transit strike

NEW YORK —

It's a collision America is seeing more often: Management tries to have workers move back their retirement age and pay more for health care, while workers try to keep their benefits and make up for lost ground on wages.

This labor-management clash forced 7 million commuters in New York Tuesday to resort to bicycling, in-line skating, or just plain hoofing it to work after a 3 a.m. strike shut down the transit system for the first time in 25 years.

Some of the issues here — especially the effort to diminish pension and health-care benefits for future employees — will be watched carefully by other unions. Management teams around the nation will also be watching to see what succeeds and what doesn't.

Stanley Aronowitz, a sociology professor at the City University Graduate Center, said that for at least two decades most New York unions in the public sector have gotten wage increases below the rate of inflation and had to make other concessions.

Two-tier salaries

The main police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, he noted, agreed to a reduced starting salary for new police officers in its recent contract to help fund pay raises for those already on the force.

"The transit union is taking a tremendous amount of responsibility for what the whole New York City labor movement should be doing," said Aronowitz, a labor historian who is active in his own union, the Professional Staff Congress.

The transit workers in New York started by asking for a 24 percent pay raise over three years. Since the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has a $1 billion surplus, the union felt it was entitled to a significant increase.

However, the MTA replied that the surplus did not come from operations but from selling assets. Management's last offer was reportedly for 10 ½ percent over three years. This would be above the 3 percent settlement for each of the next four years that Philadelphia transit workers got after a one-week strike in late October.

3 percent or ... ?

"Three percent per year for three years is considered a good settlement," says Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. "It's now a race to the bottom, to the lowest possible standards," countered state Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, the head of the city's Central Labor Council, which represents more than 1 million workers in 400 union locals in both the public and private sectors.

Should the transit workers get a 3 percent wage increase, that would amount to $3 daily in additional take-home pay, he said. "With gas prices rising and the cost of living rising, that's a cup of mocha grande at Starbucks at the end of the day," McLaughlin said.

The strike comes at a time when the labor movement has suffered serious setbacks at every level. Most recently, auto workers are being asked to take unheard-of cuts in pay and benefits and union membership continues to free-fall in the private sector.

The booming American economy after World War II saw private-sector unions such as steelworkers and auto workers setting the standard in wages and benefits for their counterparts in government.

Other concerns

But that pattern no longer exists, McLaughlin said.

Aside from wages, the major issue facing municipal unions is health-care and retirement costs. In Philadelphia, SEPTA, the Southern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, started negotiations by asking workers to pay 20 percent of their base pay toward the cost of medical premiums.

The workers eventually agreed to pay 1 percent of their base pay. "It will defray 4 percent of SEPTA's medical costs," says Richard Maloney, a spokesman for SEPTA.

In July in San Francisco, a transit strike on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) was averted after the workers agreed to increase their health-care contributions from $25 to $75 a month starting in January. Their contributions will continue to increase 3 percent annually.

"The trend is to pay more. There is not a lot of sympathy from the public," says Bill Adams of Adams, Nash, Haskell & Sheridan, a Cincinnati-based consultant that acknowledges an anti-union bias.

To the unions, "it's a plan to shift the cost to the employees," says Steven Kreisberg, collective bargaining director at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in Washington. "It's an all-out assault on benefits and a shifting of risks to workers who can't afford those risks."

The unions are also opposed to the concept of two-tier labor agreements, which give lower benefits or wages to newly hired workers, as was the case with the New York police. In the transit talks, the MTA is asking that new workers pay a larger amount toward their retirement.

"Two-tier agreements hurt morale and inhibit recruitment for the union," says Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "It's bad for union solidarity."

Unions are worried that any concessions by the transit workers' union will affect other negotiations next year. For example, AFSCME will be negotiating with Mayor Michael Bloomberg in late March on behalf of 120,000 workers.

For its part, New York City officials have the leverage of the Taylor Law, which makes public employee strikes illegal and fines workers two days' pay for each day not worked. In addition, the city has a court order that enacts massive fines on both the union and the workers.

"If the city enacts these fines, the workers will go bankrupt, lose their homes," says Bronfenbrenner.

In the past, says Chaison, the fines have become part of the negotiations. The city has forgiven the penalties on the workers but not the union. But this year, there is an added element: Gov. George Pataki is already positioning himself for a Republican presidential campaign in 2008. "It may give the governor a sense he has to prove something — establish his reputation to not back down," says Chaison. "I am afraid the parties are really digging in. This has become a first-class dispute, a bitter dispute."