Wilt Dasney said:
December 21, 2005
Union Leader Says Pension Issue Is Key to Ending Strike
By
SEWELL CHAN and VIKAS BAJAJ
Roger Toussaint, the leader of the transit workers union, said today that his members would return to work only if the Metropolitan Transit Authority took its pension proposal off the table, but he added that the union was ready to resume negotiations right away.
His remarks during a news conference this afternoon came as the city's first transit strike in 25 years stretched into its second day and as the heated verbal jousting between Mr. Toussaint and the governor and mayor intensified, with both sides complaining about the propriety and legality of the other's conduct.
"Provided that the pension issue comes off the table, that would be a basis for us to go back to work," Mr. Toussaint said. He later added: "We are prepared to resume negotiations right away. We wouldn't end the strike as a condition of negotiations."
Soon after he spoke, several government employees' unions including those representing teachers, firefighters and municipal workers backed the transit workers union's demand for the M.T.A. to drop the pension issue from negotiations.
Earlier in the day, Gov.
George E. Pataki and Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg assailed the strike as illegal and said negotiations would not resume until transit workers returned to their jobs.
In another significant development, Justice Theodore T. Jones of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn ordered Mr. Toussaint and two other officials of the Transport Workers Union, Local 100, to appear in his courtroom at 11 a.m. Thursday, saying that he might sentence one or more of them to jail. Today's hearing took place as Mr. Toussaint was meeting with a mediator from the state's Public Employment Relations Board.
The judge's remarks, which appeared to surprise lawyers on both sides of the case, came as the lead attorney for the state argued for a contempt order against the three union officials. The state attorney had been expected to seek fines of $1,000 a day against the union officials under the Taylor Law, which bars strikes by public employees.
Justice Jones also put off until Thursday his ruling on a request by New York City for a temporary restraining order against the transit workers as part of a lawsuit the city filed against the union.
At a news conference this afternoon, Mr. Bloomberg said that jailing union leaders would not help resolve the strike and could make negotiations more difficult and contentious.
"I never thought that putting someone in jail and making them a martyr would help," he said. "I would urge the judge not to put them in a jail and to raise the fines."
Noting that transit workers made more money than teachers, firefighters and police officers, he again hammered the union for an illegal strike "designed to take place at a time of the year where it will hurt the most people."
Mr. Pataki echoed those remarks and said no negotiations would take place until the strike has ended. "I have one message for them - there aren't going to be any talks while you are walking," the governor said in a news conference in Albany.
Richard A. Curreri, the director of conciliation at the Public Employment Relations Board, met with Mr. Toussaint this afternoon, joined by two other professional mediators. Mr. Toussaint said they would meet again after his news conference.
It remained unlikely however, that Mr. Toussaint would agree - if mediation fails - to submit his contract dispute to a three-member panel of arbitrators whose decisions would be binding. Mr. Toussaint has repeatedly ruled out arbitration as an option. Arbitration was used to end the city's last transit strike, an 11-day walkout in April 1980.
"As I said before, our concern and problem with arbitration is that it removes any say-so from transit workers," Mr. Toussaint said this afternoon. "That is precious and important to us."
In arbitration, the union and the M.T.A. would each choose one member of the panel, known as an "impasse panel." The union and the authority would each have the right to strike names from a list of candidates for the third member of the panel.
After the 1980 strike, the transit union supported the state's binding-arbitration clause, but Mr. Toussaint, who was elected in 2000, has said he does not believe arbitration would give his members the best deal. The state's binding arbitration clause applies to only three categories of workers: police officers, firefighters and M.T.A. employees.
Traffic was snarled again today along many of the city's major roadways, including the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, as many commuters tried to get into Manhattan before a 5 a.m. ban on cars with fewer than four people took effect. The prohibition ends at 11 a.m. each day there is a transit strike.
Though getting into Manhattan south of 96th Street seemed a little easier on the strike's second day, things remained hectic at trouble spots like the 96th Street police checkpoint on the Upper West Side where traffic had been backed up for many blocks on Tuesday, and at the Long Island Rail Road station in Jamaica, Queens, where there were long lines of people throughout the day.
To ease congestion, Mr. Bloomberg said today that the city would start letting non-emergency vehicles onto Madison and Fifth Avenues, which since Tuesday had been closed to passenger cars and taxis from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m. Now, only one lane would be reserved for emergency vehicles on each thoroughfare.
The strike began after talks between the union and the transportation authority were halted Monday night after the union rejected the authority's last offer.
The authority had agreed to drop its previous demand to raise the retirement age for a full pension to 62 for new transit employees, up from 55 for current employees, but said it expected all future transit workers to pay 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, up from the current 2 percent.
The offer was rejected, and at 3 a.m., union officials announced the strike. On Tuesday, Mr. Bloomberg decried the walkout as "thuggish," and "selfish" and declared that negotiations - in which the city does not participate.
Mr. Toussaint responded vociferously to those remarks today, saying that "maybe it's very difficult for a billionaire to understand what someone who is making some few tens of thousands of dollars is going through."
"We are not thugs, we aren't selfish, we are not greedy," Mr. Toussaint said. "We are hard working New Yorkers, dignified men and women who have put in decades of service to keep this city moving 24/7."
But Mr. Bloomberg sought to discredit that argument calling it a "fraud" and noting that the strike was most damaging to workers who are far poorer and more vulnerable than Mr. Toussaint and his members.
"They are the people starting up the economic ladder who are basically living day-to-day," Mr. Bloomberg said. "And if they don't get paid, they can't eat. These are not people who are making $50-$60,000 a year.
These are people making $10-$20-$30,000 a year. And they're the ones that are really suffering."
On Tuesday, Justice Jones called the strike illegal and ordered the union members back to work. He also hit the union with a contempt order requiring a $1 million fine for each day it is on strike. And he said he would consider $1,000 daily fines of its leaders, on top of the automatic fines against individual workers.
"This is a very sad day in the history of the labor movement in New York City," the judge said as he issued his contempt order.
The order sets off penalties against striking members of Local 100 of one day's pay, in addition to one day of lost wages for every day they are on strike, as stipulated under the state's Taylor Law. Those fines are separate from any fines that may be levied as part of the injunction being sought by the city.
Mr. Toussaint has called the Taylor Law fine excessive and predicted that, "in the end, I think it will be abated."
On its Web site this morning, Local 100's parent union, the Transport Workers Union of America, reiterated that it did not support the actions of its subsidiary. During Tuesday's hearings, the union said the authority had engaged in "extreme provocation" by demanding changes in the rules governing transit workers' pension benefits. Arthur Z. Schwartz, a lawyer for Local 100, said the Taylor Law stipulated that pension rules for the local's members were not subject to collective bargaining.
"They are putting the union against the wall, demanding something that the law says we cannot be asked to agree to," Mr. Schwartz said.
Mr. Schwartz also argued that Local 100 could not afford to pay the $1 million daily fines imposed by the court, and he introduced tax records for 2004 that showed the union's assets to be about $3.6 million. "This begins the process of crippling the union," he said.
Later Tuesday, the state's Public Employment Relations Board dismissed the union's complaint that the authority had violated state law by negotiating pensions.
The board said the strike "is neither a consequence of the M.T.A.'s bargaining demand regarding a new pension plan, nor within control of the M.T.A." The panel also said that both parties still had more opportunities to resolve the dispute and that any injury to the union because of the strike would be "self-inflicted."
But leaders of other public employees' unions insisted that the transportation authority was acting illegally in insisting that pension changes be part of a settlement.
"If that issue was taken off the bargaining table, there could be an imminent settlement," said
Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers and chairwoman of the Municipal Labor Committee.
Ms. Weingarten said that when the city wanted changes in the pension system, it in the past sat down with many city unions instead of picking one to try to force through changes.
Other union leaders called for changes in the Taylor Law, arguing that it unfairly allows for large penalties against unions and workers while doing little to punish cities when they drag out contract negotiations for years.
