As the MTA and TWU continue working toward a new contract, the expectations and demands from both sides are coming into view. We learned yesterday that the TWU plans to tell the MTA and Gov. Cuomo to “take their set of demands and shove it,” but what exactly are those demands?
According to Crain’s New York, the MTA’s demands are in line with what other New York unions have received recently. MTA CEO and Chairman Joe Lhota has proposed a five-year deal with no wage increases in years 1-3 and two percent bumps in years four and five. The MTA also has reportedly requested higher health care contributions from workers, a furlough period, a part-time bus driver position and a lower salary for station cleaners.
On the other hand, the TWU wants constant wage increases, especially if it signs a five-year deal, and seems cool on the thought of productivity gains, according to The Wall Street Journal. The union, says The Journal, wants five years of wage increases tied to the Consumer Price Index. They won’t get any such raises without major productivity gains though.
Ultimately, the issue boils down to money. The MTA doesn’t have money to usher in an increase in labor costs. A wage increase will come at the expense of the number of TWU members on the work rolls and their job descriptions. The union has mentioned slowdowns as they operate without a contract, but for now, the two sides will continue to negotiate.
18 comments
“The union, says The Journal, wants five years of wage increases tied to the Consumer Price Index.”
And not eight year wage gains tied to the Consumer Price Index, including the past three.
Before long, the TWU will be demanding its own inflation index. We had negative inflation during one recent period. Or 5.6% inflation, if you believe this.
What’s the logic behind wanting to pay new station cleaners lower wages? To hire more of them? Most stations are filthy.
Why should union workers have to pay more for healthcare? If we had single payer health insurance like every other industrialized country, we would not be discussing health care costs. So everyone should pay more for health insurance so that the insurance compnaies can make bigger and bigger profits? Screw that. It’s time to take profit out of the equation.
Health care costs won’t come down just because we go single payer. The Pareto Rule applies to health care costs. 1% of all patients spend 30% of all health care dollars. Top 10% of all patients spend 60% of total health care dollars.
Much of the costs result from preventable diseases and horrible followup on care. We spend incredible amounts of money through private insurance, union dues, and government (Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs) on emergency care. Then we drop the ball on followup, especially for chronic conditions. The patient has repeated relapses of condition and the bills become gigantic.
The immediate results are we spend lots of money unproductively, the patients get lower quality of care and life, and the US is less economically competitive. If we don’t fix this, Medicare and Medicaid and pensioner benefits will bankrupt the Federal, State, and Local governments in less than 15 years.
We also don’t do a good job with preventive medicine. I believe in China they pay their physicians if you DON’T become ill. If you do, your doctor will be paid less money.
As much as people complained about the Medicare drug bill, would you rather pay $5 for a bottle of pills that will prevent your visit to the hospital or $50,000 for a weeks stay in ICU that those pills would have prevented.
pay $5 for a bottle of pills that will prevent your visit to the hospital or $50,000 for a weeks stay in ICU that those pills would have prevented. .
Getting people to take pills (and other recommended actions) prescribed is one of the problems related to medical follow up and follow through.
Doctors prescribe patients with weight and diabetes and/or cardiovascular issues exercise, dietary modification and weight loss. However, results of getting people to do that is spotty.
“If we had single payer health insurance like every other industrialized country, we would not be discussing health care costs.”
True, but if we had single payer health care unionized public employees and retirees would receive the same health insurance benefits as the serfs.
And if we all had the same pension system, as in France, unionized public employees would have to work for 40 years rather than 25 (though not at the same job), just like the rest. Instead of having the serfs get just Social Security at 67 if they are lucky.
Union workers aren’t a special class of people who deserve better than the plebes. If everyone deserves healthcare, as you say (and I agree), it doesn’t become the MTA’s responsibility to be the healthcare fairy to its spoiled, under-productive workers.
That said, the main reason healthcare isn’t single payer is because that would save money – too much money, infact. Forget the insurance companies. Private HR departments and government bureaucracies alike would need to put way less effort toward paper pushing if there were single payer care – which is great, if you’re not a paper pusher. You can pretty much count on similar problems with getting rid of the war on drugs. Once you stop giving the state incentives to imprison people, the need for police, prosecutors, and prison guards drops. It’s welfare, of a much more insidious sort.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it.
I have read estimates that if we had a single-payer system, about 250,000 people would lose their jobs- exactly the people you list. However, at the same time, there would around $700 billion a year saved in the country- by private citizens, companies, various governments, etc.
Imagine $700 billion pumped into the economy- those 250,000 people and millions more would very quickly find new jobs.
In any event, Vermont has already passed a Single Payer plan, all it needs is the okay from the Feds for an exemption from the Affordable Care Act. (Something like that.) One state down, 49 to go. That’s how Canada got it. First it was Saskatchewan, and then the other provinces followed when they saw how much cheaper it was.
I dunno, I agree that a number like $700B has opportunity in it,* but I’m not very optimistic about supply side arguments either. Supply side has been orthodoxy for most of 30 years now, with little to show in the way of results.
It could easily be that employers will pocket the difference, and the economy wouldn’t be any the better for it. Hell, it might look worse – on paper. No doubt the current system pads the GDP; it just doesn’t do it in a very helpful or value-added way. OTOH, everyone would be covered – rather than just special classes of people who work for employers that can afford to give them the benefits.
* Transit?
I’d have guessed much more job loss than just 250,000 coming from saving $700 billion in private health care spending (public spending would basically stay the same, but would cover everyone and not just the old and poor, so do not expect a bounty of public money out of it). But anyway:
1. The job loss would be gradual as all job losses coming from efficiency improvements are.
2. The jobs lost are mainly in administrative and clerical jobs. Those can be very easily redirected to other fields, because the reduction in health care costs would lead people to spend money on other industries, which would expand hiring.
3. A secondary source of job loss would be from companies engaging in rent-seeking – e.g. planned obsolescence of medical devices. Most likely the affected firms would just be compelled to spend their energies on more productive inventions.
Well, at $2.8M/employee it’s not a very believable labor cost savings, but I’m not sure that’s what he meant. Figure each medical practice alone is doing several times that amount in work to stay afloat (if they’re staying afloat). Or take insurance firms’ sales account managers, who easily must do business measured in the eight figures at a large firm. Or litigators connected to the industry in all kinds of ways. Technically, these are all value-added services. If the system changed, much of this spending cease to be necessary, or could be re-allocated to preventative care, research, etc..
Then there are the actual paper pushers who don’t do any value-added work, but must exist for the sake of administration or compliance. They’re the ones whose elimination represents an economic savings that is approximately equal to their employment costs.
But hell, maybe I was being overly-cynical. But with down hiring abound anyway, I still have trouble buying the notion that freeing up all this capital is going to stimulate the economy much. Some of it will clearly be reallocated to necessary things that aren’t being done, of course.
But those paper pushing jobs you describe will be eliminated ANYWAY through automation and outsourcing.
Maybe to some extent. But certainly governments are not going to outsource their HR positions for political reasons alone. And either way, the costs for human resource budgets will remain staggering, particularly for small companies that want to “compete” with similarly sized companies overseas.
this is laughable
we should be talking about 4% raises per year, and a “20 and out” pension plan. no one works as hard as we do, and we get no respect
And posts like this might explain why you get no respect.
Many of your riders work harder than you do, even if they haven’t gotten any raises in the past three years and don’t expect to see any in the next three, even if they don’t get pensions.
“Imagine $700 billion pumped into the economy- those 250,000 people and millions more would very quickly find new jobs.”
Not quickly, but you should do more generous unemployment benefits as well.
Its better to pay people in paper pushing jobs not to work than to tolerate some of the huge economic inefficiencies that have cropped up in the U.S., in health care and in other places. But its better in the long run. That is the problem.