Transit Labor

As the MTA continues to look for ways to cut costs, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 is continuing to take jabs at MTA CEO and Chairman Jay Walder. As The Daily News’ Helen Kennedy reports today, the union will be distributing the above postcard later this week to mock for Walder for daring to go on vacation to his house in France after eliminating a few thousand jobs.

The postcard features a message on the back: “Heard the weather’s real hot and humid back in New York and that you’re packed in like sardines on the trains and buses because of all the service cuts. I’ll be back in plenty of time to push through the fare hikes.”

Union leaders responsible for this card, including TWU President John Samuelsen who, like Walder, makes a six-figure salary, want to whip up rider anger at Walder over the cuts. “Jay Walder is completely out of touch with average, everyday working New Yorkers who don’t have country houses – or the unmitigated gall to take a three-week vacation in the south of France in the midst of drastic cuts,” he said to Kennedy. “I personally believe that transit riders are beginning to wake up and smell the coffee and realize that their mass transit has been hijacked by millionaires.” Pick your poison: hijacked by millionaires or hijacked by labor.

I understand what the TWU is hoping to do with this card. They want to somehow suggest that Walder’s salary is the root of all evil and that the house he and his family purchased with the money he made while at Transport for London and McKinsey should preclude him from running a transit system. The truth is far more uncomfortable for labor.

Right now, John Samuelsen has failed his constituents. While trying to impinge on the credibility of the MTA chiefs, he has presided over a period of nearly unprecedented job loss for TWU members. Instead of taking the political risky but necessary step of working with transit advocates or with the MTA to secure alternate means of funding for station agents and constant service levels, he has gone for the public ploy of protecting the TWU’s members, and that ploy isn’t getting anyone anywhere.

For now, this battle over nothing will continue to take up headlines and time. It will lead to animosity between parties that should be working together against a state hellbent on transit policies that don’t adhere to common sense. It is, in a word, counterproductive.

I want to support a sensible labor union. I don’t want to see jobs eliminated and the subways less secure or clean. I want to see the TWU use its might for the good of public transit in New York City. That hasn’t happened yet as the TWU leadership seeks to secure its position atop a union still reeling from the 2005 strike. No matter how this battle plays out, the riding public will continue to lose until the two sides can reach a ceasefire and fight together for the better of everyone.

Later this evening, MTA Board members and angry union members will square off in a pair of public hearings. Despite voting to cut the station agents in early 2010 and holding hearings on a nearly identical proposal a year ago, the MTA had to host these public open houses to placate a Manhattan Supreme Court judge who found that the MTA’s dismissals this year for plans approved last year violated the law. What the hearings tonight will accomplish is very little.

We’ve been down this path before with public hearings, and every time the MTA opens itself up to hearing from its constituents, politicians and interest groups grab the microphones. Instead of allowing people to speak in the order in which they’ve signed up, our elected officials often jump to the front of the line to get in their shots and go home. That’s what happened in March when the authority heard from the public on the planned slate of service cuts.

This week’s hearings should be even worse. The TWU organizers have engaged in a blitz via Twitter, Facebook, phone-banking and old fashioned union round-ups to, as one release put it, “pack these hearings and deliver a strong message” to the MTA Board members. At locations in Manhattan and Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, MTA employees will come out in force to yell at those who sign their checks.

In all likelihood, tempers will flare as they did in March. When job cuts are on the line, labor leaders tend to be ruthless, and anyone who dares speak out in favor of the plan to shutter token booths and fire station agents will be, at the very least, mocked and probably threatened by the union supporters in the crowd. With jobs on the line, after all, the TWU members are very motivated to attend these hearings and make themselves known.

On the one hand, I can’t hold the TWU’s actions against them. As a labor union, those in charge have to protect their jobs, and right now, the TWU is fighting against an MTA Board that has already made up its mind in a day and age very hostile to labor interests. Many New Yorkers have come to see station agents as superfluous, and while these workers put themselves in harm’s way on a daily basis, the media coverage often focuses around those who don’t do their jobs well rather than those who do.

But on the other hand, I still have to wonder about the union’s lackluster support for the MTA in Albany and at home. Instead of talking about the way pension obligations represent nine percent of the MTA’s annual expenditures, former union members focus on debt service which accounts for 16 percent of the MTA’s spending pie. Do two spending wrongs make an economic right?

The TWU has never embraced congestion pricing, claiming to me once via Twitter that it was “too complicated” to get into the debate through that media and voicing concerns about the impact a charge would have on the middle class. This argument completely ignores the fact that middle class New Yorkers don’t spend their days driving to and from Manhattan’s Central Business District and would, in fact, benefit more from a more fully funded subway system. Such are the way of unions today.

So tonight we get a political governmental farce. On the stage will be MTA Board members who are there because a judge told them to be. They’ll hear the crowd; they’ll vote to close the booths and fire the station agents. At the microphone, we’ll see an increasingly belligerent audience using the time to bash the MTA for all of its many short-comings. No matter who wins, those paying the fare and riding the subways will lose.

With TWU workers set to enjoy a three-percent raise next year despite a $400 million MTA budget gap that led to this week’s service cuts, Albany is set to handcuff the MTA’s labor practices. A bill that passed the Senate yesterday and now awaits Assembly approval will bar the authority from closing station booths, fire agents and eliminating on-board personnel numbers. It would, says, the MTA rollback $80 million in cost savings, and the hypocrisy from Albany on this measure runs deep.

As the authority has tried to close a budget gap of approximately $400 million, it has tried to work with the TWU leadership to find savings. After all, a fiscally healthy MTA is in the best interests of its employees, and the upcoming mandatory raises are more than anyone should expect while working for a company that’s bleeding money. Last week, the authority floated a proposal that would have saved it money and the union jobs in exchange for a lesser benefits package for new workers. The union counterproposed another plan that would have allowed for $35 million in savings.

In each case, a provision calling for no layoffs proved to be a sticking. The MTA won’t grant it, and the TWU won’t accept benefits or salary reduction measures without one. Meanwhile, the union is working behind the scenes in Albany to get legislation passed that would hamstring the MTA’s labor relations for at least the next three years.

The bill the State Senate passed is S03772, and it is sponsored by Martin Dilan, chair of the transportation committee, with Ruben Diaz, Ruth Hassell-Thompson and Diane Savino as co-sponsors. Ostensibly, the bill is entitled the Transit Authority Passenger Security and Safety Act, but with the TWU openly touting its passage, it’s clear that this is a piece of special interest legislation wrapped in the en vogue language of safety and security.

With a justification in the enclosing memo citing “threat of terrorist attacks,” the act requires the MTA to keep at least one train operator and one conductor on board each train and cannot close token booths until at least July 1, 2013. During the next three years, a TA Transit Safety Advisory panel is supposed to “study, monitor and make recommendations with respect to the public safety from terrorist threats and criminal mischief” at stations. “I really don’t want to micromanage the MTA, but sometimes public safety trumps everything,” Senator Dilan said to the Daily News this morning.

Right now, the bill is awaiting action in the Assembly, but with numerous sponsors, it should see a floor vote at some point. As the legislation ripens, the MTA is less than pleased. In a response memo, the MTA slammed the bill and Dilan’s line of thinking. “Decisions about transit operations are best made as the result of thorough managerial analysis and review, not mandated by statute or advisory panels,” the authority said.

In a word, this bill is a travesty. The TWU can’t seem to come to an agreement with the MTA over the layoffs, and so it’s using its powerful political position to exploit Albany’s dislike of the MTA. If this bill passes, the state assembly will have, in the span of eight months, stolen $143 million from the MTA and forced it to implement unnecessary and costly business practices without funding them. Trains don’t need two operators, and under this regime, the MTA wouldn’t be able to implement cost-saving OPTO plans. Additionally, every single station booth doesn’t need to be staffed. But that doesn’t stop Albany from acting. Barring layoffs until 2013 would ensure that we the riding public have to pay more for less, and you can thank our elected representatives for that.