The New York Sun, January 24, 2006, Tuesday

Copyright 2006 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC
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The New York Sun

January 24, 2006 Tuesday

SECTION: NEW YORK; Pg. 3

HEADLINE: Toussaint Silent as MTA Prepares To File for Arbitration

BYLINE: By BRADLEY HOPE, Special to the Sun

BODY:
The outspoken leader of the Transport Worker's Union, Roger Toussaint, was unusually quiet yesterday as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority prepared paperwork to request that a state agency arbitrate a contract agreement with the union.
One labor analyst said a vacuum-like silence between the two sides has descended since the union's members voted Friday not to ratify a tentative contract agreement.
Observers said Mr. Toussaint, the Trinidad national who rose from a train car cleaner to president of Local 100, is reeling from what many say is a personal defeat. The union reached the tentative agreement after a three-day transit strike that put the city in a stranglehold in December.
The contract agreement was killed by seven votes, a razor-thin margin considering that more than 22,000 were cast. The illegal strike - the state's Taylor Law prohibits some public employees from going on strike - was the first of its kind in more than 25 years. In a similar deadlock between the MTA and TWU in 1980, transit workers walked off the job for 11 days.
With Mr. Toussaint facing possible jail time and millions of dollars of fines levied against transit workers and the union for violating the Taylor Law, observers have said that not only are negotiations back to square one,but the union may end up with less than it started.
Yesterday, the union's secretary treasurer, Ed Watt, said that a campaign of misinformation by members within Local 100 and "certain media outlets," including the New York Post, led to the contract being voted down.
Asked whether a lack of confidence in the contract agreement equated to a lack of confidence in Mr. Toussaint's leadership, Mr. Watt said, "It's not about Roger Toussaint. It's about the TWU."
A union vice president who opposed the contract agreement, Ainsley Stewart, dismissed Mr. Watt's contention yesterday. Mr. Stewart said he actively campaigned against the contract in conversations with hundreds of union members because he felt it was his duty to tell them the truth about how they would be affected.
"Toussaint set himself up for the fall," he said. "Members are smarter than he thinks. He thinks that by bombarding them with phone calls and fliers he will convince them it's a good contract, but it forced them to look at the contract more closely."
Mr. Stewart and fellow vice presidents John Mooney and Martin Goodman have fought the key union concession made by Mr. Toussaint: having workers pay 1.5% of their health care premiums. Mr. Stewart said the concession would mainly hurt the transit employees who spend more time on the job.
"He betrayed members by forcing on them this 1.5% after taking them on strike for pensions," he said.
The tentative 37-month contract included wage increases of 3%, 4%, and 3.5% over the next three years. The MTA dropped demands that workers begin receiving full retirement at 62 rather than 55, but Mr. Toussaint conceded that workers should pay 1.5% of their health care premiums.
If the Public Employee Relations Board declares an impasse, the two sides may go to binding arbitration, which would give authority to a panel of three arbitrators selected by each side to negotiate the contract. The union has been strongly opposed to arbitration from the beginning of negotiations because it would take away the final vote from the membership.
The chairman of the New York City Transit Committee, Barry Feinstein, said yesterday that the agreements made in the old contract wouldn't carry over into the new negotiations.
"All bets are off," Mr. Feinstein, who is a former head of Local 237 of the Inter national Brotherhood of Teamsters, said.
A professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University, David Lipsky, said he thinks binding arbitration, also known as interest arbitration, was the best option for both sides. The union's membership seems to think otherwise, he said. "It's obvious from the contract rejection that this is a union that is sharply divided," Mr. Lipsky said. "The membership is demanding a more militant approach to reach a contract with the Transit Authority."

With Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki differing on key clauses in the old contract agreement, a political tug of war also could be on the horizon, a teacher of collective bargaining at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, Lee Adler, said.
Mr. Pataki directly controls six seats on the MTA board and Mr. Bloomberg controls four. Together, they control nearly half of the board.
After the preliminary contract agreement became public in December, Mr. Pataki threatened to veto a portion of the deal that would refund more than 20,000 transit workers a total of $110 million that workers gave up in extra contributions to a retirement program from 1994 to 2000. He argued that it amounted to rewarding transit workers who broke the law by going on strike. Mr. Bloomberg is a strong supporter of having transit workers pay a portion of their health care premiums, a trend he has said he hopes other city unions will follow to help the city save millions of dollars.
"They have divergent interests in this rejection of the contract," Mr. Adler said. "This makes it difficult to figure out where the leverage points are going to be" in the new negotiations.
Meanwhile, union leaders are waiting for Mr. Toussaint to schedule an executive board meeting so they can determine what the next step will be. The MTA has a board meeting scheduled for tomorrow.