Transit Worker Heroes Stand Up for All Workers, Stave
Off Pension
Giveback
But Toussaint Caves In, Gives Up on Healthcare Premiums
by
Andrew Pollack and Marty Goodman
Marty Goodman is a station agent and executive board
member of Transport Workers Union Local 100. This article was written for the
January 2006 issue of the newspaper
Socialist
Action.
Particularly admirable is the fact that their courageous fight was
primarily on behalf of other workers—that is, to protect the pensions of
workers not yet hired in transit, and to stop the bosses from setting a
precedent for other workforces.
Unfortunately, the members’ determination was not matched by their
leadership. The tentative agreement approved Dec. 27 by the Transport Workers
Union Local 100 executive board is a mixed bag that may be a draw financially
but also includes a huge, new concession. For the first time all workers will
have to pay health benefit premiums—a giveback far more costly in dollars than
the pension giveback against which they struck.
Why TWU struck
The issues in dispute before the strike included wages, health care,
discipline, and job combinations. But the one that became central due to
management’s last-minute provocation was pensions. The MTA wanted to create a
lower pension tier for new hires, with higher contributions and a retirement
age raised from 55 to 62.
Then, just hours before the contract expiration at 12:01 Friday, Dec.
16, management dropped the higher retirement age demand but now demanded that
new hires contribute 6% of their wages to pensions (as opposed to the current
2%).
The union rightly said no. At the rally that evening, leaders of other
unions stressed this was a fight for all workers, and TWU Local 100 head Roger
Toussaint made the connection with the fight of autoworkers and others to save
their pensions and health care.
TWU members were at a higher level of combativity than ever before.
Executive board member Marty Goodman said that in the 19 years he has
worked in transit he’s never seen members this angry—angry at the previous
contract’s first-year wage freeze, at the loss of the no-layoff clause and
other givebacks, and at the indignities of working for the MTA.
In a workforce of 33,000 people, there were 15,000 disciplinary actions
last year. When sick, many members are checked on by phone and in person. A
union rep told the Daily News about a
member with cancer and another recovering from a heart operation who faced
harassment and even threats of dismissal. Said the rep: “We’ve been fed up with
the MTA and wanted a strike for years.”
New York Daily News columnist
Errol Louis, in his article, “Workers right to defy MTA,” pointed out that few
riders know that transit workers have to sleep on cots to try to be first in
line to ask for a holiday off, don’t know the fear of driving through tunnels
filled with debris, nor of “rusted, filthy, freezing bathrooms” provided for
female workers.
Management bullying was matched during the strike by the media. The
always-rabid Post called strikers “rats.”
(In 2002 it accused Toussaint of waging “jihad.”) The low point of the everyday
slander from the Daily News came when
it advocated Toussaint’s murder by outraged riders in its editorial, “Throw
Roger from the Train.”
Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg called strikers thugs, cowards, greedy,
morally reprehensible, etc. Toussaint pointed out the hypocrisy of Bloomberg’s
taking part in activities honoring the late Rosa Parks, saying that by defying
the unjust Taylor Law strikers were the ones following in her footsteps. When
asked how they explained to their children that they were breaking the law, a
striker said: “We tell them slavery was legal once too.”
The MTA’s own lawbreaking went unmentioned. The MTA has arbitrarily
imposed new work rules and defied court orders to stop unilateral imposition of
One-Person Train Operation (OPTO). Even its pension demands were violations of
the Taylor Law. (On top of Taylor Law fines, Bloomberg asked a judge to fine
the union $1 million and each worker $25,000 on the first day of a walkout,
both to double every day thereafter.)
But polls showed majority support for the strikers, and honking horns
and cheering by passing drivers was continuous.
Bargaining issues
Before the strike one of the biggest concerns was whether members could
win wage increases large enough to make up for the last contract, which
included no increase in the first year, a highly-taxed $1,000 lump sum payment,
plus 3% raises in the second and third years, lagging behind inflation by about
9.5% over those years.
Goodman and three division heads—Station VP John Mooney, Car Equipment
Division VP Ainsley Stewart, and TA Surface VP Bill Pelletier—demanded that the
union fight for a 10% increase each year, job security, and no givebacks. Only
in the last week of bargaining did Toussaint make his demand of 8% a year,
dropped to under 6% if management agreed to a 25% reduction in disciplinary
actions.
In response, the MTA offered a two-year contract with 3% and 2%, IF the
number of sick days dropped. Management refused to budge on improving bathroom
access, and demanded more job combinations, such as having station agents
perform more duties outside their booth (a station agent was recently beaten
while doing so). The MTA persists in trying to close some booths entirely,
which is dangerous for riders stuck far from an exit in an emergency.
Another MTA demand was for new hires to contribute 3% (versus the
current 2%) of their pay to pensions, that their retirement age be raised to
62, and that they work 30 years versus the current 25 before qualifying for
full pension. The MTA also demanded new workers pay 2% of wages as health
insurance premiums; current workers pay no premiums for the basic plan.
The day before the first strike deadline, management changed its wage
offer to two 3% raises over 27 months and demanded even more concessions on
pensions, health insurance, and productivity.
The same day, MTA head Peter Kalikow demanded that the union agree to
arbitration of the contract, which Toussaint correctly rejected, saying only
the members would decide their fate.
The union hit hard in its publicity on the MTA’s billion-dollar surplus.
As if hoping to provoke the union, the MTA board had voted the week before the
strike to spend most of that surplus on items such as a holiday fare break.
MTA pension hypocrisy
The importance of the pension demand has been shown in recent media
propaganda claiming that cities and states around the country can’t pay for
retirees’ health and pension benefits—stories that ignore management’s role in
underfunding such benefits, and the fact that they were paid for in part by
foregone wage increases.
The Taylor Law banning strikes also states that retirement benefits
cannot be negotiated; only the legislature can approve pension changes.
Contracts can include agreements to jointly petition the legislature for
pension changes, but management can’t force a union to agree to changes in a
contract, much less declare a bargaining impasse over it, as the MTA did.
So the union appealed to the state Pension Employees Retirement Board
(PERB), which responded that the strike was not due to the MTA’s pension
demand, adding that “any injury to the union because of the strike would be
self-inflicted.” This is the same PERB that sent a mediator to work out a deal.
The amount the MTA would have saved by the pension demand was a drop in
the bucket for their finances, about $20 million over the next three years—and
far less than it had spent on recent management pension increases. Some
contrasted this figure to the $300 million lost by the MTA through fraud and
cost overruns, leading Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to say, “The MTA is the
most mismanaged, least competent [authority] out there.”
In its own publications the MTA says that its debt problems, and thus
its supposed future deficits, come from the state’s failure to fund capital
spending. They also admit that increased pension costs come from the plummeting
stock market. Daily News columnist
Juan Gonzalez explains that during the stock market boom, contributions by the
MTA to pension funds plummeted from 21% of payroll to less than 1%!
When you see the MTA or other agencies claiming their pension costs
have “doubled” or “tripled,” that’s just a way of saying that they’ve resumed
building up pension funds from non-stock sources. As CWA Local 1180 head Arthur
Cheliotes said: “If you are stupid enough not to budget for it, you should be
left holding the bag, not the workers.”
But however small the immediate savings, the MTA—like bosses and
officials around the country—has its eye on the far larger long-term gains to
come from slashing or even eliminating secure pensions (thus, for instance, the
recent failed attempt by California Gov. Schwarzenegger to attack state workers’
pensions). Their strategy is to leave the working class holding the bag not
only for their own spending errors but for their declining profits as well.
In fact, after the strike ended the Daily
News quoted a Brooklyn businessman who said Bloomberg had told him he was
urging the MTA to “hold fast” on pension and health benefits to “establish a
precedent.”
Support from city’s workers
It’s not surprising, then, that other city union leaders joined
Toussaint in publicly criticizing the MTA’s pension and health benefit demands.
But neither Toussaint nor the other union leaders were interested in a
fight to the end. The New York Times
quoted NYC Central Labor Council head Brian McLaughlin as saying Toussaint had “worked
feverishly, behind the scenes, to address the concerns of powerful
constituents.” McLaughlin and Toussaint met with representatives of
McLaughlin asked union members to contribute a dollar each to a $1.5
million “solidarity fund”—yet never said where to send donations. During the
strike other unions never organized their members to come to picket lines nor
to protest the threats of Taylor Law fines.
The most militant expression of solidarity came when the
At the executive board meeting before the first strike deadline,
International President Michael O’Brien told the local he opposed the strike
and they would get no support—a statement he then repeated to the press.
Toussaint tried to play this off as simply complying with the law (which
forbids even verbal support for a strike!), but the craven language used makes
that unlikely.
Union officials from the commuter rail parts of MTA—Metro North and
LIRR—pledged support if strikers set up pickets at their worksites. This would
have completely shut the city down, shifting the burden to better-off riders on
those lines, and turning crawling auto traffic into impassable gridlock.
Metro North workers have been without a contract for three years, and
among their main demands are also pension and health benefits. But in the end
no solidarity action was taken by these unions, who work for the same employer.
First deadline passes
Nonetheless, Local 100 members were ready to strike at 12:01 a.m. on
Dec. 16. Bus drivers proved they were ready the week before, refusing to drive
unsafe rigs subjected to surprise inspections by union reps, and blocking a
But the night of the deadline, bargaining went on until 4:30 a.m. Kalikow
didn’t arrive until 11 p.m., another insult. At that point raises of 3, 4 and
3.5% were on the table, as well as the 6% pension contribution by new hires.
The demands to raise the retirement age for new hires to 62 and for them to pay
health premiums had been dropped, and Martin Luther King’s Birthday was added
as a holiday.
Toussaint rejected this and headed to union headquarters. (This
bargaining session, like almost all others, was attended only by Toussaint and
a couple of close advisers, with no elected bargaining committee and not even
the right of executive board members to attend all sessions.)
Toussaint proposed to the executive board postponing the system-wide
strike to 12:01 am Tuesday and instead striking the two private bus lines on
Monday. (These lines won’t be subject to the Taylor Law until finalization of
the MTA takeover.) In 2002 Toussaint pulled a similar maneuver, stopping the
clock at midnight and reaching a mediocre deal 19 hours later; this year he
told a Daily News reporter that he
would not immediately strike at 12:01 a.m. unless there was a “provocation” by
the MTA.
By the time of the 5:30 a.m. meeting, going on strike that morning
would have meant bringing workers to work but leaving them no way home. After
criticizing the impact of missing the deadline, Goodman made a motion to go out
system-wide at 12:01 a.m. Monday, but was ruled out of order.
Management returned the favor Toussaint had done them by announcing
later that morning that the offer then on the table was their best and final
offer.
The strike is on!
The themes of the contract mobilization had been “A deadline is a
deadline,” and “No contract, no work.” The first was violated at the strike’s
beginning, the second at its end.
Transit workers (including also Amalgamated Transit Union Local 726
members in
Then, shortly before noon on Thursday, Dec. 22, PERB mediator Richard
Curreri announced that the union had agreed to return to work. The day before
Toussaint had offered a return to work if pension cutbacks were dropped. The
MTA made no such promise and that was not what ended the strike. Curreri
announced that the MTA had not withdrawn its pension demands but would discuss “whether
adequate savings may be found [instead] in the area of health costs.”
Toussaint not only agreed to a media blackout but would give no details
to the executive board, asking them to “trust my judgment” and to take a “leap
of faith.” When a board member asked if there would be amnesty from fines, the
reply was a flat no.
Goodman, reminding Toussaint of his “No Contract, No Work” slogan,
moved to continue the strike and not go back until amnesty was won, which was
seconded by V.P. John Mooney but ruled out of order.
The vote to return to work was 36 yes, 5 no, and 2 abstentions. John
Mooney called the deal a disgrace and said the strike’s power had been
needlessly abandoned. He told reporters: “No details were provided to the
executive board, no details at all.” Ainsley Stewart said the deal was “more
than a disappointment…We have no knowledge of what led to the strike
termination.”
There was also no agreement with the private bus lines, which
previously was said to be a condition of settling. Board member George
Perlstein said his members “are screaming bloody murder, they’re demanding full
amnesty. We got absolutely nothing.”
Some speculated the strike was ended because repression was stepping
up. The day of the mediated deal, Toussaint and other local officers were
scheduled to appear before a judge to face possible jail time. It’s likely,
though, that Toussaint felt a deal he could sell the members was in sight.
Fellow bureaucrats help craft a deal
At strike’s end Local 100 activist John McCarthy asked a pointed
question: “Where were the leaders of the AFL and Change to Win?” Where indeed?
The New York Times detailed
how they had pressured Toussaint: “[O]ther labor leaders had become more blunt
in counseling Mr. Toussaint, suggesting that his union was in real peril. In an
early afternoon telephone conference call with 40 union leaders...Mr. Toussaint
showed his frustration as he sought a public showing of support.” After the
strike, Local 100 attorney Arthur Schwartz told WBAI that before Toussaint had
joined the conference call the other labor bureaucrats were griping about the
strike.
At a press conference, said the
Times, other union leaders supported Toussaint’s pension demands. “What
they did not do was declare support for the strike. Privately...they had warned
Mr. Toussaint that the fines, public anger and contempt citations from the
strike could be disastrous.”
Significantly, the Times
portrays the deal brokered by the labor fakers as being between Toussaint and
Bloomberg, not the MTA or its master, Gov. Pataki. Some of these unions had
knuckled under to Bloomberg in their own negotiations yet still endorsed him
for re-election. Now they helped him end the strike without a contract.
Toussaint called Bruce Raynor, head of UNITE-HERE, and Mike Fishman,
head of SEIU Local 32BJ, and asked these two Bloomberg supporters to ask the
mayor to pressure Kalikow. Raynor floated the idea of trading pension cuts for
higher health-care contributions, and Bloomberg agreed.
But whatever pressure was exerted dovetailed with Toussaint’s own
desire for a quick end to the strike. This is not to deny the role he played in
crafting consciousness around some issues. The solid front on pensions shows
that if an issue is explained properly the membership will understand and take
action.
But strike preparation was lacking. Calls by dissidents for mass
meetings and mobilizations were ignored. There were no mass rallies until the
night before the first strike deadline. And with the death of the New
Directions (ND) caucus, dissidents had no organized local-wide way to counter
this.
After running as ND presidential candidate and winning in 2000,
Toussaint purged ND members and independents from the union hall. In spring
2001, paid staff packed a caucus meeting to get rid of any ND officers who
disagreed with Toussaint. ND’s popular newspaper Hell on Wheels never appeared again.
The debate over the 2002 contract led to more purges. Management
claimed it had a budget deficit—but in April 2003, the city controller revealed
a secret set of books used to hide a surplus of over $500 million. Local 100
members were infuriated, but Toussaint ignored calls to reopen the contract.
In the 2003 election some former dissidents made a bloc with their old
opponents, the local’s old guard and its International sponsors. Not
surprisingly, most members, whatever their doubts about the 2002 contract,
wouldn’t support such an “opposition,” although the dissatisfaction did lead to
the election of three Toussaint opponents as division vice presidencies (joined
later by two division V.P.s who had become disenchanted with Toussaint).
The deal is revealed
Many members questioned why they went back to work with no contract,
and they had to wait until the Tuesday after the strike’s end to find out any
details. On the way into the executive board meeting to vote on it, VP Mooney
said that with a billion dollar surplus “it would be outrageous for us to even
consider giving back. I’m totally against paying into health benefits, and the
wage increases are too low.”
VP Stewart said, “the numbers don’t add up, there’s no amnesty, and we
have to pay for health? It’s unbelievable.” But the board voted 37 for and 4
against, with one abstention, for the proposed agreement.
In the end, the new-hire pension demand was dropped—in return for
payment for the first time by ALL workers toward health-care premiums. The
amount will be 1.5% of their wages—to start.
The new premiums will save the MTA about $32 million a year—more than
triple the $20 million over three years that the new-hire pension demand would
have supposedly saved, and which was the main strike issue!
What’s more the contribution to premiums could go up. The proposed
contract says: “In future years the 1.5% contribution rate shall be increased
by the extent to which the rate of increase in the cost of health benefits
exceeds general wage increases.” Before voting the members need to be told what
oral discussion was held at the table on how this would be calculated. Employer
health-care costs in general have been going up by far more than the 3 to 4%
wage increases in this contract.
The wage increases remained the same as the last pre-strike offer: 3,
4, and 3.5% raises, but now it’s over 37 months instead of 36. The MTA
estimates this one-month extension will save it over $11 million. And the union
would lose the bargaining power obtained from having the contract expire before
the Christmas holidays.
The proposed contract also seems to include some gains on issues of
discipline, maternity leave, improved health coverage for retirees not yet
eligible for Medicare, fending off some attempts at job combination or
elimination, etc. However, the MTA is notorious for granting contract language
on such issues and then ignoring it, knowing the union won’t enforce it.
Probably the biggest sweetener—and one certain to go over big
considering the fines—was a clause committing the MTA and the union to lobby
Albany to refund some past pension contributions, with a goal of securing such
legislation by the first week of July 2006. The refund would go to about half
the membership who paid 5.3% of their wages over six years to get into the “25
years, 55-years-old and out” pension plan, while others were paying only 2%
(starting in 2000 all members paid only 2%).
The press claims this could affect 16,000 workers and could amount to
as much as $14,000 for some. This is actually money agreed upon in the past but
never paid due to Pataki vetoes.
There’s no guarantee that the state legislature will agree, and even if
they do, Pataki vowed on Dec. 29 to use his veto again, with his spokesperson
saying: “The governor, still fuming over [the] strike, isn’t going to help the
union get a cent.” This may mean the MTA will have to foot the bill, and the
day after Pataki’s announcement the local claimed there was a written side
agreement pledging the MTA would do so.
In any case, the refunds would go to only some workers, and it’s a
one-time payment. It does not make up for the precedent set of all transit
workers paying health premiums for the rest of their lives, nor for the
precedent set for other unions’ negotiations.
It’s hard to know how the members will vote, but both management and
union leadership know that once a strike is called off, building momentum back
up is difficult even in a high-morale strike like this one.
The way the strike played out is reminiscent of the historic TWU
bargaining pattern set by the local’s founder, Mike Quill—knowing beforehand
what management was willing to give, and then using rhetoric, and a strike if
absolutely necessary, to convince members that this amount was the product of a
hard fight and worth settling for.
Quill and successors would meet behind the scenes with their
counterparts in management to work out the final deal but go through a public
charade of disagreement, and then sign just before the midnight contract
expiration. The exceptions to this—the 1966 and 1980 strikes—came only because
Quill and John Lawe respectively
faced dissent, which threatened their hold on their presidencies.
In the same way, Toussaint may have intended a more peaceful resolution
but was caught off guard when the MTA brought in the provocative pension demand
at the last minute, leading, based on the members’ pent-up anger, to the need
to call a strike.
Just before the executive board approval, Newsday said: “According to state budget documents, the MTA in July
set aside funds for a wage and fringe increase at the regional inflation rate
[of] 2.9 percent per year. This could come close to the final rate when the
health insurance concession is taken into account.” Even if Toussaint never
held any pre-strike discussions with management about the final outcome, his
actions—postponing and then calling off the strike, and his surrender on
healthcare—show his willingness to be a team player with management.
What next?
If the members approve the contract, the final message sent by the
strike will be mixed. On the one hand, the union members’ superb efforts will
have yielded only a financial draw and a dangerous precedent. On the other
hand, the strikers can hold their heads high, knowing they did what they could
under the circumstances, and knowing that other workers will take inspiration
from their struggle. And perhaps they will start to discuss what more needs to
be done in these fights.
Most union leaders use such militancy as a bargaining chip with their
employer partners, and so don’t feel the need to forge a strategy of the type
needed to see the fight through to the end—including proper strike preparation,
mobilization of members to reach out to other unions and the public, and a plan
to garner ever stronger supporting action from other unions to meet the bosses’
escalating attacks. In the case of transit, this would have meant starting with
securing commitments for action by other unions against imposition of Taylor
Law fines.
As recent attacks on autoworkers show, the ruling class has raised the
stakes in an attempt to permanently reverse the gains made by workers in the
private sector in the 1930s, and now those made in the public sector since the
1960s. But the transit strikers, and those who drew inspiration from them, have
shown they are willing to fight, and in time will produce a leadership from
within their ranks willing to launch the kind of fight needed in this period.