The sudden end of the New York transit strike: A preliminary assessment

There is no point in denying the fact that the New York City transit workers have suffered a significant setback. Despite the immense impact of the strike on the city’s economy, which was growing by the hour, the workers have been sent back to work by the Toussaint leadership of Transport Workers Union Local 100 without having realized any of their objectives. The fines imposed under the Taylor Law have not been rescinded.

Local 100, which represents the city’s 34,000 bus and subway workers, ordered its members to take down their picket lines at bus depots and rail yards throughout New York and immediately return to work after an agreement to resume negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) was reached through state mediation.

The workers are going back without a contract, with no resolution of the central issue that provoked the strike—management’s demand to attack pension rights of new employees—and no amnesty for strikers, who still face punishing fines for joining the walkout. In short, nothing has been resolved.

The news that the agreement had been brokered came at 11 a.m. as a New York State Supreme Court judge convened proceedings in a Brooklyn courtroom to rule on the jailing of union officials and the imposition of massive fines against individual strikers. These fines were to begin at $25,000 on the first day, doubling for each day the walkout continued. These astronomical sums were requested by the city as a means of breaking the transit workers, forcing them to lose their homes and driving them into poverty.

State Supreme Court Justice Theodore Jones adjourned the case until January 20, declaring that he did not want the legal proceedings to interfere with negotiations.

Republican Governor George Pataki called a press conference to announce that penalties imposed under the state’s anti-labor Taylor Law, which makes public employee strikes illegal, would be enforced. The law calls for every striker to be docked two days’ pay for every day on strike, meaning a loss of approximately $2,000 for every worker, on top of $1,000 for the unpaid days on the picket line.

More
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/trwu-d23.shtml