State authorities threaten to impose contract on New York transit workers

The walkout was the transit workers’ first in 25 years, and came as a rude shock to the political and financial establishment, which had just succeeded in securing a second term for the city’s billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg and had confronted few militant labor struggles in recent years.

The strikers immediately won broad sympathy among working people, reflecting the growing polarization in the city between the super-rich and the millions of workers and sections of the middle class struggling to make ends meet.

Despite this support the transit workers were sent back to work without a contract, however, on the instructions of the officials of Transport Workers Union Local 100, headed by union president Roger Toussaint. The major city unions worked behind the scenes to sabotage the strike and craft together a deal that Toussaint could point to as a face-saving agreement.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority quietly withdrew its demand for major concessions on pensions, including raising the retirement age from 55 to 62 for new hires. In exchange, however, the union wound up agreeing a few days after the return to work to a giveback as bad or worse, forcing the workers for the first time to pay 1.5 percent of their earnings toward their health insurance premiums.

The ruling elite got another jolt, along with Toussaint and the TWU leadership, when rank-and-file transit workers narrowly rejected the proposed settlement. Although the margin of rejection was a mere 7 votes out of more than 22,000 cast the vote reflected a new level of anger and determination. Many workers were enraged by the provocative actions of the MTA and the denunciations of the transit workers as thugs by Bloomberg, other wealthy politicians and the big business media.

Toussaint, following the contract rejection, apparently hoped to rearrange the givebacks in additional negotiations. The MTA bosses, however, decided to teach the workers a lesson for daring to express their opposition. They withdrew their last offer, substituting even more drastic and obviously provocative demands, amid calls in the media for the mass jailing of transit workers if they renewed their strike.

The MTA quickly announced that it had reached an impasse with the union, and demanded that the dispute go to arbitration. The result of this would be, firstly, that the wages and conditions of the transit workers would be imposed by an arbitration panel and rank-and-file workers would have no right to vote on the contract. Secondly, the arbitration panel was legally barred from approving one of the very few improvements included in the rejected contract—the provision calling for repaying about $131 million in pension contributions that the workers had been improperly assessed between 1994 and 2001. This repayment, which was in fact owed to the thousands of workers to whom it applied, had aroused the ire of New York Governor George Pataki and many other big business spokesmen.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/tran-m27.shtml