Razzle Dazzle

Strike's Unsettled Questions

By RICHARD STEIER

Once you cut through the angry rhetoric and the screaming headlines, answering two questions is the key to understanding the three-day transit walkout:

Why did Transport Workers' Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint refuse to go to binding arbitration when doing so would have guaranteed no reduction in pension rights for new union members?

Why did the Metropolitan Transportation Authority continue to press its demands on the pension change, knowing Mr. Toussaint considered it a strike issue, while simultaneously pressing for an arbitration where the matter would have been summarily dismissed?

Public-Relations Value

There's an inherent contradiction in the MTA's dual positions. One possible explanation is that MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow and chief negotiator Gary Dellaverson expected Mr. Toussaint to balk at arbitration and were urging it for public-relations purposes, so that they would seem more flexible than the Local 100 leader.

If that was their aim, they succeeded in the battle for the hearts and minds of most of the editorial writers and columnists at the city's daily papers, so much so that the MTA got almost none of the blame for a strike that it basically dared Mr. Toussaint to instigate.

ACCOUNTABILITY CUTS BOTH WAYS: Transport Workers' Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint (left) shouldered most of the blame for the strike in a media that took its cue from elected officials. In contrast, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Peter Kalikow was given a pass even though the walkout was triggered by his refusal to rule out a pension change that couldn't have been implemented if Mr. Toussaint accepted his offer of binding arbitration.

When Mayor Bloomberg was asked Dec. 21 whether the MTA deserved some responsibility for the walkout after holding to a position on pension reduction that it knew would be dismissed as a nonmandatory subject if the dispute went to arbitration, he responded, "I might have done that differently, but their strategy is up to them."

It was a strategy, however, that forced Mr. Toussaint to either blink on his insistence that a contract be brought to conclusion and that no pension change be part of it, or muster his troops and go to war. Despite the claim by the MTA - eagerly swallowed by much of the media - that its revised pension demand was a softening of the blow to future employees, the change merely meant employees would pay significantly more now to collect faster later. One fiscal expert said that on first blush it looked like six of one, a half-dozen of the other.

While the MTA scrapped the earlier proposal to require that new workers need to reach age 62 to collect, it bumped the 3-percent contribution envisioned under that plan up to 6 percent for employees to qualify by age 55. The seven-year gain in eligibility for future workers was offset, it appeared, by the 3-percent increase in proposed contributions.

One veteran union negotiator, who spoke on condition that he not be identified, said of the initial, age-62 pension proposal, "That's something no union would voluntarily accept."

The revised plan was more palatable, he said, because he believed the MTA might have negotiated the contribution rate downward as much as two or three points. At 3 percent, he said, it would be just a point higher than what current employees contribute.

An Absolutist on Unborn

But when it comes to what he and other labor leaders refer to as "the unborn," Mr. Toussaint, to carry the metaphor a bit further, doesn't believe you can be just a little pregnant. Even a point or two above the current level would represent a regression in his mind.

Deriding this, as some pundits and Mayor Bloomberg have done, as outdated thinking in an era when private employers are slashing or eliminating pension benefits and other city unions are saddling their unborn with reduced pay levels, is like trying to convince someone that his religion makes no sense in the modern world. The essence of being principled is holding on to your beliefs regardless of whether they are popular or even practical.

Local 100's position in the public-employee cosmos also was a factor for all interested parties, including the Mayor and Governor Pataki. The ghost of Michael J. Quill looms just as large as the Curse of the Bambino: his willingness to take his members out 40 years ago and paralyze the city in the chill of winter has informed every round of bargaining by Local 100 since, particularly after the union regained a December contract expiration date a decade ago.

That aura gives added muscle to Mr. Toussaint's own militancy, and it helps explain his anger over the pension demand. The Bloomberg administration attempted to win agreement on a lesser pension tier during the last round of bargaining with District Council 37 and got nowhere, even though it succeeded in gaining a concessionary contract deal that forced most other city unions to reduce wages and benefits for future employees.

In that context, expecting Mr. Toussaint to cave where DC 37 hadn't was a test of his manhood. The symbolic as well as substantive need to send a message in return could be seen by the number of prominent public-employee union leaders who rallied to his side in the final days of negotiations before the strike.

Governor Pataki appeared to view the battle the same way, particularly after the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial suggesting that if he wanted to prove he was the kind of Republican presidential contender the party faithful could rally around, beating the union into submission was the place to start.

Kalikow Stiffened

Three years ago, indications were that Mr. Kalikow improved the MTA's wage offer to Mr. Toussaint after getting a signal from the Governor; this time around the MTA Chairman seemed as resolute as his flinty negotiator, Mr. Dellaverson. And once the union walked, Mr. Pataki was the one who publicly insisted that negotiations not resume until the strike ended.

Mr. Bloomberg loosed his sense of outrage at irresponsible behavior, something he does infrequently and generally reserves for union transgressors rather than Mr. Pataki or President Bush when they engage in questionable actions that harm the city.

His press releases referred repeatedly to the "selfish and illegal strike," as if to preempt any claim by Local 100 that it was fighting for some greater good.

Less than 12 hours after the walkout began, Mr. Bloomberg turned up the rhetorical volume a couple of notches by declaring, "The leadership of the TWU has thuggishly turned their backs on New York City, and disgraced the noble concept of public service."

Mr. Toussaint bristled with anger the following day when he said at a press conference, "The thugs are not on this side of the podium."

While there was no reason to buy the arsenic being peddled by career racialists like Charles Barron and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry that the Mayor's remark was an ethnic slap at a mostly minority work force, "thuggishly" was the wrong word to use. Most people associate such references in labor conflicts with physical violence and intimidation.

When this was mentioned to two of Mr. Bloomberg's aides, one of them laughed off the concept that vandalism had to be part of the package to merit such a description, and the other one retorted that the line had gone over well with the public. It was as if he needed a reminder of Mr. Bloomberg's own mantra that he looked to do what was right rather than what might appeal to the crowd.

Damned by D'Amato

Adding further fuel to the fire was a comment by former Sen. Al D'Amato, a close friend of Mr. Kalikow's who played a prime role in Mr. Pataki's first election victory and remains a confidant of the Governor's, on New York 1 the first night of the strike. Mr. D'Amato opined that by leading the walkout, Mr. Toussaint had surrendered his status as a "labor leader."

Mr. Toussaint had more reason than the ex-Senator's ties to two of his antagonists in the negotiation to be furious with the remark. The MTA, after all, was pushing so hard for the pension change not for the relatively small savings it would realize over the next three years but for the several hundred million it could save 20 years from now.

The surprise surplus the MTA unveiled a month after the 2002 contract agreement, and the subsequent declaration by State Comptroller Alan Hevesi that for years it had maintained two sets of books, have created major credibility problems for the agency in its dealings with the union.

A Symbolic Taunt

The decision to spend part of the billion-dollar surplus on holiday fare breaks for riders was the equivalent of taunting union members who saw money that could have helped fund their contract being blown on a short-term promotion. To many of them, it represented one more indignity in an agency which has been known to suspend a Bus Operator for a day on the unsubstantiated claim of a single passenger that the driver appeared to be asleep.

The MTA's casual attitude about spending sizable sums so long as it's not on union contracts was particularly evident in a boondoggle that had Mr. D'Amato's fingerprints all over it: the leasing of a building at 2 Broadway that has become a monument to cost overruns.

A few years ago, the MTA rented the building under a 49-year deal with Zar Realty Management, which had paid $20 million for the property and was expected to spend $55 million on renovations. The MTA under the terms of the lease was supposed to pay $135 million.

Mel Levy, who was then the president of the New York City Transit Chapter of the Civil Service Technical Guild, strongly questioned the deal at the time, saying it would have been cheaper and more logical for the MTA to purchase the building outright.

Al's $500G Phone Call

Mr. D'Amato, who became a lobbyist after losing his 1998 re-election race against Chuck Schumer, was retained by Zar to resolve a dispute with the MTA that was holding up a $230 million bank loan to the firm's owner, Tamir Sapir. He was given $100,000 as a retainer, with a promise of another $400,000 if the deal went through.

A single phone call by Mr. D'Amato to then-MTA Chairman Virgil Conway - a Pataki appointee - resolved the problem, at least from Mr. Sapir's standpoint, as he got his bank loan and happily paid Mr. D'Amato's bonus.

The MTA's troubles with the building were just beginning, however. Its costs for 2 Broadway have since been reported to have reached $480 million because of massive overruns, and Mr. Levy claims the true tab is even higher and still climbing. That extra money could have wiped out the need for pension savings.

"Don't believe that hasn't come up at the table," one Local 100 official said last week. And so Mr. Toussaint probably regarded Mr. D'Amato's insult as the snarl of a well-paid attack dog.

It was this sort of posturing by past and present Republican officials, rather than the fulminations by the media, that created the atmosphere encountered by three state mediators when they were summoned to the scene of the negotiations at the Grand Hyatt Hotel less than 24 hours after the strike began.

One of them, Al Viani, said "there was a certain level of distrust" on Mr. Toussaint's part because of the remarks of "some of the politicians. There were some real rough spots, but as we went along and dealt with them, this distrust was interfering a lot less with getting down to the business at hand."

MTA's Position

That led to the agreement by Local 100 to have its members return to work by the afternoon of Dec. 22, with bargaining to continue even though the MTA reserved the right to push the pension change. The chair of the mediation panel, Richard Curreri, said that the agency had impressed upon him the need for some form of long-term labor savings, but had also expressed a willingness to scrap the pension proposal if the union would agree to changes in the health-benefits program that might have the same impact.

It wasn't immediately clear what Mr. Toussaint had gained by this agreement, other than a graceful way to pull back from a strike that he clearly realized was causing collateral damage for small-business owners and working people who in some cases found commuting either impossible or unaffordable. The media portrayal of the conflict had dumped virtually all the responsibility for those problems in his lap, and his treatment figured to get worse - if it really was possible to top back-to-back front-page headlines of "You Rats" and "Jail 'Em" in the Post - if union members were still striking over Christmas weekend.

"It sure looks like Roger blinked," one management official said.

Which brings us back to the question posed at the beginning of the column: why would Mr. Toussaint be so resistant to arbitration in these circumstances?

The Local 100 leader's response last week was that having a third party make a contract award deprived his members of the right to vote on their wages and working conditions. This, though, did not seem like the motherhood trade-union principle that protecting the unborn is: surely taking the right to ratify away from his members was less of a deprivation than they might face for violating the Taylor Law.

A Way to Spur Deal

One Local 100 official responded that Mr. Toussaint's real reason was rooted in practicality.

Except for the occasion immediately after the 1980 strike when the union would have risked extinction if it walked out over its 1982 contract dispute, Local 100 has never resorted to arbitration. If it had agreed to do so this year, that official said, "You'd wind up in arbitration every time. We're the only public-employee union that gets a contract at the deadline."

The importance of settling on time can be seen in the disastrous DC 37 contract deal in April 2004. At the time, that union's members were working under a deal that had expired July 1, 2002 and hadn't had a raise in nearly three years. The average salary for DC 37 members at the time was $29,000, a wage that offered little cushion against inflation.

The anxieties of her members, and her own internal political problems, led DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts to publicly declare in the spring of 2004 that she was "desperate" for a contract. That was how she came to settle for a deal that included givebacks affecting future members and did not even match in wage gains the giveback-free contract reached a month earlier by DC 37's state counterpart, the Civil Service Employees' Association.

No such desperation overcame Mr. Toussaint when he took his members out last week.

Even so, it's not clear that agreeing to arbitration rather than walking off the job would have forfeited the union's ability to use a strike as leverage in the future, any more than the 1982 arbitration did. And the next contract negotiation is likely to be with an agency overseen by a Democratic Governor. The change at the very least would remove concerns that the chief executive would be looking to make his bones for national office by playing to a large anti-union wing of his party.

The strike could have and probably should have been avoided. But just as a contract agreement depends on the cooperation of both sides, last week's walkout reflected a mutual failure. Those who blame Mr. Toussaint for pulling the trigger without acknowledging the MTA's role in challenging him to make its day are being disingenuous.