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Letters to the Editor: Transit Deal Beat Final Offer

Letters to the Editor

Transit Deal Beat Final Offer

To the Editor:

Buried inside Ainsley Stewart's book-length letter last week was the preposterous assertion that the post-strike transit settlement was worth many millions less than the offer on the table before the strike. This is so false and so destructive that it must be answered. To accept it and respond instead to Stewart's convoluted politics would allow this dangerous lie to spread.

As Division Chairman, I urged the members of Car Equipment to approve the post-strike contract for Transport Workers' Union Local 100. The majority of our department voted Yes. The post-strike deal was in fact worth far more than the pre-strike offer. Looking at the two offers sheds light on how a union works, and also on how a man out to destroy his union like Ainsley Stewart works.

Take a look at the calculation of the value of the different offers. Stewart is just parroting the Metropolitan Transportation Authority numbers. Every union member knows that the boss's math adds things up the boss's way. What is the 25/55 pension refund worth? Transit workers will get at least $131 million.

But Stewart doesn't care about what transit workers get. He is using the MTA costs instead of the real value. If Albany goes along, the MTA will only have to pay out about $10 million a year for 20 years. When a transit worker buys a house, he gets to live in the whole house right away even if it takes 30 years to pay off the mortgage. Transit workers will get the whole pension refund right away, even if it takes the MTA 20 years to pay it off.

Stewart turns the $131 million dollar pension refund benefit into a $10 million dollar-a-year benefit. Spoken like a true management man.

Stewart wipes out $100 million that would wind up in our pockets. Then he doesn't deal with the value of everything else that only came onto the table because of the strike. This includes major retiree medical improvements, disability benefits, maternity/paternity pay, assault pay for two years at run pay, increased line-of-duty death benefits. These add-ons were worth millions of dollars more.

Big lies repeated over and over seem to be Stewart's preferred method of argument. He stood before members in Car Equipment and told them that Martin Luther King's birthday is paid for by the Federal Government, not the employer, so it is nothing new. He also told the members that the negotiators traded away a personal day for MLK.

He stated time and again that the 1.5-percent contribution for retiree health benefits becomes 3 percent the second year and 4.5 percent the third year, when the truth is that the 1.5 percent contribution reduces the net value of the 10.9 percent raise by only 1.5 percent. And then he screams at the top of his lungs that anyone who disagrees with him is a tyrant or a puppet.

Is the problem that Stewart can't add, or doesn't know the facts? Sadly, no. His actions illustrate the most cynical and selfish approach to unionism. He furthers the idea that each member or small group can only advance if someone else falls back. It's a dog-eat-dog world in Stewart's union. It's us against them, only inside the union instead of transit workers against the MTA mismanagement.

Stewart's form of unionism would have members ignore givebacks that don't immediately hurt them personally. Members in the Car Equipment Division would ignore it when Traffic Checkers are kicked down the stairs. Members in the bus divisions would ignore it when titles in CED are broadbanded.

This goes against the most basic ABCs of unionism. Thinking union means thinking about what's good for the whole union, and not only what is good for oneself. That is why all of Local 100 stood in 2002 for improvements for Traffic Checkers, and why all of Local 100 stood in 2005 against OPTO. Stewart's logic would carry us back to the days when there were no unions and it was every man for himself, to the detriment of all.

This anti-union way of thinking is particularly striking when laid side-by-side with Stewart's attempt to denigrate the strike, which he was one of the few members of the Local 100 executive board to vote against. He is on the record at the February CED Division meeting and in the shops pushing binding arbitration as "fair, just, reasonable."

His current support for arbitration taken together with his votes against the strike lead me to believe he was for pushing this union into the trap of binding arbitration from the very beginning.

JOHN SIMINO, TWU Local 100 CED Chairman