TOUSSAINT'S DUES OF DECISION

Razzle Dazzle

Toussaint's Dues of Decision

By RICHARD STEIER

When Roger Toussaint was sentenced April 10 to 10 days in jail, he immediately removed his watch and bracelet. It was premature - Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Theodore Jones stayed the sentence for 30 days - but it seemed a tacit acknowledgment that Mr. Toussaint had been handed something more valuable than the jewelry he was ready to leave behind.

The president of Transport Workers' Union Local 100 had just begun a re-vote on the wage contract his rank and file rejected by seven votes in January, and he is seeking re-election in December. How better to convince his members that the contract he negotiated in the wake of the three-day transit strike was worth ratifying, or that they would never find someone more dedicated to fighting for them, than to be given a trip to the slammer?

Tabloids Lighter on Blood-Lust

Even the editors of the Daily News and the Post, which formed competing hanging parties last December with an editorial entitled "Throw Roger From the Train" and a front-page headline of "Jail 'Em," seemed to understand that getting what they wished for wasn't necessarily happy news for Mr. Toussaint's enemies. Both reacted without their past blood-lust to the Local 100 leader's pending incarceration, even as the Post urged Justice Jones to finish the job by upholding the $3 million in strike penalties he had imposed against the union and rescinding its right to have dues automatically deducted from employee paychecks.

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow MONEY MATTERS: Transport Workers' Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint, leaving the courtroom with Recording Secretary Darlyne Lawson, fought considerably harder to reduce fines against the union and the potential loss of its dues checkoff rights than he did to avoid a 10-day jail sentence that was imposed April 10. Justice Jones's decision April 17 to suspend checkoff rights indefinitely and impose a $2.5-million fine on the union posed a far greater problem for Mr. Toussaint than joining Michael J. Quill among the ranks of Local 100 presidents locked up for telling a judge and the transit system where they could file their cease-and-desist order.

Jail has been a winning career move at Local 100 even when the issue is less serious than a transit strike. Eight years ago, then-President Willie James's narrow re-election victory was overturned by the International TWU because he improperly withheld portions of a union mailing list from his opponents during the first week of voting.

Two weeks later, as his rivals were preparing a rally against him for being too accommodating to management, Mr. James was arrested for disrupting an MTA board meeting to demand that part of a transit surplus be used to raise salaries. He briefly went to jail, and two months later won re-election by nearly the same margin as in the tainted vote where he had a clear campaign advantage.

At a time when his political foes are hoping to capitalize - even if the re-vote goes his way when ballots are tallied April 18, the same day this newspaper is published - on members' unhappiness at the prospect of paying a portion of their health-benefit premiums, Mr. Toussaint can draw solace from the impact Mr. James's jailing - which was for a shorter duration than his and received little media attention - had on voter sentiment in Local 100.

On the morning after Mr. Toussaint received his deferred jail sentence, he responded, "Yes," when asked by Metropolitan Transportation Authority lawyer Neal Abramson whether the strike had been "worth it."

'Struck Because We Had To'

"I stand by the statement I made yesterday before this court," the Local 100 president testified. "We went on strike because we believed we had to do this."

In doing so, however, he placed his union's financial stability at the mercy of Justice Jones, who was empowered under the Taylor Law prohibiting public-employee strikes to impose heavy fines and indefinitely suspend dues checkoff rights. Those punishments, even if they could be spun for political gain by Mr. Toussaint, will severely affect the union's ability to service its 33,700 members. And so, while it was quickly indicated that he would not appeal his jail sentence or his $1,000 fine, he and his attorneys took a far less-passive stance on the financial issues.

One Local 100 lawyer, Terry Meginness, sought to make clear in his own questioning of Mr. Toussaint that the cause for the strike ran deeper than the expiration of the union's old contract and the failure four days later to gain new terms. He elicited testimony from Mr. Toussaint that Local 100 had continued negotiating with three private bus lines for extended periods after contracts expired as evidence that the union did not flex its strike muscles unless provoked.

Mr. Meginness called Local 100's treasurer, Ed Watt, to the stand to testify to the precariousness of the local's financial condition. He stated that the union - which takes in $20 million in dues annually, virtually all of it through dues check-off - has just $542,000 in cash on hand.

Where the Money Goes

Thirty percent of members' dues are forwarded to the International TWU, Mr. Watt testified, 12 percent of it is committed to fixed costs such as office equipment and supplies, and about half of it goes to the payroll costs for staff members, whose duties include representing members in disputes with management. The local also has, he noted, "quite substantial severance payments" to make to former staffers.

Mr. Abramson pointed out discrepancies between the financial disclosure forms the union had filed with the U.S. Department of Labor for 2004 and 2005, trying to establish that the union had under-reported its current assets to strengthen its argument against heavy financial penalties. Mr. Watt responded that this was not fancy book-keeping but rather reflected a change in Federal regulations under which "they have taken all the entities and assets that used to be listed separately and combined them."

He told the courtroom that union leaders had circulated pledge cards seeking a commitment from members to pay dues by hand if the checkoff right was suspended. To illustrate how great the problem could become, he noted that during 1982, after a judge suspended checkoff rights because of the 11-day strike in 1980, only 44 percent of Local 100 members paid their dues by hand. Compounding the problem, Mr. Watt testified, it cost the union an additional 10 percent in expenses to make those collections. The then-head of Local 100, the late John E. Lawe, got the checkoff right restored by arguing that the union was nearly bankrupt due to its revocation.

Mr. Abramson noted that updated technology could relieve some of the burden, asking whether the union had explored online payroll accounts. Mr. Watt responded that having members make payments by credit card would be the most expensive way of collecting dues.

'Drastic Measures Loom'

The loss of dues checkoff, he said, would force the union "to take drastic, drastic measures," including cuts in staff that would wind up reducing services to members.

Left unsaid was that the last thing any chief executive seeking re-election wants to do is reduce services to his constituents. And so Mr. Toussaint was left to hope - vainly, as it turned out - that Justice Jones, having come down harder on him personally than anyone would have expected (the representative from State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's Office who urged a jail term had said it could be worked off through community service) might show some leniency on the monetary sanctions by reducing the original $1-million-per-strike-day fine and leaving the dues checkoff rights alone.

The situation raised anew the question of whether accepting the MTA's pre-strike offer of arbitration, which Mr. Toussaint rejected because it would deny members the right to vote on their own contract, would have really been less acceptable than the spot he's in now.

Mr. Toussaint was willing to figuratively pay to find out. The price his union may wind up literally paying is anything but modest.