POLITICS AND THE TRANSIT MESS

Politics and the Transit Mess

In explaining his heated opposition to having the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board vote on the contract that Transport Workers' Union Local 100 initially rejected and then ratified, MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow told the Daily News that doing so would place him and his successors in an untenable position.

"It violates the principles of the collective-bargaining process if you allow union or management to turn something down, hope for a better deal and, when they don't get it, insist on getting the old deal back," Mr. Kalikow said in an April 26 interview, the same day he blocked the MTA board vote.

In theory, what he said was true. There are two complicating factors, however, in how the drama over the transit contract has actually played out. One is that Local 100's leadership never really explored the possibility of a better deal after the pact was rejected in January. The other is that Mr. Kalikow himself, following a Feb. 28 MTA board meeting, when asked about the torpedoed deal, said, "I wish they would accept it."

Note that he was speaking in the present tense, not expressing regret about an opportunity he now believed was past because it would violate the bargaining principle he enunciated to The News last week.

So why the change of heart over the two months since that comment? The most likely explanations are that Mr. Kalikow didn't grasp that principle at the time, that he was being insincere, or that he has since been updated on the political imperatives of Governor Pataki.

Mr. Pataki has seemed determined to make a stand against Local 100 ever since a Wall Street Journal editorial last December urged him to get tough with the union if he wanted to be taken seriously as a contender for the Republican nomination for President in 2008.

Our own view is that officials who need guidance from editorial writers on how to appear tough lack the right stuff to be taken seriously as presidential candidates. But ever since then, the Governor has taken a harder line against Local 100 and its president, Roger Toussaint, than he displayed during the 2002 talks, when the MTA was in considerably tougher financial shape.

The way in which Mr. Pataki's political needs are driving the situation produced a peculiar dynamic last week. He engaged in demagoguery by blaming Mr. Toussaint for the injuries suffered by a firefighter who was hit by a private bus during the three-day transit strike. Mr. Kalikow came close to an emotional meltdown in fighting off attempts to have the MTA board consider the Local 100 contract. And Mr. Toussaint, who having spent the better part of the week behind bars figured to be showing the most stress of the three men, came off cool and collected in interviews he gave while incarcerated at the Bernard B. Kerik Complex.

Mr. Pataki lashed out at Mr. Toussaint on the day that the Local 100 leader marched with a large delegation of supporters over the Brooklyn Bridge to his waiting jail cell. He emphasized the toll the strike had taken, with a particular mention of the injured firefighter, Matthew Long.

It's true that Mr. Long and his parents have castigated Mr. Toussaint as responsible for his condition and are suing the union, claiming that the strike was responsible for the major injuries he suffered. In that regard, they are like any individuals whose lives are severely disrupted and react emotionally by pointing fingers in questionable directions. What they are doing in accusing Mr. Toussaint is human and understandable.

Mr. Pataki, however, should have greater detachment and perspective. The firefighter's injuries are the result of a driver employed by a financial services firm making an illegal left turn. Blame should be cast no further than on the driver and possibly his employer if it didn't make sure he was qualified to do his job.

Mr. Toussaint has no more relation to that incident than does Mr. Pataki, even though there is reasonable suspicion that the MTA would not have taken the course it did in the late-hour transit talks prior to the strike if it hadn't gotten a signal from the Governor to do so. Whatever blame Mr. Toussaint deserves for leading an illegal strike, a not-insignificant share of it rests with the MTA for its bargaining tactics.

The Local 100 leader, during an April 27 interview on New York 1, appeared weary but calmly and eloquently laid out his case, seeming nothing like the caricature of him rendered by the cowboys on the Journal's editorial page and the pundits sailing under the buccaneer flag of Rupert Murdoch. The strike, he told interviewer Dominic Carter, was triggered by the MTA's insistence even in its final offer that Local 100 accept an inferior pension for future members. Mr. Toussaint posed a question to the TV audience that went beyond whether a union should accede to such a demand, asking whether that was what this country should be about: a reduction in the benefits provided to the children of today's workers.

It was a concise, powerful argument that resonated far more than the theatrics of Mr. Pataki and his man at the MTA.

An hour after Mr. Toussaint was released from jail, Mayor Bloomberg decried the decision of other union leaders and elected officials to march with Mr. Toussaint, saying, "What kind of message does that send to our kids?"

What it tells them, Mr. Mayor, is that those who protest what they perceive as an injustice, and believe in their convictions enough to go to jail for them, are worth marching alongside.

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