Transit Workers Still Aggrieved
2 Years Later, Little Gained

By ARI PAUL

Nearly two years after a transit strike that was as much a rebellion against what they considered an oppressive management as it was a battle to preserve and improve wages and fringe benefits, more than a few members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 say little has changed for the better.

SAME AS THE OLD BOSS: Steve Downs, who heads the Train Operators Division for Transport Workers Union Local 100, says that although Governor Spitzer and his appointee to run the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have sought to establish less-venomous labor-management relations, employees are still subjected to petty and excessive discipline.

Both they and their union paid a steep price for the 60-hour walkout that threatened the holiday shopping season and violated the Taylor Law barring public-employee strikes. Most of them lost six days' pay under the law's 2-for-1 penalty clause, and the union has struggled to make ends meet as the result of the loss of automatic dues-deduction rights six months ago.

Union's Internal Strife

Compounding the problems is bitter infighting that has pitted Local 100 President Roger Toussaint against a growing faction of union dissidents, many of them former allies of his.

And while rank-and-file members' anger at a disciplinary process they believed was petty and excessive became so clear during the walkout that Eliot Spitzer lamented the state of labor-management relations well before he became Governor in January, they say efforts by Mr. Spitzer, Elliot G. Sander - his appointee as head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority - and New York City Transit President Howard H. Roberts to ease conditions have not yet made an impact.

"Mr. Sander and Mr. Roberts are definitely trying, but the problem is bigger than they probably realize," said Sadiyya Hakam, a Station Agent at the Queensboro Plaza station on the N/W and 7 lines.

Dec. 20 will mark the second anniversary of the transit strike. In its aftermath, observers have wondered what good it did for the rank and file.

Not Much to Show

An arbitration panel awarded transit workers essentially the same collective bargaining agreement their leader negotiated - which they narrowly rejected - after the strike, including the requirement that they pay 1.5 percent of their earnings toward their health premiums.

'THEY DON'T LIKE GUYS STANDING UP': Daniel Dermody claims he has faced 'ongoing harassment' after severe on-the-job injuries led him to file a Workers' Compensation claim.

In the year following the strike, opposition within the ranks of Local 100 to Mr. Toussaint swelled, but he was able to win re-election last December with less than 50 percent of the vote after a change in election rules that allowed more candidates on the ballot helped split the opposition vote among four challengers.

In April, two Track Workers - Daniel Boggs and Marvin Franklin - were killed in work accidents, yet even those tragedies could not produce sufficient leverage to push the union-backed Track Safety bill through the State Legislature to establish regulations for NYC Transit. Instead, the union settled for a bill creating a track safety task force that includes the presidents of Local 100 and NYC Transit in addition to the state Transportation Commissioner.

Kinder, Gentler Bosses

Since the strike, the leadership of both the MTA and NYC Transit changed. Mr. Sander became the MTA's Executive Director and CEO on Jan. 1 by appointment of Governor Spitzer, a Democrat whom the union supported. Mr. Roberts, a former ranking transit official here in the mid-1980s who served as a top official at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority before becoming NYC Transit President this year, has tried to work with, rather than against, Local 100.

But for workers like Daniel Dermody, a Track Equipment Maintainer based in Brooklyn, the last two years have made little difference and the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Mr. Dermody fell off a crane that was on a railroad car while on the job, injuring his back and knee in September 2005. Subsequent medical exams revealed a herniated disc in his back and two torn meniscus in his left knee, leaving him partially disabled. NYC Transit accused him of filing a fraudulent Workers' Compensation claim. A judge exonerated him a year later, but he is still owed $8,000 in back-pay, he claimed.

The loss has ruined him financially, he said. He has filed grievances on the matter, but they seem to him to go nowhere. He has sent dozens of letters to officials throughout the MTA and NYC Transit including Mr. Roberts asking them to fix the problem, but to no avail.

"It's on-going harassment by this so-called change of regime," Mr. Dermody said of the delay. "It hasn't changed. The kinder, gentler TA system is not there. Still to this day I have no discipline on my record. I'm a model employee, but they don't like guys standing up for themselves."

Track Worker Elliot Gerran, based at the 59th St. station on the West Side IRT line where Mr. Boggs was killed, said that supervisors were "pounding" safety rules into workers' heads before they went out to the job, but that he believed they were not addressing remaining deficiencies in track-safety regulations.

'Get to the Source'

"They trying to basically say that the deaths of Track Workers Boggs and Franklin are their own fault because of the fact that they violated certain safety rules," he said. "What they're not doing is getting to the source."

He also complained that supervisors continue to encourage workers to cut corners in terms of safety. He especially pointed to work gangs bringing heavy equipment onto passenger trains. Yet, when he brought up his safety concerns on the job, he faced harassment from his supervisors, he claimed.

He wasn't the only worker to complain of management intimidation. A survey conducted by the Global Strategy Group this summer found that more than 30 percent of the Maintenance of Way and Rapid Transit Operations workers who responded did not report trains speeding through work sites that could have resulted in death or injuries because they feared retribution from supervisors. In the same survey, many subway workers complained of dirty conditions as well as high temperatures, rodents and metallic dust in the air. In fact, only 25 percent of survey respondents described their job as very safe.

In a phone interview, Tony Osorio, a Power Distribution Maintainer, said that even though NYC Transit Senior Vice President of Subways Michael A. Lombardi mandated in August that track flagging was required on any track adjacent to one where work was being done if a physical barrier wasn't there to separate workers from oncoming trains, in some cases it wasn't provided.

Given the post-strike environment and the regime change, some transit workers hoped that the new transit leadership would mean less disciplinary action against workers.

15 Days for Asking Why

Cecile Clue, a construction flagger in the union's Rapid Transit Operations Division, claimed she was working near the Grand Ave. station in Queens on the G/R/V lines in April when she was told by her supervisor to work the portable trip. When she asked why, since she had been performing a different duty, she was written up and given a 15-day suspension.

Her union representative, Train Operator Division Chairman Steve Downs, called the situation the kind of excessive and petty disciplinary action that defined the past management.

Mr. Downs gave other examples, including one involving a Train Operator who tried to clock in wearing a windbreaker over her uniform. When her supervisor told her to take it off before she clocked in, she complied but was still written up, he said, for attempting to clock in out of uniform.

Ms. Hakam gave the new regime credit for adding Cleaners on certain subway lines, but added that even though the transit regime has changed, the same supervisors are still overseeing work and imposing what she called petty discipline. In particular, she mentioned that Station Agents have to wear a new uniform as of this month, and that if they did not immediately switch over they received a citation.

'Low People on Pole'

She also said morale among Station Agents was low because they have been unable to get things such as microwaves and better bathroom facilities - in contrast to workers in other departments such as Rapid Transit Operations. It remains common for Station Agents to heat their lunches on their booths' radiators.

"We are at the bottom of the totem pole," she said, alleging that her managers were uneducated and poorly trained for management. "The left hand never knows what the right hand is doing. You have incompetence up the wazoo."

An NYC Transit spokesman did not comment on post-strike working conditions.

Mr. Toussaint, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has pointed to several victories in the last two years. A union-backed bill guaranteeing members and retirees a refund on excess payments to their pension plans in the last decade was signed into law. The union also hailed a plan to add 250 Cleaners to the workforce this year. And the Local 100 leader has also pointed to a collaborative effort with NYC Transit management, which included one in-house joint task force on track safety and a state task force on the same issue.

Some Hurt There, Too

But even those matters have caused some workers and retirees to grumble. Those who retired before Dec. 28, 2005, under the pension refund bill language, are ineligible to get their money back. And while Local 100 Stations Vice President Andreeva Pinder asserted that the new Cleaners would be full-time workers, one Cleaner said that at the same time management was attempting to cut elevator Cleaners in stations in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan through attrition.

One of the biggest remaining irritants cited by transit workers from all departments is that the current contract has them contributing 1.5 percent of their earnings toward their health care. Mr. Toussaint has pointed out that under the same contract, Local 100 extended health coverage to retirees between 55 - when they become eligible for full pensions - and 65, when they qualify for Medicare.

"In the drama of the strike, this important fact tended to get lost in the news coverage," Mr. Toussaint said during a panel discussion at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations last month. "With this factored in, we still did quite handsomely."