TWU Goes Short on Day Care

TWU Goes Short on Day Care

Slightly more than five years ago, Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint said a new contract should be judged not by its modest wage increases but by improvements in key benefit areas, including funding for day-care reimbursement.

Such provisions, he told this newspaper, "will give our members a sense of more connectiveness to the job ... where people buy into their responsibility to deliver services because they've been shown they're appreciated."

Last week, however, several Local 100 members said the union had turned them down for reimbursement for day-care expenses, for a variety of questionable reasons.

One of them told this newspaper's Ari Paul that he was informed last September that he lacked enough seniority to be eligible, even though he had seven years on the job. Others were receiving money until recently, when the reimbursement was cut off, or told they would have to wait six months for their money. One said that when his application was turned down, the reason stated was that the day-care fund was short on cash.

This doesn't add up, according to one Signal Maintainer who was told his reimbursement would be six months late. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority under the contract with Local 100 is supposed to provide $200,000 a month for day care, and the Maintainer, Kurt Walsh, said he had been told that 400 members are receiving payments. If each received the monthly maximum of $200, he noted, that would amount to $80,000.

"Where is the other $120,000 a month going?" he said to Mr. Paul.

Mr. Toussaint and his public-relations staff, with the arrogance that has infested them as the Local 100 leader's popularity has waned, declined to respond to the questions raised by those whose benefits were denied or delayed.

Some union members wonder if some of the day-care money hasn't been siphoned to other union programs to make up for the loss of dues income over the last 8-1/2 months after Local 100's payroll deduction rights were lost as one punishment for the December 2005 transit strike. Even with improved collections in recent months, more than 20 percent of the union's members are not voluntarily submitting their dues.

One of those whose application for reimbursement was turned down called for State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to take a look at the fund.

The MTA is the agency that should be asking questions first about how money that it is allocating under the contract deal is being spent and why there is a shortfall. If it can't get satisfactory answers, Mr. Cuomo should step in.

Mr. Toussaint's rhetoric of five years ago rings hollow when the union's leaders apparently don't, in his words, "buy into their responsibility to deliver services" to those whose dues pay their salaries.