Bar Transit Farmout
Phone Repair Work Is Still TWU's Call

By ARI PAUL

An arbitrator has ruled that New York City Transit may not give the work of its Telephone Maintainers to workers outside the Transport Workers Union Local 100 bargaining unit.

The Chief-Leader/Adrienne Haywood-James 'FAR-REACHING RAMIFICATIONS': Kevin McCawley, a vice chairman in Transport Workers Union Local 100's Line Equipment and Signals Divisions, praised an arbitrator's decision mandating that telephone maintenance work at New York City Transit's downtown headquarters could not be farmed out to clerical employees.

Sought to Privatize

In April 2006 NYC Transit started replacing Telephone Maintainers based at its lower Manhattan headquarters with non-Local 100 Computer Specialists. It informed the union that the title of Telephone Maintainers responding to calls about problems in the telephone system would be phased out because, as arbitrator Richard Adelman explained in his ruling, NYC Transit "had developed a new, more complex computer program, SPEAR, which enabled supervisors to dispatch work at the same time that a trouble call is received."

Local 100 General Counsel Walter Meginniss argued in hearings in 2006 that the work of telephone maintenance was traditionally Local 100's domain and that precedent had shown that NYC Transit was not allowed to transfer that work out of the bargaining unit except in special circumstances. NYC Transit retorted that there was precedent supporting its case and that the work of Telephone Maintainers at the lower Manhattan location had also been done by clerical workers and supervisors in the past.

"[NYC Transit] further asserts that nothing in the civil service job description of [Telephone Maintainers] even mentions performing work at a desk-top computer as a job function," Mr. Adelman said.

But he concluded that while the job in question was a desk job, it was still telephone maintenance and therefore could not be given outright to clerical employees.

'No Shift in Duties'

"If the work on the desk was clerical work only, or was integrated into non-unit work or into work done traditionally by others, this case might have a different result," he said in his ruling. "In sum, the evidence has not shown any change in the trouble-shooting work which [Telephone Maintainers] have performed exclusively on the desk; the only change that has occurred has been the introduction of SPEAR, a new computer program, which [Telephone Maintainers] can learn to use, just as they learned to use the previous computer program."

Kevin McCawley, a vice chairman in the union's Line Equipment and Signals Division, saw the ruling as a major victory for Local 100.

"It has really far-reaching ramifications," he said.

He also believed that the farming-out of jobs was a problem workers faced from employers in both the public and private sectors, adding, "This is something they're trying to do from coast to coast."