Mayor: Transit Engineers Deserve Higher Salaries;
Tech Guild Seconds the Motion
By DAVID SIMS

Despite Metropolitan Transportation Authority budget woes and a possible recession, Mayor Bloomberg said MTA engineers should be paid more in his weekly radio show on July 25, a proposal praised by the Civil Service Technical Guild. The union also, however, suggested municipal engineers were in the same boat.

BOB UNGAR: Low salaries 'a citywide issue.'

"We don't pay them enough," the Mayor stated on WOR-AM. "We work as hard as we can to make those jobs appealing, but obviously we are limited by being in the public sector." He has also been calling on the MTA to reduce its spending while opposing new fare hikes, so his call for higher salaries was surprising.

Tech Guild: Mayor Gets It

But Mr. Bloomberg was lauded for this position by the Tech Guild, which is Local 375 of District Council 37. Claude Fort, the union's president, said he was "pleased that the Mayor has realized that [engineers are underpaid]," adding that it was "an issue of recruitment and retention." Bob Ungar, the legislative counsel for the local, added that the Mayor "has clearly got a grasp on what's going on ... I give [him] a lot of credit for understanding that there's a problem at the MTA."

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: 'We don't pay them enough.'

The Mayor blamed construction delays and budget overruns on underpaid MTA engineers having to haggle with their higher-paid, private-sector counterparts. "If you want to have the best engineers to negotiate with the best engineers in the construction company, you are going to have to pay comparable salaries," he said on the radio show.

Mr. Ungar agreed, pointing out that "the MTA is just not competitive," and saying that it needed to raise salaries to retain its "excellent cadre of in-house engineers ... who are recruited off to the private sector." He acknowledged that mounting financial worries meant such demands could fall on deaf ears, but posited that raising wages would save money in the long run. "We have problems getting new talent. People who leave will wind up actually coming back working for consulting firms at a much higher cost to the MTA," he argued.

"We understand that there's a national fiscal issue, that the national economy is not good," Mr. Ungar continued. "But work does continue, work goes on, and the question is how do you get the most bang for your buck, and at the MTA they need to up the salaries. It'll save the MTA a lot of money."

Mr. Ungar was unreserved in his praise for the Mayor, saying, "We compliment him on understanding that our people can do a lot of the work much more cost-effectively and sometimes even better [at the MTA] than having to bring them back as contractors." But he also pointedly added that while the Mayor was only addressing the plight of MTA employees, that the same issues applied to engineers who work at agencies under Mr. Bloomberg's direct control: "the salary issue is not limited to the MTA," Mr. Ungar said. "It's a citywide issue as well."