Must Counter MTA, Mayor

Transport Workers Union Local 100 is holding a rally Sept. 29 outside Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters to protest the agency’s decision to file suit against the contract arbitration award issued in August by a panel the two sides had selected. A demonstration last week on the same subject produced a disappointing turnout of 300 or so; it’s time that other unions mustered their troops to make their voices heard on this issue.

Beyond showing up for the rally, we would hope that they also bring pressure to bear not just on MTA officials but Mayor Bloomberg—who is supporting the court challenge—as well. That effort should especially involve those unions that have endorsed his re-election. They should make clear to him that while they may like his performance in office, they believe he has no business siding with an agency that is essentially abusing the arbitration process.

The MTA’s chances of having the award overturned hover between slim and none, with a strong tilt toward none. It has to convince a court that the arbitrators acted in an arbitrary and capricious fashion.

That will be an extraordinarily steep mountain to climb. The four-percent wage hikes for the first two years of the three-year award match what Mr. Bloomberg himself has negotiated with several city unions for a similar period, and actually have a reduced cost to the MTA because their effective dates are delayed, unlike the other deals. The final hike of 3 percent is hardly outrageous, even at a time of low inflation.

It also can’t be stressed enough that the “arbitrary and capricious” standard that courts apply for overturning an arbitration ruling means that courts don’t act simply because they might have reached a different conclusion than the arbitrators; the award has to fall so far outside what would be considered reasonable that it could be considered shocking. And the long and distinguished career of the arbitration panel’s chairman, John Zuccotti, as a government and private-sector executive as well as resolving transit disputes, is one more factor that makes it unlikely any judge would reach that conclusion.

This leads us to believe that the suit launched by top MTA officials amounts to a vanity production, spurred either by pique at its former CEO, Lee Sander, or a public-relations attempt to show that they will be vigilant in trying to limit the agency’s costs. There is a good likelihood that Mr. Sander indicated before his departure from the agency in midspring that he could live with an award along the lines that the panel ultimately granted; he had been ready to sign off on a slightly more generous deal a year ago before Mr. Bloomberg intervened.

The Mayor’s support of the suit, at a time when he is seeking re-election while portraying himself as a guardian of the public purse against union incursions, may also be designed to win applause from tabloid editorial pages, which seem anxious to exact further punishment on transit workers besides that already inflicted for violating the Taylor Law with their 2005 strike.

But he surely knows the odds against the MTA prevailing, which means that the primary results of its court foray will be that employees will have to wait a year or more for raises that are already six months overdue, and a deterioration of labor-management relations that Mr. Sander—at the urging of the man who hired him, ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer—had been working to improve.

The pragmatic Mr. Bloomberg has a pet phrase— “Get over it”—for telling people not to get bogged down in futile efforts to undo matters that hadn’t gone their way. His friends in labor should be reminding him of those words, and suggesting he speak them to the MTA hierarchy.