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	Workers Vanguard No. 1046	16 May 2014

NYC Transit Contract

TWU Tops Help Cuomo Knife LIRR Unions

MAY 12—New York City’s 34,000 transit workers are currently voting on a divide-and-rule contract cooked up in April by Democratic Party governor Andrew Cuomo and Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 president John Samuelsen. If ratified, the five-year pact with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), retroactive to January 2012, will give subway and bus workers a small wage bump of 8 percent over its life, an amount unlikely to keep up with inflation. The agreement contains various sweeteners but also serious concessions. Notably, new hires will have to slave away two years longer on the MTA plantation to reach top pay, an extension of the wage and pension tiers that weaken the union. The deal has also pulled the rug out from under Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) unions, making Local 100 members pawns in Cuomo’s effort to spike a looming rail strike.

Samuelsen is especially trumpeting the agreement’s large increase in death benefits, even as workers are slated to pay more out of pocket for medical benefits. With a recent derailment on the F line spotlighting crumbling infrastructure and dangerous work conditions in the subway, one retired transit worker dubbed the pact “a contract to die for.” In this period of wage and benefit gouging by the bosses, the terms may not seem so bad. But make no mistake: this deal is poison to the unity and integrity of Local 100 as well as to basic union solidarity, and should be rejected.

The nearly 6,000 LIRR workers splintered in eight separate craft unions have been under the gun since their contract expired in 2010, with the MTA, which operates the LIRR as well as NYC transit, set on imposing a wage freeze. After mediation failed in 2013, a federally appointed Presidential Emergency Board recommended a 17 percent wage increase over six years and did not propose the work-rule changes and pension givebacks demanded by management. Convened under the federal Railway Labor Act (RLA), which imposes a series of obstacles to head off strikes, that board also mandated greater employee health care contributions. The MTA rejected the board’s recommendations out of hand.

LIRR workers voted in February to strike, which could happen in July if the MTA continues to hardline it. A summer walkout would disrupt commuter traffic to the city as well as peak-season tourist travel to the Hamptons and other shore destinations. Following the pattern-setting TWU pact, the MTA—whose board is appointed by the governor—proposed similar terms for LIRR unions, only worse. Meanwhile, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio is poised to use his nine-year contract agreement with the United Federation of Teachers to extract concessions from the 151 other municipal unions without contracts.

The MTA bosses, not to mention the city rulers, have plenty of experience playing one group of workers against another. For instance, to encourage racial divisions among workers, the MTA has historically paid the whiter LIRR workforce higher wages than the heavily black, Caribbean, Latino and immigrant NYC transit workers doing comparable work under harsh conditions. No small thanks to Samuelsen, Cuomo and the MTA have now succeeded in ratcheting up tensions between LIRR workers and Local 100 members. One LIRR conductor bitterly complained that, if ratified, the TWU contract would set a bad trend for rail workers. Meanwhile, the MTA has announced that it will pay for the TWU raises by forgoing “supplemental” payments to the massively underfunded LIRR pension fund.

Rather than rely on Democratic Party politicians who falsely posture as “friends of labor,” transit workers must forge a fighting alliance of rail, bus and subway workers, who have the power to cause a crisis for the bosses by withholding their labor. Joint negotiations and struggle could turn the tide of givebacks and lay the basis for the separate MTA workforces to draw together in one industrial union with a single contract.

Since he began his term imposing wage freezes and layoffs on state workers in 2011, Cuomo has earned plenty of enmity from the working people of New York. In July 2012, union tops representing workers locked out by utility giant Con Edison begged the governor to intervene. Cuomo heeded their call—and stepped in on the side of the utility (see “Cuomo, Con Ed Strong-Arm Union into Concessions,” WV No. 1006, 3 August 2012). Cuomo’s anti-union track record has done nothing to slow Samuelsen from helping the conniving Democrat burnish his labor credentials on the eve of the governor’s re-election bid.

The Local 100 tops kept union members working under the expired contract for more than two years, arguing that more could be won by holding out until the economy improved. During that time, Samuelsen pledged support for an LIRR strike, but there was not a snowball’s chance in hell that he would call a secondary strike. Samuelsen disavowed the 2005 TWU strike and bows before the New York State Taylor Law, which bans strikes by public employees outright. Like his predecessor Roger Toussaint, he is just another in a long line of union misleaders who tie workers to the capitalist class enemy through the agency of the Democratic Party.

All wings of the TWU bureaucracy promote class collaboration. The Local 100 Executive Board unanimously endorsed the Cuomo deal, for which Train Operators chairman Steve Downs ran point. Downs’ April 28 letter to the Chief is chock-full of fuzzy math intended to gussy up the contract’s terms. Supported by the reformist outfit Solidarity, Downs has played toady to Samuelsen and to Toussaint before him and was a founder of the now-defunct New Directions (ND) caucus, which was a vehicle for propelling phony “militants” into union office. ND’s trademark was court suits against its union opponents, a treacherous policy that exposed the TWU to meddling by the bosses’ state.

What is needed is a union leadership that strives to unite workers in struggle against the bosses, their political parties and their state. To put an end to the everyday savagery of the profit system and provide a decent living for all, workers must expropriate the capitalist exploiters. This requires forging a workers party, one that fights for a workers government in which those who labor rule.