The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) formally presented
its concessions demands this week, only days before the contract
deadline for some 35,000 bus and subway workers in New York City.
The
transit agency is insisting on a three-year wage freeze along with a
host of other major concessions. The givebacks include the elimination
of the guaranteed 40-hour work week, with the introduction of part-time
bus operators. A proposal to approximately double the amount workers pay
for their health care coverage would be the equivalent of a huge pay
cut.
Other MTA demands include reduced vacation days for
new-hires, a cut in night differential pay, the broadbanding of job
titles in order to increase productivity, a dramatic cut in pay for
newly hired transit cleaners, changes in overtime rules that would cut
overtime pay, and new disciplinary rules to discourage the use of sick
time.
The aim of the transit agency is to make the
concessions contracts imposed on New York State employees last summer
the pattern for transit workers. The workers, members of Transport
Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, are currently ending a three-year
agreement that included 11.3 percent in wage increases awarded by an
arbitration panel. This award followed the general pattern set in other
city workers’ negotiations. Since then, however, the financial collapse
has been followed by endless demands for austerity, with public
employees targeted in states and municipalities across the US.
The
New York negotiations are part of a national pattern in which the
corporate and political establishment is seeking to claw back gains won
by workers over the past three-quarters of a century. A concessions
contract imposed on transit workers will become the pattern for other
city employees who face deadlines of their own this year. Other state
and big city administrations will also be looking at the outcome of this
contract to step up their own attacks on wages and working conditions.
It
was New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, using the threat of
layoffs and the collaboration of the union leaders, who imposed
concessions contracts last year on tens of thousands of state employees,
members of the Civil Service Employees Association and the Public
Employees Federation. Cuomo then underscored the bipartisan character of
the attack on public service workers by appointing Joseph J. Lhota to
head the MTA last fall.
Lhota is a Republican veteran of
the administration of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. He was budget
director and deputy mayor under Giuliani in 1999, when transit workers
were threatened with severe penalties if they even discussed job action.
The
TWU Local 100 leadership has indicated, in the days and weeks leading
up to the contract deadline, that it will do nothing to seriously resist
the concessions demands, let alone fight for genuine improvements for
transit workers and for the transit system as a whole.
Local
100 President John Samuelsen told the annual mass membership meeting in
December that the January 15 contract date was not “a hard, fast
deadline.” The union refused to hold a strike authorization vote as it
had traditionally done in the past.
The role of the union leadership was indicated this week by an authoritative online voice of big business, crain’s new york business.com.
The Internet publication wrote: “… though the two sides remain far
apart, a strike like the one that crippled the city in 2005 is
unlikely.” It continued: “Budding respect between Mr. Samuelsen and Mr.
Lhota, and the union’s recognition of the MTA’s financial predicament,
suggest that the two sides will find a way to work together. Few expect a
deal can be struck by the deadline on Jan. 15, but the union has said
it will break from past practice and work without a contract, if need
be.”
This clearly sums up the role of the Local 100
leadership, which it shares in common with every other section of the
union bureaucracy. Tied to the Democratic Party and beginning not with
the needs of the transit workers, but rather the “financial predicament”
that has been produced by the Wall Street crisis, Samuelsen is pledging
in advance to subordinate the interests of the membership to that of
the financial and corporate elite.
This also shows the
emptiness of the union’s claim to support last fall’s Occupy Wall Street
movement. Samuelsen saw the protests as an opportunity to give himself a
“left” image. Behind the scenes, all of the city unions were glad to
see the eviction of the Occupy encampment last November, lest it
complicate their efforts to negotiate rotten deals for hospital workers,
janitors and now transit workers.
TWU Local 100 has
gone so far as to call its scheduled rally for Sunday, January 15
outside the midtown Manhattan hotel where negotiations are taking place
“Occupy the Contract,” as if this label will fool many workers.
The
battle facing New York’s transit workers, like that of every section of
the working class, demands above all a new political strategy. A
genuine struggle against the regime of permanent austerity alongside
growing inequality can only be waged independently of and in opposition
to the union defenders of the profit system, breaking with the twin
parties of big business and uniting the working class in its own mass
political party fighting for a socialist program.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jan2012/tran-j14.shtml
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