Samuelsen on Contract Fight

President Samuelsen
President Samuelsen

conservative pundits are railing against what they call the agency’s high employee compensation, and Governor Cuomo—who exercises great power over the MTA’s budget and leadership—has recently made contract deals with the two largest state-employee unions that if ratified would freeze their members’ pay for three years.

Those might seem like steep mountains for a union to scale, but Transport Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelsen insisted last week that he not only intends to get raises for his members under a contract that would begin next January, he’s got precedent on his side.

Points to Smaller Union’s Deal

In a July 21 phone interview, the union leader—who later this year will begin negotiating his first wage contract since taking office at the start of 2010—said he did not believe the MTA would succeed in forcing Local 100 to accept terms along the lines of those agreed to with the Cuomo administration by the Civil Service Employees Association and the Public Employees Federation.

“I think there’s a couple of hurdles they’re going to have binding us to the CSEA deal,” he said. Foremost among them, he contended, was that the MTA recently agreed to a five-year contract with the Transport Communications Union granting 9 percent in raises to employees in the MTA Business Service Center. While that contract requires a pay freeze in its first year, Mr. Samuelsen noted that this covers 2011, a point at which his members are receiving a 3-percent raise under their existing contract. Beginning in 2012, he said, that TCU pact provides annual pay hikes of 2, 2, 2 and 3 percent.

“We have every intention of putting on a contract campaign and fighting tooth and nail for what we consider a fair contract,” he said.

Mr. Cuomo in announcing the CSEA deal last month had said he believed it should serve as a pattern for all state unions. Local 100 is not directly under his jurisdiction, but as Governor he can appoint or dismiss the MTA Chairman and decide to increase or cut the agency’s state funding, two matters that would make whoever succeeds departing MTA CEO Jay Walder particularly determined to hold the line at the bargaining table.

Thrust and Counterthrust?

It seemed something more than a coincidence that the MTA announced the possibility of layoffs to help fund capital construction projects including the Second Ave. Subway on July 20, one day after a letter to the New York Post from Mr. Samuelsen was published in which he stated his union “is not agreeing to zeroes—particularly when the tax on New York’s wealthiest people was eliminated.”

That was a reference to the Governor’s insistence as part of his budget deal with the State Legislature earlier this year that the “millionaires tax” be discontinued as scheduled at the end of the year. The letter was in response to an op-ed column in the paper a week earlier by Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute in which she lamented the rise in transit-worker wages even as the agency has coped with a fiscal crisis that required hundreds of layoffs last year.

In the letter, Mr. Samuelsen attributed that rise to a “faulty management decision,” alluding to the fact that the layoffs—many of which were later rescinded—left New York City Transit so short-handed that overtime rose sharply for workers who remained on the payroll and had to pick up the slack left by the employee departures.

A spokesman for Mr. Walder did not respond to a request for comment and further details about the TCU contract.

No Regrets About Taking Layoffs

During last week’s interview, Mr. Samuelsen, while emphasizing that he was not criticizing state-union leaders for accepting concession-heavy contracts in return for a two-year no-layoff provision, said his own choice not to offer givebacks to preserve jobs has been vindicated by both the rehirings and Mr. Walder’s new threat of layoffs.

The MTA Chairman had argued that many of the layoffs were necessary because of a 3-percent wage increase that was part of an arbitration award that was handled by his predecessor. He had told Mr. Samuelsen that if the union relinquished the raise, the layoffs could be averted.

“They put a gun to our head,” the Local 100 leader said. “We chose not to negotiate in that manner. If I had agreed to that, what would have stopped Walder from coming back and demanding more concessions?”

He called the new layoff threat “shots over the bow. Their playbook is to browbeat organized labor into concessions under the threat of layoffs. I have no doubt that they’ll use whatever [budget] deficit they claim as a hammer to extract further concessions.”

Not Anxious to Arbitrate

Asked whether, if the MTA balked at giving him terms similar to those negotiated with the TCU, he would seek a similar deal through arbitration, Mr. Samuelsen said his executive board had “no intention” of going that route, which was used to decide the past two Local 100 contracts, in one case following the three-day transit strike in 2005.

“We plan to negotiate a contract that the members can vote on,” he said.

He said his union would begin formulating its contract demands this fall, and would look to go to the bargaining table with the MTA by late November.