TWU Local 100 members protest in New York City.   (Photo courtesy of TWULocal100.org)

By Lindsay Beyerstein

New York's transport workers will keep the raises they won in an arbitration deal with the Metropolitan Transit Authority. On Friday, Manhattan Supreme Court judge O. Peter Sherwood rejected the MTA's bid to have the arbitration deal thrown out.

John Samuelson, the incoming president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, called the ruling "a big win for us."

Sherwood found nothing improper or unusual about the arbitration panel's decision (which I reported on for this blog back in August) to give the transport workers a raise in step with raises received by other city workers. TWU workers will get a raise on the order of 11.3%, phased in over the next three years.

It's no secret that city workers' pay rates tend to rise in step. The MTA knew it was hammering out the TWU contract on the heels of pay raises for teachers, garbage collectors, and other New York City workers.

Yet the MTA repeatedly failed to budget for a comparable increase for transport workers. Perhaps officials were overconfident in their own negotiating skills. In any event, the MTA went on to gamble and lose when it submitted its proposal to the arbitration panel. At the end of the day, the panel thought the transit workers put forward a fairer plan.

Regardless, the MTA is now pleading poverty and trying to blame the TWU for its own ineptitude at the bargaining table and in the courts.

The MTA is facing a significant budget shortfall. The agency learned in early December that a controversial new payroll tax that was supposed to add $1 billion to the MTA's budget would bring in $200 million less than expected.

The State Supreme Court ruling comes at a convenient time for the MTA. The transit authority promises to unveil a series of dramatic "doomsday cuts" in service today. Naturally, the transit authority is using the court decision as an opportunity to blame the union while announcing some tough choices that it would have had to make anyway.

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein  ·  government negotiations organized labor  · 

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