MTA Chief Faces Uphill Battle In Forging Union Harmony
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Fresh off raising subway and bus fares – and a year into his term as MTA chairman – Jay Walder says he needs big help from labor to put the agency on the right track. NY1 transit reporter John Mancini takes a look at Walder's prospects for pointing the agency in the right direction.It's been anything but a smooth first year for the head of the MTA. But amid service cuts, layoffs and subway-booth closings, one regret lingers in particular.
"The biggest disappointment that I've had in one year at the MTA," says Chairman and CEO Jay Walder, "has been the inability to be able to partner with our labor unions."
Walder told a York College audience that talks to negotiate new work rules and reduced benefits for new employees broke down. That's no surprise. The folks he wants to partner with include John Samuelsen, head of the the city's largest transit union, who has mocked him repeatedly as an out-of-touch rich guy.
"Jay Walder’s idea of a partnership is a one-way street in his direction," Samuelsen said in a recent statement. "For Jay, it’s always about cutting transit workers’ pay and benefits, and destroying conditions of labor negotiated over 75 years."
With nearly a thousand layoffs, it's been a rough year for labor relations at the MTA. And in recent days, management has stepped up its call for union concessions.
When the MTA board voted this week to hike fares, they heard a new warning.
"We are faced with union contracts now that are truly onerous," said MTA Vice Chairman Andrew Saul. "We have antiquated work rules, which makes it hard for us to modernize the system. We have pension costs and benefits that are just really going out of control here."
But union leaders, like the head of a Queens bus drivers' local, say it's the MTA that's out of control.
"Ridership is up, and yet they're losing money? Something's wrong with that," says ATU Division 1056 President I. Daneek Miller. "It's not all on the workers. There have been things that have been mismanaged."
The unions say the MTA should have spent federal stimulus money to save transit jobs and service. But Walder says that was never the goal for those dollars.
"They were intended to be used for construction," he says. "They were intended to get people back to working by doing it. And that's exactly what we did with that money."
Saving, not spending, will more likely be the subject from now until 2012, when the TWU's contract expires – a year before your next scheduled fare hike.