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Dunh dunh dunh? The Transport Workers Union's Roger Toussaint met with a mediator this afternoon, but in the meantime, according to the NY Times, "Justice Theodore T. Jones of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn raised the possibility of jail terms for top officials of the Transport Workers Union and ordered them to appear in his courtroom for a hearing at 11 a.m. on Thursday." Basically, jail would be because the union leaders had not called off the strike. Will there be a transit-filled Christmas weekend? Hundreds of transport workers crossed the picket lines yesterday, to get assignments from the MTA, which isn't much given the TWU's 33,000+ membership, but still [The NY Times also spoke to workers with mixed feelings]
Gothamist wonders if there is a resolution soon whether or not the transit workers will have to pay the huge fines - at this rate, they each owe $75,000 - the government threatened; their curret fine is one day's lost wages per day they strike, not to mention the lost pay for the day they are striking. More about the Taylor law from the Daily News and NY Times. And other local unions are being fined as well.
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My idea: Let the fines keep tallying, then bargain with the TWU using the fines to go toward their raise. You want that 8% raise? You got it. Just pay us the $X million you owe us, and that nets out to a whopping...3%, right back to the original offer!
Sending union bosses to jail is just going to give them martyr complexes and drag this out even longer. Stick with fines -- which, for workers, is two days of pay for every day of striking, not one day as this post says (just a typing error, I assume).
Has anyone read the various comments on the NY1 website? Do half the comments from "transit workers" all saying the exact same set of pre-scripted lines about how this strike is "for you, and everyone in New York" sound a little -- I don't know, like they might have been written by PR folks?
What I heard on a news cast after Bloomberg today is that if tomarrow the judge hands the case over to the City that every TWU member will have their personal bank accounts frozen!!!
put them in jail later. Not during the strike.
Don't forget that jail (which made his heart problems worse) killed Mike Quill in 1966. He died three days after the strike was settled.
Pataki is completely incompetent. And after reading more about the issues at hand, the pension plan issue is an idiotic thing for the MTA to bring up.
At first I thought the TWU was just greedy, but basically they are in agreement about everything but this pension issue. And bringing it up is equally illegal under the Taylor Law for the MTA. And lets really make that clear, the strike is illegal for the TWU to do, but the first blow was the MTA placing an illegal pension issue on the table to begin with.
What bunch of idiots! Just take the stupid pension issue off the table and move forward. Pataki should be taken to task for allowing this idiocy to happen. What an ineffectual jerk!
After watching Toussaint today it's clear that he's divorced from reality. Mediation is pointless and the city should go straight to arbitration, then start handing out the pink slips.
Jack - it isnt "equally as illegal" to negotiate pensions - and the funny thing is that the Union never has trouble with the approriatness of negotiating pensions when they want the benefits raised.
I read that TWU workers generally get 1 weeks training for motorman and bus driving positions - I dont know this to be tru but if so, the best thing the NTA could do is to start training replacement workers and deploying them on key bus and subway routes. The Union will cave like a house of cards.
If the country can replace air traffic controllers w/o any accidents I got to assume we could replace bus drivers.
The Union has happily accepted collectively bargaining pension related issues when it has suited them, regardless of whether it is illegal under the Taylor law. They've set the precedent, and now are hypocritically trying to back out.
The Union definitely went too far. They decided to strike prematurely and now the PR giants are trying to win it out in the media. They were probably better off threatening to strike than shutting down the city before they could make their case.
Today Toussaint actually had the stones to compare transit workers to Rosa Parks, as if Ms. Parks didn't give up her seat because she felt she had a God-given right to retire with half of an awfully big salary at 50 and shouldn't pay one thin dime toward her medical care. The only connection I can see between the two is that the TWU leadership does seem to think it's still 1955.
If our governor wasn't a mingy hack pol, or if NYC actually controlled its own transit system instead of having to watch a bunch of upstate dairy farmers run things, there might be a chance at doing what needs to be done. Namely: decertify the TWU, fire and rehire, and introduce the workers to the concept of working past 55 and contributing to one's own healthcare and retirement. Time for the TWU to get a swift kick into the 21st century.
While the mayor and governor keep waging wars of namecalling and no negotiating while you are walking? I don't think that I would be in the frame of mind to return to work. Would any of you? This has become way too rapidly a game of face saving and in the end we have a lame duck governor and a term-limited billionaire mayor calling transit workers name. Yeah that should work I guess the labor relations model of the 21st Century is if you aren't ready to wait 2, 3 or even 4 years (like the day care workers union) to help fund your own contract you are selfish!
>>>I dont know this to be tru but if so, the best thing the NTA could do is to start training replacement workers and deploying them on key bus and subway routes. The Union will cave like a house of cards.
When the BRT took a desk jockey named Luciano and gave him training on the fly to operate an el consist during a strike in 1918...the result was the Malbone Street Wreck.
www.forgotten-ny.com
Isn't it strange that Hillary is no where to be found for this strike. She has always been the (want-a-be) voice of the New Yorker. Is she afraid of her views might effect her in the upcoming Presidental Polls?
Hillary is a federal senator not a state senator. She has nothing to do with it.