Rejecting mediator’s proposal, New York’s transit agency insists on a wage freeze

Alan Whyte
RINF Alternative News
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has vehemently rejected a non-binding mediators’ recommendation that Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) employees receive a wage increase tied to concessions, insisting instead on a three-year wage freeze.
The agency’s intransigence toward the nearly 6,000 workers on the commuter rail line linking Long Island’s suburbs to New York City has much wider significance. It signals not only how the same agency intends to deal with 34,000 bus and subway workers in the New York City Transit Authority, but also how New York City’s newly installed Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio will confront some 300,000 municipal workers. Both transit and city workers have been working without contracts for years.
The mediators’ recommendation would have hardly represented a victory for LIRR workers. The six-year pact, back-dated to June 2010, included nominal wage hikes of 2.83 percent annually, offset by a first-ever requirement that workers pay a portion of their health benefits amounting to about 2.25 percent of their gross pay beginning in the final year of the proposed contract. The panel rendered its decision based on various considerations such as MTA finances, what other railway workers in the region earn, and the cost of living in the New York area.
The MTA is a quasi-independent public agency that runs two commuter railway lines, the LIRR and Metro-North, which links New York City and its northern suburbs; and two subway systems, the New York City Transit Authority which covers four of the five boroughs in New York City, and the subway system in Staten Island, which is the city’s fifth borough.