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Transit strike may embolden unions nationwide

by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 4 January 2006

Trade unions Strikes USA Transports

By LARRY McSHANE

NEW YORK - The three-day walkout by city transit workers, while a hassle for millions of New Yorkers, was a boost for unions from coast to coast as they face negotiations where management calls for health care and pension givebacks are almost inevitable, labor experts say.

“This was a very important stand for those workers to have made,” said Ron Blackwell, chief economist for the AFL-CIO. “It will resonate nationally.”

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The 33,000 members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 rejected a proposal that would give future employees less generous pension plans, and the deal reached after their illegal strike took that provision out of the contract. The union’s executive board approved the contract on Dec. 27.

“I think it’s a positive for the labor movement,” said Bruce Raynor, president of the garment workers union UNITE. “The strike was a success. The workers supported the union. It was a bold and strong move.”

For the leadership at Change to Win, a coalition of seven unions representing 5.4 million workers, the link between the strike and the future of organized labor was clear. Chairperson Anna Burger sent TWU local president Roger Toussaint a letter before the strike praising his “struggle to preserve health care and retirement security for your members.”

“We know that your fight is our fight,” she continued, “and that the future of the American dream is at stake.”

Joshua Freeman, who wrote a history of the TWU, said the walkout “will certainly discourage efforts in the future to diminish pension benefits for other workers.”

Blackwell was impressed by the transit union’s willingness to make a stand despite fines of $1 million a day against the union, and two days pay for each day on strike for its members. The union violated the state Taylor Law, barring public employees from striking.

“I thought the transit workers showed their members aren’t willing to suffer these concessions,” Blackwell said. “They were going to fight, and they did against tremendous odds. The billionaire mayor was calling them thugs.”

Harsh verbal attacks by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. George Pataki failed to sway the union’s resolve.

Some labor experts, however, were not convinced that the New York strikers’ solidarity would spread to other unions.

“They don’t have quite the same hammer,” said Oren M. Levin-Waldman, a public affairs professor at the Metropolitan College of New York. “This union had the clout of shutting down mass transit. A strike like this is not the same as setting up a picket line outside the GM factory.”

Still, he said, “it may give some other unions cause for hope.”

But as Waldman pointed out, there aren’t as many unions left to follow in the picketing footsteps of their New York brethren. About 35 percent of American private companies had unions in 1950, compared to less than 20 percent by the turn of the century, he said.

Pataki felt it sent another message for future negotiations.

“The way to resolve a labor issue is at the table and not through an illegal action,” the governor said. And he didn’t see the strikers as winners.

“Whenever you have a strike from critical public workers ... no one comes out ahead.”

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