"Court Fines NYC Transit Strikers $1M a Day " ......CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?

Court Fines NYC Transit Strikers $1M a Day
By LARRY McSHANE, Associated Press Writer
60 minutes ago

NEW YORK - The city's subway and bus workers went on strike Tuesday for the first time in more than 25 years, stranding millions of commuters, holiday shoppers and tourists at the height of the Christmas rush. A judge promptly slapped the union with a $1 million-a-day fine.

State Justice Theodore Jones leveled the sanction against the Transport Workers Union for violating a state law that bars public employees from going on strike.

Attorneys for the city and state had asked Jones to hit the union with a "very potent fine" for defying the law.

"This is a very, very sad day in the history of labor relations for New York City," the judge said in imposing the fine.

http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2005/12/20/287858.html

edited bad link

union will go the way of the air traffic controllers'.

I strongly suspect the other unions will not honor those picket lines.

of their right to organize.

And their right to strike AFTER all the legal avenues provided under the Taylor Law have been followed.

I do not support illegal strikes.

If people had waited for strikes to be legal, we'd have no unions.

Do not confuse a historical situation where unions were not protected and labor law virtually did not exist with the contemporary situation where they are.

Please tell me what "protections" you think unions still have.

Laws are not 'illegal' since they define the law and hence legality.

However, they may be unconstitutional.

What's the basis for your view ?

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issues.

And your name calling does not contribute credibility to your arguments.

Several unions have defied the Taylor Law and won. NYC sanitation workers struck in the late seventies and demanded and got amnesty (from an emergency session of the state legislature). The Yonkers UFT (Teachers) has struck against the Taylor Law five times, and taken some fines while winning some victories. In recent years NYCT workers have pulled slowdowns and won, as in the RTO rule-book action against Pick take-backs. Management didn’t even try to use the Taylor Law in that case.


info on the Taylor Law

http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2366

...we'd have no unions."

It's very simple? Who's Side Are You On?"

The poor, the working class, and increasingly the middle class are being bled to pay for illegal wars, tax cuts for the rich, corporate profits at the expense of labor. We either stand with those fighting for good wages, decent working conditions, health care and retirement, or we don't.

We either stand against the war on Labor, or we stand with the Profiteers waging that war.

immediate edit for typo.

Look at all the *support* from fellow DUers here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5647433

Its parent union disowned the strike.

Not a single other union is honoring the picket line.

:shrug:

Methinks some people here are not really "democratic" at all.

at all the pro-illegality semtiment.

And who annointed you to determine who is really "democratic" ?

That smacks of the Republicans deciding who is a patriot. Surely you don't condone such attitudes or tactics.

That's it. No wriggle room. The Republican analogy is disingenuous.

the adjudicator of wriggle ?

It's not anti-union to propose and support that the union adhere to the legal process established for public employee unions.

The analogy seems to gain credibility the more you seek to label someone who doesn't accept your views.

means you arent lockstep in with the crowd, not afraid to be different and have different viewpoints.

if we were to all have the same viewpoint we are just as bad as the bushbots

THE deciding factor.

It's a duck.

and confessing to high crimes while living a life of priviledge.
Seems to me you are too delighted to scream "rule of law" against the have nots.

At least, not anymore. It ends here and now.

NY law does not allow public employees to strike. Period. No exceptions. The union knew that but struck any wat. They will now be fined and could even face abolition by the state legislature if the public gets too pissed off at the union for striking in the middle of winter.

Who's pension is getting fucked with? The pensions of those already working aren't the issue here - it's the pensions of those who haven't been hired yet that are the issue.

If you ask me, you can't "fuck with" a pension that doesn't exist yet.

A man with a clue.

ship those jobs overseas and lay off often so a worker can never qualify for a pension, then increase Medicare premiums, allow expensive uninsurable gaps in medication coverages, reduce/eliminate SS if not by legislation then by reduction of earnings in those most vulnerable, and more contemporarily, make sure that modest, safe housing is, in the moment, unavailable to families just beginning, students busy studying, and the elderly who should have earned their rest. In that way, our elderly, their children (the middle classes), their children (just starting out in lower wage service jobs), and the students in college down to those in kindergarten can no longer concentrate on their studies and become dumbed down with anxiousness and distractions created just for these fractured families - all due to the BFEE, PNAC and puppet *'s policies of greed and corruption.

The TWU is recognized as perhaps the most militant union in NYC. Every other union is watching this right now to see what the TWU does -- if it stands its ground, or if it caves in to the MTA. The city and state have made it clear whose side they come down on, and it's not really any big surprise.

The real issue here is not pensions, it's simple respect. The MTA has proven that it cannot be believed. Hell, NYS Comptroller Alan Hevesi found that the MTA kept 2 sets of books -- one for the public, and one for themselves. That's how they went around saying they were in the red and had to raise fares when they were really sitting on a mountain of surplus cash. Given this past history, why should we expect the MTA to deal any differently this time around.

Finally, as for the workers in the TWU, most are those that we can think of as trying to make their way from the working class to the middle class. Should that door be shut to them? Or should it remain open? Should the MTA continue to get away with its blatant disregard for simple honesty, or should it get smacked down and be forced to operate by the same rules the rest of society is expected to follow?

Personally, I'm 100% on the side of the workers on this one. Their strike isn't about money. It's about respect and the maintaining of opportunity for their workers. If there are people here who see that as a problem, then perhaps I'm on the wrong discussion board....

accounting or will they just accept satisfaction of their monetary demands.

If the latter, it's about money or they are willing to sell out their 'respect' for it.

What keeps them from filing a racketeering claim against the MTA if the mTA has been dishonest ?

before throwing them like garbage on the street?...

They weren't locked out, they struck illegally.

They are being fined for violating the law.

Could you explain your comment to me if i have misinterpreted it.

of callous disregard in your posts for these workers. When negotiations break-down strikes happen. The outcome is uncertain, and I don't find it helpful to cast aspersions on either side.

for public unions in the case of a breakdown of negotiations.

Why is the union not pursuing those avenues and keeping a strike as a last resort instead of a first ?

I usually don't read the tabloid papers of NYC, but I think the Daily News really hit the nail on the head with this one. It goes beyond how the strike will temporarily inconvenience the city's residents and workers, and sheds some light on the bigger picture...

Workers right to defy MTA

Think of the impending transit strike as the price - the fare - our city pays every so often to travel toward an important destination for many New Yorkers: entry to the middle class. Many people know nothing about that journey, and frankly couldn't care less about the lives, hopes and working conditions of the 34,000-member army of token booth clerks, track workers, mechanics and bus drivers who ferry us all safely across the city millions of times every day.
The great and growing disconnect between white-collar and blue-collar workers in our town makes it hard for office workers to see, understand or respect what is at stake in this labor standoff. Few riders know, for instance, that transit workers have to ask for a day off 30 days in advance. Back in October, in an annual ritual, some MTA workers slept on cots in bus depots so they could be first on line the next morning to ask for permission to take Thanksgiving off.

Such accumulated humiliations fuel much of the fury leading up to Tuesday's threatened strike. Train operators complain about the fear of driving through tunnels filled with debris; female workers recently went public with descriptions of the rusted, filthy, freezing bathrooms provided for them.

None of that got mentioned at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's news conference at the Grand Hyatt on Friday when talks broke down. Peter Kalikow, the MTA chairman, flanked by Executive Director Katherine Lapp and labor negotiator Gary Dellaverson, declared the talks at an impasse and earnestly pleaded that there was no more money to put on the table.

Unfortunately, Kalikow and the MTA have long since thrown away their credibility. The agency lost $300 million to fraud and cost overruns at its own headquarters, leading Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to tell my colleague Michael Goodwin, "Of all the authorities, the MTA is the most mismanaged, least competent one out there, and everybody knows it." That's putting it mildly. This is the agency that Controller Alan Hevesi found kept two sets of books - one for the public, and the real numbers. The same place that claimed a deficit, then a small surplus, and then a billion-dollar surplus - which the MTA voted to spend down last week even as the strike deadline approached....

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/375722p-319283c.html

Of course, I've never been one who's entirely convinced that the "right" thing to do is always in keeping with the law. The TWU made their decision KNOWING that they would be breaking the law, and that there would be some kind of sanction against them. That being said, I don't think that any of us here know ALL of the facts, but I also think it's pretty safe to say that the TWU wouldn't have taken this step -- the first transit strike in 25 years -- unless they felt their bargaining ability was being seriously threatened by the MTA.

When they are all gone, you can kiss all the benifits that unions are responsible for goodby.

No wonder they had dispatched operatives on DU to do nothing but bash them. I wonder if our own Dildo reilly writes about anything else.

how many of the union's upper echelons bother to cut their pay in the name of "solidarity"?

Who will crack first?

Their assets will be gone by Friday.

fight these greedy corporate rulers? I am for the workers not the owners and yes that means state,city and government employers. Proud to see someone fighting for the workers this government and our laws no longer do!

:grr:

the same taylor law that prevents the workers froms striking also guarrantees them the ability to organize into a union. any attempt to fire them is an attempt to break the union and violate the taylor law.

Workers: good. Thanks for the deep analysis.
My reading of the 2004 financials (admittedly not my forte) for the MTA is total revenues (in millions) of $8,197 and total expenditures of $8,875. The difference was made up by taxpayer subsidies.

Bad, bad corporate ruler!

It sickens me to think of how executive pay has shot up, while compensation for workers has remained stagnant or barely kept up with inflation.

:nuke:

Without taking this out of context to say I'm saying about all unions all the time forever (I know how some poseters operate), I think this strike is wrong based on what I know and hope it comes to a lightning quick resolution.

not the strikers.

the international TWU has ordered the workers back to work but the local 100 is refusing so far.

This is an attempt at labor discipline which will fail.

If anyone thinks this is a topic for law school and not a vital strike can better spend his time pondering the legality of the MTA's billion dollar surplus, gathered from the people who live in the city to pay for the subways.

Pay and pensions are the cost of the subway. Shell it out. It's more useful in the hands of the workers who make the system work than in the hands of the bankers who are financing the building of the Second Avenue subway.

long - I saw their identical posts on the Union's blog this morning. It's part of the "discredit the dissenter" karl campaign and it's unraveling right here on DU.

Shame on us for allowing it stand!

In case anyone is living in a Fantasyland where they see this transit strike as being a triumph of the working class over the rich, you might want to think twice.

There are times where a strike would be appropriate, this is not one of them. The different places I've seen different places report different numbers, but the consensus is about the low-to-mid fifties for an annual salary. Yes, everything here is expensive, but you can live quite respectably in the outer boroughs on that much.

Some questions to think about though:

Is this hurting business?

You bet.

Is this hurting wealthy individuals?

Not really. I have a somewhat decent white collar job, and my company is letting anyone who takes a cab expense it. It's at worst an inconvenience, at best something to chat about for some time to come. Then there are some people are just choosing to use up any vacation days they had left.

Is this helping the guys who are really at the bottom?

No way. If you work in Manhattan but you're living in NJ, Staten, or the Bronx and you're making 20-30K, you are probably being stretched pretty bad if you can't get to your job, especially at this time of year. These are the people I feel sorry for, not the thugs running the TWU.

not money.

:shrug:

The Union wants NEWLY hired workers to pay 2% for the first ten years into their pensions.

The MTA wants them to pay 6% over that stretch.

That's why they're striking.

Need I say any more?

:(

.