"Under terms of the deal, current LIRR employees will receive a 17 percent wage increase over six-and-a-half years. The union had been seeking six years, and the MTA seven. To pay for the additional salary expenses, all employees will for the first time contribute to their health insurance, the governor said. New employees will have a different wage progression and retirement contributions. The agreement doesn’t include fare increases, Cuomo said."
If what Cuomo said is what's actually in the deal, then the union leadership conceded on health care contributions and they ate their young on wage progression and retirement contributions.
Those concessions sure do diminish the 17% wage increase over 6.5 years.
I've written this over and over, but I'm going to do so once again:
Making that first-time concession on health care contributions is ALWAYS a loss.
Once you open the door to ANY contributions to health care, you hit the slippery slope of concessions on health care/increased payments from employees EVERY time the contract comes up for re-negotiation.
They couldn't do better than this in an election year with a strike deadline looming?
Hard to fight the health care contribution when the rest of the worlds unions are doing it
ReplyDeleteRemains to be seen what the "savings' in health care will be for the city unions - it may ultimately result in employees paying percentage of salary to health care - but UFT and other city union leaders will argue they held the line on that concession while LIRR unions caved.
Deletedamn, I so wanted a strike. Isn't anyone willing to do it anymore?
ReplyDeleteWe are so ****cked.
I would like to know what happened behind the scenes for the LIRR union leaders to accept this concession-laden deal.
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