Another Sham From Andrew Cuomo

Remember when Cuomo parachuted in to save the TWU/MTA contract deal?

Turns out the whole thing was orchestrated by Cuomo's office to make him look the "hero":

If the latest episode of the MTA-TWU drama seemed a bit scripted, it’s for good reason.
It was scripted.

In what might be dubbed the “Fairy Tale of Albany” or the “White Knight from Mount Kisco,” the hero who saved the day was Gov. Cuomo. He came to town during Holy Week and helped get a new contract — with retroactive raises and improved benefits — for some 34,000 bus and subway workers who have been toiling without one for more than two years.

This wasn’t a covert maneuver. It was more like Paul Revere coming to town, but in a souped-up muscle car.

On April 16, Transport Workers Union Local 100 set the stage for the charade rescue with a letter that urged Cuomo to get personally involved in negotiations.

A Cuomo staffer pushed the theme in a phone call with me that night. Local 100 and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had made some progress but not on major issues like wages and health care costs, he whispered. The administration staffer would only talk on “background,” meaning his name or position was not to be printed.

“They are far apart on the big stuff,” the staffer said.

In reality, much of the contract had been hammered out by the two negotiators: MTA Chairman Tom Prendergast and TWU Local 100 President John Samuelsen. The two men had been meeting privately for days at MTA headquarters — and at Cuomo’s Midtown office.

On Thursday, the next day — the very next day after the staffer said the two sides were far apart — the White Knight announced that a new contract had been achieved.

“Everything was being orchestrated,” one government official familiar with the Holy Week crusade said to me afterwards. “All of it. The timing. When it was done. How it was done. Nothing was left to chance.”

Local 100 was more than willing to go along with whatever script came from Albany in order to get the deal, which doesn't have "zero" percent raises for any of the years it covers and beats the emerging municipal wage pattern.

“We’d stand on our heads if that’s what he wants us to do,” one union staffer said.

 ...

It was all in the script. Nothing left up to chance for a governor running for re-election.

Not much different than the Cuomo/Moskowitz charter rally, which was suggested by Cuomo's office to Moskowitz's people as a way to stick it to de Blasio on charters.

Cuomo runs his governorship the way many so-called "reality' shows are run - everything is totally scripted and nothing is left to chance.

How Union Contracts Get Covered In The Media

From the ever municipal union-friendly NY Post:

A day after the MTA offered its workers a new contract with retroactive pay, Mayor de Blasio insisted the deal doesn’t set a precedent for the city’s ongoing negotiations with its unions.

“We have a very different reality here — we have our fiscal circumstances. We have a separate history in terms of labor relations than that which state and MTA has,” the mayor said Friday at a press conference in Brooklyn.

“So we’re going to do things our own way with our partners in municipal labor.”

Chuck Brecher, research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, agreed that the proposed MTA deal — an 8 percent raise spread over five years — doesn’t directly impact the mayor’s options.

“He doesn’t have to be bound by any other model, and to the extent there’s been pattern bargaining, the pattern is usually what’s happened to other city unions rather than state,” Brecher said.

He estimated that if the city were to follow in the MTA’s footsteps the tab this year would run about $3.5 billion — and that doesn’t even include teachers-union demands for retroactive pay dating back to 2009.

The mayor has said previously there’s no way the city could afford to pay full retroactive pay to all 152 unions that have been working under expired contracts.

Ah, but when the state pattern was the old CSEA contract of 4% over 5 years, with three years of zeroes and health care concessions, that's when the editorial boards thought de Blasio should follow the state pattern (even though, as this Post article points out, pattern bargaining is relegated to what happens in city contracts, not state contracts.)

Funny how that is.

Even funnier is how the the MTA/TWU 100 deal is being talked about as if it's some grand giveaway, even though, as NYC Educator points out here, the MTA contract actually leaves TWU 100 workers a little bit behind inflation, so it's not that swell a deal at all.

Sure, the TWU contract is better than the CSEA contract pattern that came before, but it's still not replete with a "bunch of new goodies" as the Post's resident Ayn Randian specialist Nicole Gelinas says it is.

Somehow we've gotten to this point in American culture where any contract that pays union workers just below the rate of inflation, doesn't shove too many onerous work rules on them, and only nails them with a half percent in health care concessions is "full of goodies."

Meanwhile on Wall Street, the criminals at Bank of America and Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase continue to lose money hand over fist due to bad bets and/or criminal penalties lodged by the feds for fraudulent activity and yet, they still keep paying themselves more money.

Funny how that it is too.
 
Can't wait to see the Nicole Gelinas piece criticizing that.

Oh, right - that's the "free market".

You know, the one with the Too Big To Fail banks who took all those government bailouts after nearly taking the world economy to total collapse.

MTA/TWU Contract Agreement May "Set The Floor" For Other Contract Negotiations In City And State

First, some of the details of the contract:

Under the MTA pact, members of the TWU Local 100 would receive retroactive pay increases of 1% for each of the past two years and 2% increases in each of the following three years. The deal would also give the union employees paid maternity and paternity leave, as well as increased optical and dental benefits.

In a concession to the MTA, the employees would contribute 2% of their salaries for health-care benefits, up from 1.5%. 

A person familiar with the matter said that in another concession by the union, new hires wouldn't receive full pay rates until they worked five years. 

And the effect this contract agreement may have on other municipal and state contract negotiations:

The TWU's labor deal could have implications for other bargaining units within the MTA, and potentially set a pattern for a union of Long Island Rail Road employees who have been locked in their own labor battle with the agency.

New York City is also facing difficult negotiations with its some 350,000 workers who are also seeking back pay. The city says 152 of its collective bargaining units are without contracts, with the oldest expired as long as five years ago.

Rebecca Givan, assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, said the Transport Workers agreement could set a benchmark for other labor groups. "It sets a floor for the municipal unions," she said. "None of the municipal unions will now want to take anything less than this."

Harry Nespoli, head of the city's sanitation union and the Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella group of city unions, said he believes the retroactive pay increases in the MTA deal "definitely helps" the city unions in their negotiations with the de Blasio administration.

"Retroactive [pay] is very important to any of the unions that have been waiting for their contract," said Mr. Nespoli, whose union is without a contract for 2½ years.

As for concessions from the municipal unions, this contract agreement may set the floor for that too - the TWU agreed to health care concessions as part of the deal, something de Blasio wants from municipal unions:

Mr. Nespoli said he expected other unions that have outstanding contracts going further back than his union, notably the teachers union, will be settled before Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration moves to his union and others in a similar situation.

The mayor and top aides have said that the city is seeking concessions on health care, but Mr. Nespoli said he doesn't expect much progress there unless the city moves away from its position of no raises. Still, he said, the de Blasio administration deserves credit for engaging with the city unions.

"At least this administration is listening and is sitting down and talking to us and trying to get to some sort of settlement," Mr. Nespoli said. "And I hope we can get the settlement quicker than later."

One thing I'll say in this post regarding the UFT negotiations - I am completely against any health care concessions that has employees paying any of their health care.

Once that line is breached, every contract we'll be conceding more and more to health care costs.

You can see how that happened in this contract - from 1.5% for health care costs to 2%.

It goes up every contract, eating away whatever future raises you get.

I would rather take a zero on a year of retro than agree to pay any health care costs because in the long run, the 1% you get for a year of retro will be far outweighed by the money they take for health care costs that will just go up and up and up...

Best to keep the line on health care concessions for as long as you can, because once that line is breached, it never stops.

Funny What An Election Year Can Do To Politicians

Cuomo in January talking about contract negotiations:

Meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board Wednesday, the governor went out of his way to point out that he had negotiated state worker contracts that included three years of zero raises.

He did so in the aftermath of the national economic downturn, a time when inflation was essentially zero. Mayor Bloomberg took the same stance with the city’s unions, after having granted them generous raises for most of his tenure.

The unions chose to wait for the election of a new, presumably labor-friendlier mayor. They got de Blasio, and they now want him to ante up as much as $7.8 billion in back pay.

At the same time, Cuomo has taken his no-raise stance into negotiations over a lapsed contract that extends back to the same time period.

“We’re still trying to negotiate with the TWU, which is the subway workers’ union,” the governor said. “And it’s along the same parameters of three zeroes. So when you talk about the New York City labor unions and retroactive raises, that’s the pattern that has been set by the state unions: three zeroes.”

Asked if his fellow Democrat at City Hall should follow suit, Cuomo replied: “I don’t want to tell the mayor how to negotiate his contracts, but that’s how we negotiated ours.”

The message was clear: He wants de Blasio on the same page for the good of all taxpayers.

Cuomo yesterday:

Ending a two-year impasse, the MTA and the union for subway and bus workers in the city have agreed to a new contract that includes 8% raises over five years and no increase to the base fare, Gov. Cuomo announced Thursday.

The deal, brokered with the help of the governor, calls for the 34,000 members of the Transport Workers Union Local 100 to receive 1% retroactive pay raises for 2012 and 2013, and 2% pay increases for 2014 through 2016.

The deal also includes two weeks’ paid maternity and paternity leave, and improved dental and optical benefits.

“It was a long negotiation,” said Tom Prendergast, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “What we have here is a fair wage settlement for employees, an agreement consistent with our financial plan.”

The agreement, which must be approved by the MTA board, came after Local 100 President John Samuelsen wrote to Cuomo on Tuesday night, requesting that he help overcome stumbling blocks in negotiations.

The terms of the deal are likely to influence contract talks with several other MTA unions, particularly ones for LIRR workers.

Cuomo said the deal would have little bearing, however, on Mayor de Blasio’s efforts to reach settlements with 152 municipal unions whose workers are laboring under expired contracts.
“I think these are separate situations,” Cuomo said. “The mayor will negotiate his contracts separately.”

This contract deal shows how desperate Cuomo was to avoid labor strife in an election year, especially the kind that leads to strike threats from the subways and/or rail unions.

It now works for city unions as a nice argument against the city or the newspaper editorial boards when they say full retro/increases every year in a contract are not possible.

Hey, Cuomo signed off on them, of course they're possible, that's the response when the concern trolls at the News or Post say the city can't afford either.

And any argument that the CSEA pattern holds for the city negotiations, a dubious argument before hand, though one that was pushed by Cuomo, is dead with this TWU 100 deal.

Clearly Cuomo is feeling a little squirrel-y over his re-election campaign prospects or he wouldn't have pushed the MTA to break the CSEA pattern.

Too bad the TWU 100 leadership didn't press him more.

Given the flak Cuomo is taking over Moreland, given the worries Cuomo has about a third party candidate entering the race and taking votes away from him, given the concerns he has about his "liberal" base and the unions abandoning him, and given his need to avoid even the talk of a transit strike by either MTA or LIRR workers in the months leading up to Election Day, I think they could have ultimately gotten more than they got.

That said, municipal union negotiators should be smiling today because they just got an early Christmas gift for their own negotiations with NYC.

Except for the UFT, of course, who will no doubt look to make the worst deal possible regardless and tell us it "scrapes the skies."

More Details On TWU 100 Contract

More from Dana Rubenstein at Capital NY on the TWU 100 contract:

After two long years of stop-and-go negotiations, Governor Andrew Cuomo today announced that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Transport Workers Union had struck a tentative labor contract deal.

The announcement, which was light on details, includes five years of annual wage increases, including 1 percent in the first two years, and 2 percent in each of the final three years, paid maternity and paternity leave, improved optical and dental benefits, and, noted union president John Samuelson, pointedly, "no zeros."

"The union believes that we've achieved many of the goals that we set out to achieve," said Samuelson.

Though the deal, which represents most subway and bus workers, does include small worker increases in health care contributions ("from 1.5 to 2 percent," according to Prendegast), the deal comes with no specific work rule reforms and appears, as a whole, to be a win for the T.W.U.

And the effect on the city unions:

As Steven Greenhouse noted when he broke news of the impending deal yesterday: "if the transit workers receive a contract that contains substantial raises, that could increase pressure on Mr. de Blasio to award sizable raises, when the city already says it cannot afford."

I think one can say one definitive thing about this contract settlement:

Cuomo is not all that comfortable with his re-election prospects.

Otherwise he wouldn't have been pushing the MTA to break the pattern set for state contracts by CSEA back in 2011.

Cuomo Announces Contract Deal Between MTA And TWU 100 - Raises In Each Year + Full Retro (UPDATE - 3:27 PM)

Here's a TWU 100 update:

President Samuelsen, Gov. Cuomo announce tentative contract agreement giving raises in each year and fully retro. pic.twitter.com/zTC6OYDrmq
— TWU Local 100 (@TWULocal100) April 17, 2014

Cuomo was asked at the press conference if this new TWU 100 contract sets the pattern for city contracts (no link, I was watching it live.)

Remember that he said a few months ago that the state pattern set the pattern for the city too.

That was when the pattern was three years of wage freezes and 4% over the final two years of a five year contract - the pattern set by the CSEA contract in 2011.

But now Cuomo says the state pattern is "separate" from the city pattern, de Blasio has his own negotiations to handle that are separate from the state's.

Funny how that changed.

More later as we get more details on the contract.

The big news appears to be there is a raise in each year of the contract and full retro for TWU 100 workers.

But the devil is, as always, in the details.

UPDATED - 3:27 PM:

Cumulative impact of 5 years of raises in tentative MTA contract -- 1%, 1%, 2%, 2%, 2% -- would compound to just over 8.3%.
— Bill Hammond (@NYDNHammond) April 17, 2014

So less than half the 17% recommended by the federal panel but a little more than double the CSEA deal that set the pattern back in 2011.

Also, there's this:

Prendergast: Health-care contributions from MTA employees will go from 1.5% to 2% of salary.
— Bill Hammond (@NYDNHammond) April 17, 2014

Not a great deal, in my opinion, given the panel recommendations and the leverage the unions had over Cuomo in a re-election year when he in no way wanted even the threat of a summer subway or LIRR strike.

But the deal does allow the city unions to claim full retro has to be on the table since TWU 100 says that's what they got.

Daily News: Cuomo Stepping In To Broker MTA/TWU 100 Deal (UPDATE - 1:50 PM)

As surmised in this morning's NY Times piece, Governor Cuomo is indeed stepping in to broker a deal between the MTA and TWU 100 over deadlocked contract negotiations that has brought about the possibility of a summer transit strike hitting just months before Cuomo hopes to get re-elected:

Gov. Cuomo is stepping into the heated contract talks between the MTA and the union representing 34,000 transit workers, the Daily News has learned.

Cuomo has been claiming the three wage freeze CSEA and PEF agreed to as part of their five year contracts set a "state pattern" that city unions must follow in contract negotiations with de Blasio.

The MTA has stuck to the three year wage freeze and 2% in each of the final two years of a five year contract in their negotiations with TWU 100 despite an arbitration board handing over a non-binding deal that gives 17% raises over five years and no freezes.

If Cuomo brokers a deal that is anything different than what he forced CSEA and PEF to take early on in his administration, the state pattern is effectively broken from the one set in 2011.

I would argue that the state pattern has nothing to do with the city pattern in any case, but the argument that Cuomo (and apparently de Blasio, according to a PBA ad noted by James Eterno at ICEUFT blog) has been pushing, that the CSEA contract of 4% over 5 years with three years of wage freezes, sets the patterns for all city and state unions would effectively be dead.

This is something to watch closely because it has implications for city workers.

UPDATE - 12:45 PM: Here is what deal is supposedly on the table:

The MTA and the union representing subway and bus workers in the city are close to reaching an agreement on a new contract that would grant workers an 8% raise over five years, according to sources familiar with the talks.

Under the package now on the table, new hires would have to work for five years before reaching the top pay rate, an increase of two years, and worker contributions to health care costs would rise to 2% of base pay, from 1.5%, the sources said.

...

The potential breakthrough was being closely watched by workers in other MTA unions, particularly Long Island Rail Road employees, due to the possibility it could set a precedent. The MTA had previously insisted that workers accept a three-year wage freeze.

If true, this is nowhere near the 17% the arbitration board granted, but it does break the 4% over five years deal that CSEA took.

CORRECTION - 1:50 PM: Earlier I posted that ICEUFT blog had been sent information about the city's contract offer to the PBA. That was incorrect. ICEUFT blog was simply noting a PBA ad that had been run in the Daily News that said the police had been offered the CSEA pattern of a three year wage freeze and 4% over the final two years of a five year deal.

Cuomo May Break CSEA Contract Pattern For MTA, Has Implications For City Contract Negotiations

James Eterno at ICEUFT posted this morning that in its municipal contract negotiations the city is offering the pattern first set by Governor Cuomo and CSEA back in 2010 - a five year contract with 0% for the first three years, 2% in the fourth year and 2% in the fifth year.

Cuomo said publicly that the CSEA pattern set the pattern for municipal contracts as well as state contracts, although in the past these two patterns had been different.

But this morning the NY Times reports that Cuomo is on the verge of breaking the CSEA/PEF pattern to avoid an election-year transit strike at the MTA and LIRR:

More than two years after its contract expired, the union representing New York City’s subway and bus workers is involved in intense negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and appears on the cusp of reaching a new contract, union and government officials said Wednesday.

The officials said the union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, was likely to receive a sizable raise as part of a lengthy contract for 34,000 transit workers as the authority appears to have moved away from its earlier demands for a three-year wage freeze.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials had been insisting that unions at NYC Transit and the Long Island Rail Road accept the same three-year pay freeze that the main state employee unions had accepted, although labor leaders predicted that the demand would lead to a strike by railroad workers in July.

Vincent Pitta, a lawyer for the Transport Workers Union, said the anticipated deal for the union — by establishing a new, more generous pattern — could help avoid a railroad strike. Such a strike would affect 300,000 daily commuters and could hurt Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo when he is running for re-election.

“Frankly, it’s an election year,” Mr. Pitta said. “I don’t think any governor would want a strike on the Long Island Rail Road in an election year.”

Does de Blasio still get to claim the CSEA pattern if the TWU 100 gets a more generous pattern from the state?

Let's just say it changes things

Government officials are debating how a deal between the Transport Workers Union and the authority could affect the city’s own municipal labor talks. Governor Cuomo had been urging city officials to adhere to the three-year freeze pattern that he had won from the state’s unions, but the city’s unions were bridling at such a demand.

But if the Transport Workers win a contract that does not include such a pay freeze, that would mean there would be less pressure on Mayor Bill de Blasio to win a wage freeze.

At the same time, if the transit workers receive a contract that contains substantial raises, that could increase pressure on Mr. de Blasio to award sizable raises, when the city already says it cannot afford the billions of dollars in retroactive raises that the city’s municipal unions are seeking.

TWU 100 has Cuomo over a barrel and they ought to press their demands home.

He doesn't want a strike right before an election, particularly since the MTA doesn't have a leg to stand on by demanding the three year wage freeze after arbitrators returned a suggested deal that contained 17 percent wage hikes and no freeze.

And if TWU 100 gets a more generous pattern, then that breaks the CSEA/PEF pattern and neither Cuomo nor de Blasio can claim city unions have to take the three year wage freeze in a five year contract.

I would argue in any case that the CSEA contract doesn't set the pattern for city contracts, but if Cuomo steps in and forces the MTA to give TWU 100 anything other than a three year wage freeze and 4% over the last two years of a five year contract, the argument that the CSEA pattern stands for city contracts is dead.