(The following story by Gloria Campisi appeared on the Philadelphia Daily News website on March 9.)
PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia could be hit by a transit strike Monday if SEPTA doesn’t come up with a better contract offer than the bare- bones proposal one source says includes a health-care co-pay and no raises in the first two years of a four-year contract.
The proposal would amount to more than $50 a week out of pocket for bus drivers and other city division members of Transport Workers Union Local 234, the source said. SEPTA currently pays 100 percent of health care premiums for employees on the job more than 27 months, the source said.
SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney wouldn’t confirm the contract offer but said the transit authority faces a $70 million deficit in its $875 million 2005 fiscal budget beginning in July. The budget is required by law to be balanced.
“We’ve really entered our most serious fiscal crisis in a long time,” Maloney said.
“The fundamental problem is for the past roughly eight years, in only a couple of those has there been an increase in state subsidies for state transit,” Maloney said.
Despite its dire financial straits, Maloney said SEPTA could only “plan for the future with the assumption that help will arrive.”
Maloney said Local 234 has worked with SEPTA to appeal to Harrisburg for a “long term, predictable formula for state aid” but sufficient help is not expected anytime soon.
The threat of a strike brings to mind the 40-day walkout by Local 234 in 1998, the 10th strike in the last 15 contracts.
Negotiations continued yesterday. Local 234 president Jean Alexander couldn’t be reached but has called SEPTA’s contract offer “an insult.” At least 1,700 TWU members attended a union meeting Sunday and resoundingly voted to authorize a strike.
The source said SEPTA wants a 20 percent a week deductible for health care. SEPTA also reportedly wants workers to pay half of yearly health-care increases.
The source said the transit authority also wants to provide prescription coverage for only three years, rather than life, as it now does, for retirees.
SEPTA said annual costs for union member health and welfare benefits have risen to $45.5 million from $31.9 million in 2001.
The source said the wage proposal was “zero percent for the first two years, then 2 percent each year for years three and four.”
Average salary now is $47,840 a year, SEPTA said.
The contract covers about 4,700 bus, trolley, subway and Market-Frankford Elevated operators, vehicle mechanics and others in the city transit division. Suburban and regional rail employees are not covered by the same contract.
Eighty-five percent of SEPTA’s customers, about 871,000, ride city transit, according to a transit authority fact sheet.