NEW YORK — In announcing the deal that averted a transit workers’ strike, leaders of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said they had won productivity gains to help pay for the 6 percent wage increase in a new three-year contract, according to the New York Times.
But authority officials indicated yesterday that the productivity measures they obtained would not cover the $180 million cost of those raises, an admission that could undercut Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s efforts to wrest similar productivity concessions from the city’s work force.
Peter S. Kalikow, the authority’s chairman, said in an interview that the main new efficiency measure obtained in the agreement was merging the public bus system for Manhattan and the Bronx with the transit authority system in the three other boroughs. But he repeatedly refused to specify how much money such a merger would save, acknowledging that it would be considerably less than the cost of the raises.
In the first wage offer it made on Dec. 5 to the city’s 34,000 subway and bus workers, the authority said pay increases in the contract’s second and third years would have to be financed by productivity improvements. In an indirect estimate of the contract’s savings, Mr. Kalikow said yesterday that the productivity measures would pay for the raises in the contract’s second year, valued at $60 million, but would not pay for the $120 million in raises in the third year. In its first year, the contract calls for a wage freeze and a one-time payment of $1,000 per worker.
Mr. Kalikow defended the settlement, saying, “The savings will bear a reasonable relationship to the wage increases that were granted.”
But he acknowledged that the transportation authority had failed to obtain one of its main productivity goals, a concept called broadbanding, in which workers take on additional responsibilities that are not part of their regular job assignments. As an example, authority negotiators said they hoped to win new broadbanding work rules so that a subway cleaner might also be able to change light bulbs.
“We didn’t get everything we wanted,” Mr. Kalikow said. “That’s the way negotiations work. We would have liked broadbanding. Maybe they’ll give us some of that next time. Remember, they didn’t get all the money they wanted.”
Minutes after the settlement was announced on Monday night, negotiators for Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union were boasting that they had agreed to hardly any concessions on productivity, other than the bus merger. That merger combines New York City’s buses, garages and work forces in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island with the operations of the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority.
“We gave up very little in the way of productivity concessions,” said Arthur Z. Schwartz, a lawyer for the union.
The transit workers thus continued in the tradition of a long string of New York City unions, including the police and District Council 37, that have successfully rebuffed efforts of mayors and M.T.A. heads to secure productivity increases.
Mayor Bloomberg has placed productivity gains at the center of his labor strategy, saying the city cannot grant raises to its workers unless they agree to efficiency measures, like work-rule changes, that would finance the pay increases. He outspokenly backed the transit authority’s goals of winning new efficiency measures.
At a news conference yesterday, he praised the authority’s success at reaching an agreement without a strike, and he laid out the bargaining strategy for a city facing a $6 billion deficit.
“If we give raises to municipal employees and in the private sector, we’re going to have to find productivity enhancements to generate the monies,” he said. “There just isn’t any cash.”
In the past, transit officials have made vague estimates that the bus merger could save tens of millions of dollars by unifying work forces, work rules and operations and by cutting administrative costs. For example, the merger might make the bus system more productive, transit authority officials said, by increasing ridership through the creation of more attractive bus routes connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Marc Kagan, one of the union’s top negotiators, said the savings from the bus merger might be a few million dollars a year, not tens of millions. Union officials said the merger would mean one significant cost increase for the M.T.A.: 5,500 Manhattan and Bronx bus workers would have their annual sick leave, currently 5 days, increased to 12 days, to match that of the bus workers in the other three boroughs.
The bus deal “is the only item that can be described as a productivity piece,” said Roger Toussaint, the union’s president. “They insist on characterizing our settlement as productivity when it isn’t. They’re trying to set a framework to corral all the other labor unions in the next rounds of negotiations.”
Mr. Toussaint said the merger “is an efficiency measure; it’s not really a productivity measure.”
Mr. Toussaint criticized the mayor’s strategy of granting raises only if unions agreed to productivity gains to pay for them.
“Productivity is put forward as a question of givebacks,” he said, adding that it would be wiser to treat productivity increases as shared gains for all. In effect, he said, the mayor is telling union members that their wages cannot keep pace with the cost of living unless they surrender gains won in previous years.
While the M.T.A.’s contract proposal said raises should be financed by productivity increases, Mr. Kalikow said yesterday that the agency had always meant that only the second year’s raises were to be financed that way. He said raises for the third year would be financed by something else as yet unspecified.
But others said transit authority officials had initially sought to have productivity increases finance any raises.
“It was my understanding that the initial position articulated by the M.T.A. was that all of the raises would have to be funded by productivity gains,” said Charles Brecher, the research director of the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed research group. “It was pretty absolute. It paralleled the mayor’s position.”
Noting that he had not yet seen the specifics in the contract, Mr. Brecher said, “If the productivty savings do not pay for the raise it would be a big disappointment for people who believe in these difficult times you should be following that policy.”