NEW YORK — Averting a threatened strike, the transit workers’ union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday announced a tentative agreement that calls for a 6 percent raise over three years and an overhaul of a disciplinary system despised by the workers, according to the New York Times.
With New Yorkers bracing for days for an illegal strike that could have paralyzed the city, the two sides reached an accord that gives the authority one of its main objectives: a wage freeze in the first year.
Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union had vowed not to accept a pay freeze, which was one of the last issues settled, but the M.T.A. sought to soften the blow by giving the city’s 34,000 subway and bus workers a one-time $1,000 payment in the first year. Such a payment could ultimately save the authority tens of millions of dollars, because that percentage would not become part of the workers’ base pay in future years.
The agreement gives major gains to each side, with the union agreeing to several important measures to increase productivity and management promising to contribute more than $280 million to assure the solvency of the union’s health insurance plan. A strike would have meant millions of dollars in fines for the union and its members and possible jail time for its leaders.
At a news conference at 7:25 last night, Peter S. Kalikow, the authority’s chairman, said, “We think today marks a turning point in the relationship of the authority and its union. We want to go from confrontation to cooperation.”
The agreement calls for a pay freeze in the first year, 3 percent in the second year and 3 percent in the third. Union negotiators said that at the last minute management increased the raises in each of the last two years to 3 percent, from 2 percent, in order to keep the pay freeze. Gary J. Dellaverson, the authority’s chief negotiator, estimated that each 1 percent increase costs the authority $20 million a year.
The accord was reached after officials from the authority and union closeted themselves since Friday in the Grand Hyatt hotel in Midtown.
Looking drained and speaking slowly, Roger Toussaint, the union’s president, told a room packed with reporters and photographers, “We are very confident that this package will meet with the approval of the members of Local 100. It answers many of their needs, many of their urgent pleas especially in the area of health coverage.”
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Gov. George E. Pataki sought to head off a strike by repeatedly warning the union of severe penalties if it walked out and crippled the nation’s largest transit system, which carries 7.2 million riders a day.
Mayor Bloomberg, in a news conference outside City Hall last night, said he was gratified that the city would not have to confront the challenge of a transit strike, and that the transit workers ultimately had agreed to obey the law and not walk off their jobs.
“Thanks to their efforts,” Mr. Bloomberg said of the two sides, “New Yorkers can go back about their business without a strike looming over their heads.”
In interviews yesterday, some union members said they were satisfied with the agreement, but even those who were angered by the deal appeared resigned to it. The workers’ average salary is $44,000 a year.
Minutes after yesterday’s 12:01 a.m. contract deadline, Ed Watt, the union’s secretary-treasurer, announced that enough progress was being made to warrant stopping the clock and continuing negotiations without calling a strike.
During the day, while a strike was still possible, New Yorkers were taking subways and buses to work and school, but worried that the workers might walk out in the middle of the day. All in all, it felt a lot like a normal day for New York commuters in the crowded trains and buses, despite fears of an walkout.
In the late afternoon, a few hours before the settlement was announced, thousands of transit workers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and joined a coalition of teachers, municipal employees and other union loyalists in a sprawling twilight rally at City Hall Park.
“Make the crooks open the books,” the workers chanted, voicing skepticism about the $2.7 billion deficit the authority says it faces over two years.
Apparently unaware that a tentative agreement was impending, demonstrators beat drums, carried placards and chanted slogans that vented anger at Mayor Bloomberg and demanded a fair deal from the authority.
Many said their fight was about more than money. “They don’t want to give us anything, yet we continue to risk our lives to do our job,” Frederick Chapman, 36, a subway station agent for 11 years, said. “If we’re not safe, nobody’s safe.”
Clad in work jackets and uniforms, many having arrived straight from work, the transit workers — in a line that stretched for five blocks — were buffeted by icy winds up from the East River as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, chanting “Shut up Mike, where’s your bike,” and hoisting placards demanding “Abolish the M.T.A.” and “Audit the M.T.A.”
The marchers got a warm and noisy reception along the way — honking car and taxi horns, the siren of an ambulance driver, cheers from pedestrians, even applause by passengers on a city bus caught in traffic behind the protest.
“They deserve what they fight for,” Omar Perez, a Verizon technician, said aboard an M-22 bus that got stuck for 30 minutes.
For weeks, the talks appeared to be on a collision course because the union had new militant leadership that had promised its members a strong contract, while the authority had pleaded poverty, saying it could afford only a pay freeze in the first year and modest raises in subsequent years because of the deficit it faces.
In the three-year accord, the union — representing the largest municipal transit work force in the nation — agreed to many money-saving productivity measures, including merging the city’s two public bus systems and unifying their conflicting work rules. The transportation authority estimated that this move would save tens of millions of dollars to help finance raises.
Throughout the talks, Mr. Bloomberg said he was eager for the transit agency to win increased productivity measures to help reduce its deficit and set a precedent for the city’s coming contract talks with unions representing more than 200,000 workers.
Mr. Kalikow said, “The productivity measures that we asked for that have been granted in this new contract go a long way to modernize the M.T.A.”
In the agreement, the authority dropped its demand for the workers to pay an additional $1,000 a year in the contract’s third year to finance their pensions.
For the union, one of the most emotional issues was the authority’s disciplinary system, which many workers said was onerous and arbitrary. Last year, the authority issued about 15,000 citations against the union’s members, causing the union to protest that the rate of disciplinary actions was 10 to 20 times as great as at comparable employers.
In the new provisions revamping the disciplinary system, workers will be charged far less frequently with discipline violations when they are involved in an accident or when they are late filing documents required when they are out sick.
Marc Kagan, a union official who is an expert on the disciplinary system, predicted that the new contract would reduce disciplinary citations by at least 33 percent. As for the remaining citations, he said most of them would be handled through a less formal, less onerous process.
In agreeing to settle, the union avoided millions of dollars in fines, penalties and possible jail terms for its leaders. On Friday, Justice Jules L. Spodek of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn issued an injunction, invoking the state’s Taylor Law, which bars strikes and calls for two days’ pay for every day a worker was on strike.
But the union faced even larger financial penalties from a lawsuit that the city brought seeking $1 million in fines against the union on the first day of a strike, doubling each day thereafter, and seeking $25,000 from each worker, doubling each day. That lawsuit also sought $5 million to compensate the city for the expenses it said it had incurred on emergency preparations for the strike.
Mr. Bloomberg had estimated that the shutdown would cost the city’s economy $100 million to $350 million a day. He said he had not yet decided whether to proceed with his threat to seek damages from the union for the costs incurred by the city in drawing up its contingency plans.
The atmosphere around the talks soured badly in recent weeks for two reasons. First, two subway workers died on the job in accidents on successive days in late November, causing union members to accuse transit officials of giving short shrift to safety. Second, union members felt insulted on Dec. 5 when the authority made its first economic offer, which called for a wage freeze in the first year and raises in the second and third years only if the union agreed to productivity increase to pay for them.
Fueling tensions further, management asked for two significant givebacks: that the workers begin paying $1,000 a year in the contract’s last year toward their pensions, and that they pay about $500 more a year for their health coverage. Under the agreement, the workers will not have to pay the $22 health insurance premiums every two weeks that management had demanded, although they will have slightly higher co-payments for drugs and doctor visits.
The deal that was reached was far below the union’s original demands for a 8 percent raise each year for three years. Last week, the union reduced its pay proposals to 6 percent a year. Several city officials had said they were keeping a close eye on the transit talks because they recognized that its wage package and the productivity measures could set a pattern for District Council 37 and other municipal unions.
Over the past year, the transit workers held several angry demonstrations about their top concern — the solvency of the union’s health plan. In the agreement, union officials said, management agreed to pay $60 million the first year, $90 million the second and $130 million the third year to finance the health plan. Management officials said the first year’s contribution of $60 million was equal to a 3 percent across-the-board raise.
Under the agreement, the authority will contribute $2.4 million in the first year for a new child-care fund, $3.6 million for a new skills upgrading fund, and $10 million toward a new fund financing prescriptions for retirees too young to qualify for Medicare.
The two sides said they would make copies of the tentative agreement public today. Early this morning, the union’s 47-member executive committee ratified the agreement, with 75 percent approving. It recommended approval when the rank and file votes by mail later this month.