NEW YORK — Four top union leaders on the MTA’s Metro-North are drawing full salaries from the railroad while collecting second paychecks from their controversial new union, according to the New York Daily News.
The double-dipping began in late 1999.
In 2000, the first full year of the arrangement, Anthony Bottalico, general chairman of the Association of Commuter Rail Employees (ACRE), was paid $70,557 by Metro-North and released full-time from his conductor’s job to take care of union business.
He also received $65,000 from the union treasury the same year.
Michael Doyle, the union’s general chairman of engineers, was paid $85,800 by the company in 2000 to do union work full-time.
Doyle also received more than $30,000 from the union.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials and ACRE leaders insist there’s nothing wrong with these double salaries.
But none of the railroad’s half-dozen other labor unions get the same kind of treatment, which is unprecedented for rail workers and would be highly unusual for other unions.
“It’s a sweetheart deal,” said Dennis Boston, a vice president with the Brotherhood of Railway Signalmen, another Metro-North local. “They’re union leaders paid by the company.”
The unusual arrangement began shortly after Doyle and Bottalico, who were leaders of separate conductor’s and engineer’s locals, launched a fight to decertify their AFL-CIO affiliates and start a new independent union.
Both locals voted to join ACRE by margins of nearly 10-to-1, according to Doyle.
Opponents of the move say that Doyle and Bottalico founded ACRE with MTA backing. They have filed complaints with the federal Labor Mediation Board and with the U.S. Department of Labor.
They charge that Metro-North violated federal railway law by subsidizing ACRE and interfering with the right of employees to choose their own union.
‘No undue influence’
Metro-North spokeswoman Donna Evans rejects accusations that the company colluded with ACRE. Choosing a union is “a decision made by those employees,” Evans said. “That’s not an appropriate role for us.”
“There was no undue influence from Metro-North,” Doyle said.
But the timing of the special deals for Doyle and Bottalico certainly raises questions.
According to Metro-North documents obtained by the Daily News, on Dec. 17, 1999, Raymond Burney, the railroad’s director of labor relations, sent the following E-mail to the company’s manager of manpower control:
“Please arrange, until further notice, for the paid release of Engineer M. Doyle, Emp. #103401, from his regular assignment.
“Mr. Doyle should be paid the earnings of that assignment and to that end may be coded on the payroll as being on light duty… effective immediately.”
Light-duty assignment, under MTA rules, is reserved for injured employees. Doyle was not injured at the time.
The Burney memo was written only weeks after Doyle filed a petition with the federal Labor Mediation Board for a membership vote to choose ACRE as their bargaining unit.
Railroad spokeswoman Evans said the timing of that full-time release for Doyle and Bottalico had nothing to do with the union election.
Less disruption
“We were introducing a new crew management system at the time,” she said.
“We needed to get a lot of crew scheduling information into a new database and needed people from the union who were in a decision-making capacity to help us.”
In the old days, she said, whenever a union rep left his railroad post for a few hours to negotiate an issue with a company manager, that person had to be replaced with another worker. Now, Evans says, with four union officers paid full-time to expedite union grievances, there is less disruption and more efficiency.
ACRE subsequently has won votes to represent smaller groups of yardmasters and dispatchers. The new union is seeking a vote to represent the railroad’s 275 signalmen.
“They’re trying to raid all the other unions with the financial backing of the MTA,” Boston said.