(The following article by Tina Moore and Mitch Lipka was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on October 4.)
PHILADELPHIA — Workers who make the city’s buses, subways and trolleys run – serving 700,000 riders a day – will strike beginning at 12:01 a.m. Oct. 31 if they cannot reach a contract agreement with SEPTA, union officials announced yesterday.
Members of Transport Workers Union Local 234 – SEPTA’s largest union – reacted with cheers and a standing ovation when they learned of the strike deadline yesterday morning at a meeting inside the Sheet Metal Workers union hall on Columbus Boulevard, according to people who attended. More than 1,000 of the Transport Workers Union’s 5,000 members turned out for the private session.
Their contract with SEPTA expired on March 15. Terms of that agreement were extended twice. On June 15, neither SEPTA nor the union agreed to a third extension. Since then, union members have been working on a day-to-day basis as contract talks have stalled over health-care issues.
“We’ve used every possible venue known to man to try to get a deal,” Jeff Brooks, president of Local 234, said at a news conference after yesterday’s membership meeting. “Unfortunately, SEPTA has taken a position that has been nothing but regressive.”
SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney accused the union of choosing a strike date that would “create chaos” for thousands of riders.
“A transit strike at this time of year would create conflict for hundreds of schoolchildren, university students, and for businesses during the critically important holiday-shopping season,” Maloney said.
Bus, subway and trolley service would be suspended in the city, along with 19 bus routes in Montgomery and Bucks Counties. A strike would not affect the regional rails that provide transportation between the city and suburbs.
The last SEPTA strike was in 1998 and lasted 40 days.
Both sides said the main stumbling block in contract talks has been proposed increases in health-care premiums. Brooks said SEPTA wants the members to pay 20 percent of their health-care premiums. Those members have gone without pay raises in recent years, he has said, in exchange for SEPTA picking up the tab on their health care.
Members are also fighting a SEPTA proposal that future retirees not receive lifetime prescription benefits, as current pensioners do.
Maloney said yesterday that the financially strapped authority, which projected a $92 million deficit this year, had no choice but to seek such concessions.
SEPTA’s board, Gov. Rendell and other state elected leaders “are all unanimous that, in this contract, SEPTA employees are going to have to pick up part of their health-care premium,” Maloney said.
In June, Rendell secured the shift of $215 million from federal road and bridge projects to SEPTA to help the transit agency cover deficits through December 2006. In its budget, SEPTA called the funding boost a “short-term response to an enduring crisis.”
SEPTA has been running deficits for years, something the agency blames on increases in health care and fuel costs and the slow growth in the state’s contribution – its largest subsidy.
SEPTA’s $952 million budget, which went into effect July 1, is predicated on an increase in contributions to the cost of health care by Local 234’s veteran members.
Yesterday, union members were in no mood for givebacks.
Many carried signs demanding that SEPTA management pay for their health-care insurance. One sign read: “22 months and no pay raise equals strike.”
Union member Marshall Kelly of Glenolden, Delaware County, left the meeting ready to strike. Kelly, who has six children between the ages of 11 and 22, has spent the last six months putting money away in anticipation of a walkout.
“Everybody’s for the president of our union,” the 47-year-old transit mechanic said. “He’s waited this long, he’s been trying to negotiate, and it’s time.”
Tony Jackson, 46, who drives buses between Philadelphia and the Plymouth Meeting Mall, where hundreds of city residents are employed, said he regrets that a strike might be necessary.
“What happens to the people out there who don’t have cars and won’t be able to get to their jobs?” he asked. “They have bills to pay. I feel bad…
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“Nobody needs a strike – the people, the passengers. But, at the same time, everybody wants fairness.”
Brooks said that Philadelphia residents dependent upon SEPTA should reach out to elected, community and religious leaders for help.
“Get in touch with your legislators, get in touch with your churches,” he said. “Essentially, the people who will be hurt the most will be right here in the city.”