NEW YORK — As negotiators approached the limits of exhaustion early Monday morning, the city’s transit contract talks came down to a question of the value of the past, the New York Times reports.
In the end, in fact, the concessions on both sides may have had as much to do with symbolism as with anything else: the transformation of a culture. For the workers, it was a culture within the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that had become increasingly punitive and harsh. The authority, in turn, wanted the union to loosen a traditional grip on rules that it believed had been holding the transit system back in its drive for efficiency.
In the predawn hours Monday, with its contract expired and progress beginning to stall, the union agreed to abandon a system of inherited, antiquated contracts that effectively created two city bus systems — contracts the union had fiercely defended for decades at the bargaining table.
To top transit negotiators, the compromise meant the union was willing to sacrifice something it had long held sacrosanct. For Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, it was a deal ultimately worth making because the authority surrendered a part of its own past: a disciplinary system that had evolved over the years into a kind of police state, sowing fear and suspicion among the ranks of the union’s 34,000 workers.
In a cluttered suite on the 34th floor of the Grand Hyatt hotel, both sides came to terms with these pieces of history. What followed was a flood of wage numbers and other concessions on both sides that led over the next few hours, in fits and starts, to a 50-page agreement preventing a strike.
“All of the sudden, things that were hard became easier,” Peter S. Kalikow, the authority’s chairman, said in an interview yesterday. “That’s when we started to roll.”
The final agreement included a first-year wage freeze and a $1,000 one-time payment and handed workers a 3 percent raise over each of the last two years.
The long and sometimes harrowing path that led to that deal began not in an expensive hotel suite, but in a negotiating room in the basement of the Y.M.C.A. on West 63rd Street. On Dec. 5, during the city’s first winter snowstorm, the authority offered a proposal that, even in the context of bargaining, incensed the union’s leadership. It called for a wage freeze in the first year and raises later only if workers agreed to productivity increases.
Basil A. Paterson, the former deputy mayor who served as an adviser to Roger Toussaint, the union local’s president, recalled that “Toussaint hit the ceiling” when he saw the numbers, though Mr. Toussaint acknowledged privately to other union leaders that the proposal held out some glimmers of hope on health care, discipline and sick-leave policies.
But publicly, the animosity between the parties seemed only to grow in the days leading up to last weekend, as Mr. Toussaint refused to rule out an illegal strike and officials from both the city and the authority issued increasingly dire warnings about the consequences.
When the negotiators moved into the Grand Hyatt and began round-the-clock talks on Friday, the gulf between the two sides was huge. The union went on television to accuse the authority’s negotiators of failing to show up for one of the first meetings. E. Virgil Conway, the former M.T.A. chairman and a confidant of Gov. George E. Pataki, was brought in briefly to serve as a kind of mediator because of his friendly relationship with Mr. Paterson.
Most of the 34th floor of the hotel was transformed into a hive. Small committees haggled, sometimes loudly, drafting proposed agreements on lesser issues, printing them and passing them to larger committees to pass to the principals.
“You cannot imagine the amount of paper generated at these things,” said Lawrence G. Reuter, president of New York City Transit, the unit of the M.T.A. that operates subways and buses.
The only early progress was made in child care issues and discussions with Mr. Reuter about improving safety procedures, after the deaths of two track workers last month.
But while the union was in the process of reducing its wage demands to 6 percent a year from 8 percent, the authority only inched forward in its proposal on Friday — a freeze in the first year, a $1,000 one-time payment in the second and a 2 percent raise in the third. The union, which was tersely reporting to the news media that no progress was being made, actually saw the new wage proposal as an affront and warned the authority not to let it out of the negotiating room.
“We told them coldly, `You go public with that and you may have a problem,’ ” Mr. Paterson said. ” `We might just leave the hotel. Our members will be radicalized by that.’ ” But the numbers remained unchanged, and most of the talks broke off at 2 a.m. Saturday with little resolved.
The negotiators were back at the table just after dawn Saturday and began slow movement in other areas not having to do directly with money, like easing the disciplinary process and ending the system in which many employees calling in sick were investigated.
“There were only several hours a day, literally — as in two or three — that I was not across the table from someone,” said Gary J. Dellaverson, the authority’s chief negotiator.
On Saturday afternoon, for the first time, Mr. Dellaverson presented the union with specific proposals for eliminating the separate bus system, the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority, which absorbed private bus routes in 1962 and was later absorbed by what was then the Transit Authority.
The union defended the system because it thought that merging the two would cause some workers to lose rights and benefits. Transit officials complained that its rules hamstrung them, meaning, for example, that a bus from the Bronx that broke down near a bus garage in Midtown could not be fixed there but had to be towed back to the Bronx.
“Everybody had a hot button, and that was one of ours,” Mr. Kalikow said, adding that discussions often grew heated, with profanity and threats by both sides to walk away.
The two sides were also haggling over the authority’s contribution to the union’s health insurance plan, to ensure its solvency. Mr. Kalikow argued forcefully that the contribution left the authority with little money for raises and only then in exchange for greater productivity. The issue was crucial for the union because in a recent poll, its members said health care was their primary concern.
But the authority had still moved little on its wage offer, insisting on a first-year freeze. Mr. Toussaint, for one, said he believed that Governor Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, looking ahead to contract talks with other unions, were influencing the bargaining.
“The zero reflected outside interference in the talks, and I don’t think that was the M.T.A.’s starting position,” Mr. Toussaint said.
Mr. Kalikow acknowledged that he and Katherine N. Lapp, the M.T.A.’s executive director, were in close contact with Mr. Pataki and Deputy Mayor Marc V. Shaw throughout the talks. But Mr. Kalikow said the mayor’s office was concerned mostly not with numbers, but with whether to gird for a strike.
By Sunday night, the issues of discipline and safety were beginning to reach their final form, but the bus dispute remained on the table. As the midnight contract deadline approached, Mr. Kalikow said talks intensified to such a point that the bargainers lost track of time. “I said to someone, `It’s two minutes to go to the deadline,’ ” he recalled. “And they said to me, `Peter, it’s two minutes to two.’ ”
Mr. Kalikow said yesterday that he could not recall exactly when the bus agreement came and the rush toward a deal began. He remembers only that he was in his room watching “The French Connection” — whether it was the first movie or the sequel he is not sure — when he was summoned back to the table.
Arthur Z. Schwartz, a lawyer for the union, said he saw Mr. Toussaint later that night, or actually very early Monday, after other important deals had quickly been reached on a worker training fund and prescription health coverage for retirees.
“Roger looked like he was going to die,” Mr. Schwartz said. “He clearly had to go to sleep.”
By the time the sun came up Monday, the authority had given significant ground on its wage offer and the deal-making began to change into a game of fractions and final concessions. Even the most seriously sleep-deprived began to come alive again.
“The glands were functioning,” Mr. Paterson said. “People thought it was coming to closure, and that gives you a lot more energy.”