(The following article by Dan Geringer was posted on the Philadelphia News website on September 30.)
PHILADELPHIA — Six months of a tense truce between SEPTA and the Transport Workers Union will end Sunday when 4,600 members, who have worked without a contract since March and without a raise for nearly two years, will meet to discuss a strike.
“We are tired of waiting,” declared Local 234 president Jeff Brooks in his notice to members, which appeared on the union’s Web site yesterday. “To get a fair contract, we are prepared to act. We can and will strike.”
This is a sudden, ominous change from Brooks’ long-held and oft-stated belief that SEPTA management was trying to “bully” the union into striking but that the union “refused to take the bait.”
Since the old contract expired in March, talks between Local 234 and SEPTA management have gone nowhere.
The bone of contention is that SEPTA wants all Local 234 members to co-pay for health care.
The union maintains that its members have historically co-paid only during their earliest years of employment and have sacrificed substantial pay raises in later years in exchange for SEPTA-funded health benefits.
Brooks has often said that members refuse to “pay twice for decent health care” by co-paying for benefits after having sacrificed pay raises to get SEPTA-paid health care.
No new contract means no pay raises for TWU members. So hostilities between the two parties are building toward a climax: Either there’s agreement on a new contract or there’s a union strike that would cripple the city’s public-transit system.
“There will be news coming out of Sunday’s meeting,” union spokesman Bob Bedard promised. “SEPTA has not changed its position at all, and we’re running out of options as to how to help SEPTA change its position.”
Said SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney, “We haven’t changed our position and we’re not going to. It is obvious to the public that the prime issue is health care and that [union] employees will be contributing in some measure to their benefits.
“Are we panicking? No. At some point in time, reality has to hit and [union] employees will have to start paying something for their health care. We believe we can do a contract.”
Bedard was skeptical. “We expect to make a major announcement Sunday about our next steps to secure a contract that SEPTA has dragged its feet on for almost a full year,” he said.
“SEPTA is forcing us to act by not making any compromise, any movement in the negotiations. If SEPTA won’t act with us, then we will act alone.”
Maloney disagreed. “It has been the union that has extended this contract repeatedly since last March, time and time again,” he said. “We have tried in every possible way to get them to the table.
“We believe, as we have said since April, that they certainly know, in intimate detail, the parameters of an agreement, and it’s now a matter of sitting down and negotiating those final items.”
Sunday’s expected strike threat has put a damper on this week’s good news that, in the wake of soaring gasoline prices, SEPTA’s weekday ridership is up an average 25,000 as drivers realize that public transit can be a much cheaper way to commute to work than their automobiles.
“Last September, we had 750,000 riders per weekday; this September, we have 775,000,” Maloney said. “The biggest jumps are in the city transit division. Subways are able to absorb the increase, but we do have some standing-room-only on bus lines.
“If ridership continues to grow like this, we will have to consider expansion of our lines.”
Maloney said that SEPTA’s Web site – www.septa.org – is recording 186,000 weekday hits, a 64,000-hit daily jump from last September’s 122,000.
Maloney speculated that thousands of new SEPTA riders, driven to use mass transit by the prohibitive price of gasoline, are using the Web site to learn the system.
The immediate problem for both SEPTA and TWU Local 234 is to negotiate a new contract and keep that system running for its 775,000 riders.