(The following article by Dan Geringer was posted on the Philadelphia Daily News website on October 4.)
PHILADELPHIA — Vowing that SEPTA’s 4,600 Transport Workers Union members will strike on Oct. 31 if they don’t get a new contract, Local 234 president Jeff Brooks yesterday angrily declared, SEPTA “can’t gut our health care.”
He accused the transit agency of “buffaloing and bullying us out of what we have” by insisting that union members co-pay for health benefits.
Then he promised the thousand union members packing yesterday’s meeting, “It’s not going to happen in this lifetime.”
Negotiations between SEPTA and its largest transit union have gone nowhere since the old contract expired in March.
Local 234 members have been working without a contract since then, and without a raise for almost two years. But the hot-button issue isn’t raises.
“Since this started in March, you have never heard me say anything about wages,” Brooks said.
For almost two decades, union members have co-paid early in their careers, then enjoyed SEPTA-paid health benefits for most of their employment and during retirement.
SEPTA claims that sharply rising costs of health care now require all union members to co-pay throughout their careers.
But Brooks asked what happened to the nearly $100 million that he says union members have saved SEPTA by foregoing years of raises and by co-paying for health care early in their careers.
Mark Hilton, a SEPTA bus operator for 23 years, left the union meeting ready to strike because, he said, the current health plan is what kept his wife alive and as comfortable as possible during her losing battle with cancer.
“My wife died of cancer a year- and-a-half ago,” he said quietly. “I could never have afforded the bone marrow transplants, the chemotherapy and the expensive drugs she needed if it wasn’t for that health-care plan. That’s why I’d go out on strike to fight for it.”
“I served in the military,” Hilton said. “I pay my taxes. You have to remember that SEPTA isn’t paying for our health care with private corporate dollars. It’s government tax money.
“If the government can send my tax dollars to Iraq or use them to build the Avenue of the Arts, why can’t they spend my tax dollars to pay for my health care and for treatments my wife needed while she was fighting cancer?”
Brooks said, “We will continue to negotiate in good faith, but I need somebody on the other side of the table to do it with. Unfortunately, the [SEPTA] people sitting at the table are… asking for something that is obscene.”
SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney accused the union of threatening to strike when it would cause “chaos” by disrupting the lives of 700,000 daily commuters – schoolchildren and their working families, city business people who depend on holiday shoppers and 25,000 new workday riders who are taking transit to cut down on their use of high-priced gasoline.
Maloney said that SEPTA’s position on health care hasn’t changed since April – when he publicly said, “The health insurance issue is the elephant sitting at the bargaining table… It’s time for Mr. Brooks to look the elephant in the eye.”
Maloney said then, and repeated yesterday, that SEPTA’s position on union members’ co-paying for health care “would not change in the future.”
Brooks characterized SEPTA’s unchanging stance as dealing with “mannequins” at the bargaining table.
“How do you sit down with people who treat you like a disease?” he asked. “If SEPTA wants to save money, they should cut back on the amount of people who are dead wood,” instead of demanding that “working people” give up their SEPTA-paid health care.
Principal negotiators from both sides are scheduled to meet later this week.