(The following article by Mac Daniel appeared in the Boston Globe on March 12.)
BOSTON — U.S. Representative Michael E. Capuano has asked federal auditors in the Department of Transportation to examine the commuter rail contract between the MBTA and Amtrak after union officials alleged that Amtrak has been using money for workers’ pay increases to help cover a $2.1 million budget miscalculation.
”It’s pretty serious in that you’re talking wages here,” said Capuano, a Somerville Democrat who serves on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, which has oversight over railroads.
Officials from the Transport Workers Union of America said this week that they want the audit to focus on what happened to the 5 percent annual increase in how much the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority pays Amtrak to operate the T’s commuter lines, which it has done since 1986.
Amtrak employees who work on the T’s commuter rail lines have been without a contract since December 1999 and have not had a raise, outside of cost-of-living increases, in 3 1/2 years.
The yearly 5 percent increases in what the MBTA pays Amtrak, which labor leaders said they did not know about, were revealed last December when MBTA general manager Michael H. Mulhern told a legislative panel the T had been paying Amtrak the annual increase to help cover ”increased labor costs.”
Union officials said last month they fear that Amtrak will leave Boston when the MBTA contract expires in June without giving raises to T workers. They also said they believe Amtrak officials are using the money to make back about $2.1 million in underestimated costs.
”Amtrak has allegedly taken the position that, if they do not have a new collective bargaining agreement with commuter rail workers in Massachusetts by the time their contract with the MBTA expires, they owe those workers nothing in the way of retroactive pay for the years in which the MBTA has been giving them money for these increased labor costs,” TWU railroad division manager Charles Moneypenny wrote to Capuano Feb. 27.
Capuano said he had already given the Department of Transportation’s inspector general an outline of the issue.
Amtrak officials yesterday said no pay had been withheld. The profit margin on the T contract is minimal, Amtrak spokesman Clifford Black said. He said the agreement paid for cost-of-living pay increases for employees and unforeseen higher costs for things such as overtime, fringe benefits, and medical coverage.
”The other issue is, did Amtrak pay our employees according to the collective bargaining agreements that we had with them? We did and continue to,” he said.
”There’s no money sitting anywhere,” Black added and declared, ”We’re not leaving Massachusetts with our workers’ money. Not at all, and we welcome an audit.”
The audit request and labor’s accusations are the latest spat in Amtrak’s long history of running the MBTA’s commuter rail lines, which ends June 30 when a new contractor, the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad, takes over the nation’s fifth largest commuter rail system under a $1.07 billion five-year contract.