LABOR PEACE AT CTA
Board approves 4- year pact with retroactive pay bringing raise to 9.5%
Labor peace is now locked in at the CTA through the 2019 mayoral and aldermanic election.
The Chicago Transit Authority board made certain of it Wednesday by signing off on a new fouryear agreement that guarantees CTA bus drivers, motormen and mechanics a 9.5 percent pay raise, with 5 percent of it retroactive to Jan. 1, 2016. The average retroactive paycheck will be $ 3,500.
Equally important to the roughly 9,000 members of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union Locals 241 and 308 is the freeze on health care contributions during the course of a contract that expires on Dec. 31, 2019.
CTA President Dorval Carter Jr. insisted Wednesday that the cost of the agreement — $ 45 million for increased wages alone — would not force the CTA to raise fares again or cut service. Instead, the added labor costs will be covered by “internal cost savings and efficiencies” — on top of the $ 23 million in cuts already included in the 2018 budget.
Last fall, the CTA board raised fares — the cost of single bus and rail rides went up by 25 cents — to cover a $ 33 million shortfall.
“CTA’s got money. The money doesn’t dry up. The money doesn’t disappear. It’s all a matter of where the money is going to be moved,” said Local 308 President Ken Franklin.
Keith Hill, newly elected president of Local 241, called the health care freeze his “No. 1” objective going in and the “major feat” he accomplished.
“We just held our guns to it. . . . Health care is so uncertain in today’s world — and it’s rising. It’s eating up the middle- class paycheck. The only way that we could see anything was to” freeze employee contributions, he said.
A “no- layoff” guarantee will be extended to all employees hired before 2010, instead of those hired before 2008. That guarantees job protection to 83 percent of the CTA’s unionized workforce, instead of 60 percent.
Hill also highlighted a provision allowing employees to pick more than 46 hours in a work week as giving “senior people the chance to go back to controlling their life vs. the company controlling their life with their work schedules.”
“When I drive, I like to pick the same run every day. That gets me familiar with the customers. I can give better customer service, which attracts more people to the bus. But restrictions they had on the amount of hours we could pick made it difficult for a senior person to stay on a route five days a week,” he said.
“We got that back to where that person can now pick straight across. It reduces accidents, gets us familiar with the customers and we can deliver better service.”
Franklin said the contract was ratified by 75 percent of his members, primarily because, “We didn’t give up anything. We didn’t swap any contractual benefits we had in the past. . . . We got a freeze, if you will, on the health care for two years. That gives me time to prepare a different health care argument.”
The four- year contract was the product of 24 months of bargaining, followed by stern advice from an arbitrator who reviewed the CTA’s “final proposal,” Franklin said.
“He warned us that this isn’t a bad deal and he doesn’t know if he could do better and, if we go through a full- blown arbitration, they’re gonna get some things and we’re gonna get some things. So, we took where we were to the membership,” Franklin said.