Checking Union Privilege
According to Transport Workers Union chief John Samuelson, the MTA’s efforts to rein in overtime and pension abuse amount to “creating a hostile [work] environment.” Wow. Check your privilege, John. The reason your members — and workers represented by other MTA unions — face treatment as if they might be criminals is that some of them clearly are defrauding the public.
Sure, the very worst seem to be certain employees of the Long Island Rail Road, not the subway and bus workers repped by the TWU. But it wasn’t LIRR workers who cut the cables on new subway timeclocks meant to replace honor-system timesheets.
And kudos to MTA boss Pat Foye for requesting contract changes to let the agency deny and even revoke pension benefits for workers who commit overtime fraud — which regularly inflates pensions.
It’s not remotely guaranteed that the MTA will get those fixes. Samuelson is already threatening “strikes across the entire MTA system” over the issue, even though most of those strikes would be illegal.
And never mind that the objective evi
dence is that far too many workers have been claiming hours they couldn’t possibly have worked.
On the downside, the MTA’s financial projections now assume that it will get major cost savings from ending these abuses, as called for in the Transformation Plan pushed by Gov. Cuomo and endorsed by the Legislature.
The Citizens Budget Commission rightly notes that those estimated hundreds of millions in savings ignore “serious barriers to its implementation,” such as Samuelson, his fellow union bosses and their entrenched power. “Highly optimistic” is how the CBC terms that financial plan, and the watchdog is clearly right — unless the unions decide that the public has had enough.
Most MTA workers are not thieves, but their unions are determined to protect the thieves among them because . . . union solidarity?
More likely, labor leaders figure the average New Yorker is too blinded by pro-union sentiment to realize what a racket this is. Here’s hoping Cuomo, Foye and all the rest of management have the guts to put that to the test.