Deal to end LIRR strike leaves New Yorkers – Latest News
Chalk up one other overly beneficiant contract deal for the Long Island Rail Road unions — on the public’s expense.
The MTA and 5 holdout LIRR unions reached a deal Monday evening, ending a crippling three-day strike and avoiding more turmoil, simply because the area will get set for Memorial Weekend.
More excellent news: Gov. Kathy Hochul claims the deal doesn’t “compromise affordability for Long Islanders” or “require any additional fare increases or tax increases.”
Cross your fingers she’s proper.
The settlement was seemingly the best the public can hope for — given the union’s capability to strangle the area with a strike, New York pols’ heavy pro-labor tilt and that it’s an election 12 months.
(Even Hochul’s GOP rival, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, shamefully urged her to cave to the unions.)
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But the unique hope was for the 5 unions to settle for the identical raises — totaling 9.5% over three years — all the opposite unions accepted.
Instead, they demanded an outrageous 6% raise for a fourth 12 months, then lowered the ask to a still-outrageous 5% and, although particulars are usually not totally obtainable, reportedly wound up with a 4.5% enhance, with simply minor give-backs in exchange.
That higher-than-inflation raise, by the way in which, is on prime of salaries that already make them among the many highest-paid rail employees within the nation.
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And on prime of obscene six-digit yearly time beyond regulation pay.
And on prime of weird work-rules that permit them acquire up to three days’ pay for a single day’s work.
Plus, their deal will set a sample for the highly effective Transport Workers Union.
New Yorkers ought to hope that is the final time a measly 3,500 grasping union employees, serving 300,000 every day riders, are allowed to maintain an complete area hostage by threatening a strike.
Unfortunately, although, the blackmail will proceed till Congress fixes the federal Railway Labor Act, which, in contrast to New York’s Taylor Law, lets LIRR employees take such job actions.
New Yorkers who need to end such thuggery need to press their representatives — Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, native congressmen — to repair the Railway Labor Act.
The Taylor Law, which outlaws strikes for many public-sector employees in New York, is there for a purpose: Public companies — like transportation — are just too important to permit them to be held on the mercy of self-interested unions.
Without a federal repair, it’s solely a matter of time earlier than the area finds itself going through the identical extortion because it did this week.
