Toussaint in the Toilet (continued)

A few weeks ago I wrote in this space that the underlying motivations driving Roger Toussaint to end the transit strike had nothing to do with the union membership or the motivation to restore a normally functioning transit system, but rather the sinking feeling that accompanies a major, costly gaffe. This happened when a firefighter riding his bicycle to work was hit by a private bus in the traffic chaos that ensued during the strike. As luck would have it, that fireman happened to be the son of Michael Long, saloonkeeper and Chairman of the state Conservative Party. Since the strike was ruled illegal from the start, any lawsuit by the Long family, who have access to all the city’s top law firms, is guaranteed to be a slamdunk in New York’s politically motivated court system.

Toussaint and the union leadership, as well as the union at large, stand to forfeit millions if ruled criminally negligent, which is a sure bet.

Now, in the latest reversal for this knucklehead, his union has refused to ratify the contract he reached with the MTA by seven votes, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Seven votes! Whatta’ putz! Now he has to go back to negotiations and start from the beginning.

I currently know more about negotiating a labor agreement than any other writer in New York City. I didn’t just cover a labor contract, I negotiated one with a bakery union while I was working as Manager for Industrial Relations for a large industrial bakery, a job I left when the boss decided to give me the same kind of screwing we had just administered to the union, reinforcing once again, ladies and gentlemen, the old adage that there’s no honor among thieves ha-ha!

I attended all the negotiating sessions as part of a two-man negotiating team, the other member being the company president, a coarse piece of work if ever there was one, except in the cases where he had pulled a particularly nasty piece of deception on the union and was ashamed to show his rubber Halloween mask of a face, in which case I appeared alone. In addition, I wrote all the documentation for the negotiations, neither the company nor the union employing anybody literate enough in either English or Spanish to compose more than a one-sentence estimate of the anatomical attributes of each other’s mothers.

In the preparation of this documentation and the development of negotiating strategy, I was counseled by one of the nation’s ablest labor attorneys, paid at the rate of $400 and hour by my employer, so you might say that over the course of the sixteen months that the contract negotiations took place, I received a very adequate grounding in labor relations as they are currently practiced in this country.

I might add that as a result of these negotiations, the management that I represented achieved a resounding, groundbreaking victory over a union which is so corrupt and exploitative as to give a bad name to the concept of racketeering.

The whole process was so absurd and ridiculous that it can only be portrayed in terms of fiction, which I am currently doing as part of my San Juan Bagels series of short stories, some of which are included in these blogs.

But in this essay I will stick to the facts as I see them. It may be imperfect (I’m no genius), but I believe my recent experience as a labor negotiator can help me to shed some light on the current cul-de-sac in which we as transit users find ourselves. Certainly, I am better qualified to interpret these processes than any other writer in New York City, most of whom have never even held a real job at all.

It is my experience that since labor unions are functionally illiterate entities, they relay on massive amounts of hot air to get their message across, either by screaming and yelling it or by injecting it into gigantic inflatable rats. The same can be said for industrial managers, most of whom have a very superficial grounding in the philosophical precepts formulated by Rousseau or Voltaire. The end result in this instance was some very unfortunate sound bites by Roger Toussaint in which he tried to ground the contract negotiations in terms of social justice and the struggle for civil rights as embodied by the historical example of Rosa Parks because she was black and the thing happened on a bus. This satisfied nobody except the newspaper writers, who used it to nail Toussaint to a cross of railroad ties.

The real action was over givebacks, management insisting on worker contributions to their medical insurance and pension fund, and the union insisting on MTA givebacks of previous pension fund contributions that they felt they had overpaid.

Toussaint and his cronies on the TWU executive board, having lived off the fat of the land in the form of union dues for many years, adopted a very strident and militant stance against management to show the rank and file that they were not too fat from gorging themselves like the Goodyear blimp to step up to the plate and fight for the workers’ interests. They called an illegal strike the week before Christmas, paralyzing the city in the midst of its shopping frenzy and went to feast on lobster ravioli like Diamond Jim Brady in a fancy restaurant in Harlem.

This whole pipedream burst like an overstuffed ravioli in Roger Toussaint’s ample midsection when Michael Long’s firefighter son got hit by a bus in the midst of the ensuing traffic chaos, and the union executive, quaking in their Gucci loafers, immediately ordered the strike ended.

Meanwhile, the MTA management, every bit as accomplished a gang of plunderers as the union, came to the realization that they had to loosen up a little bit on the purse strings to return New York to relative normalcy.

They negotiated a reasonable contract that extracted some concessions from both sides: a 10.5% raise over three years, MTA givebacks on the pension fund and nominal worker contributions toward their pension and health benefits.

This should have been the end of the story – Local 100 officials back to the dinner table and the MTA executive back to its wasteful larceny at 2 Broadway, but a funny thing happened on the way to the ratification elections. A gang of militants within the union, tired of sweltering or freezing in the subway tunnels according to the season, took Roger Toussaint at his word about racial and class inequities, and decided he had not adequately represented their interests. As proof of the union executive’s betrayal, they held up Pataki’s bleating noises about blocking the pension fund giveback.

Now, here is where my unique perspective into the process comes into the picture: the union executive did not go into the trenches and promote the settlement to the members whose votes were necessary to ratify the contract. That was too much like work. When I was negotiating on behalf of my company, a big part of my job was stroking the workers to make them see the benefits of putting pressure on the union to accept the laughable contract we were offering them. This person-to-person contact is absolutely necessary in industrial relations, and my union adversaries were every bit as lazy and irrelevant as the TWU executive proved to be.

I, on the other hand, speaking Spanish, was able to joke around with the workers, cajole, convince them and, most importantly, listen to their concerns. This process of talking and listening is one of the most important components in industrial relations.

Toussaint, as tone deaf on this point as he is lazy, slothful and incoherent on all the others, not only refused to massage his rank and file on the terms of the agreement and address their criticisms, he went them one worse, threatening to punish any union members who spoke out against the agreement.

After all his preaching about class struggle and racial solidarity, he showed himself to be just another banana republic Mussolini, and the rank and file murdered him by rejecting his contract by seven votes.

Seven votes! He could have won with just a few kind words.

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Posted on 1/22/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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