The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has notified board members that the state-run authority has decided to petition a state judge to vacate state arbitrators’ recent award to the Transport Workers Union, which called for 11.3 percent raises over three years.
The MTA will make the case that the two of the three state panelists who voted for the award — the TWU’s Roger Toussaint and public representative John Zuccotti — failed to base their finding on the mandatory criteria that they must consider under the state’s Taylor Law, which governs public-sector labor negotiation and arbitration.
These criteria include the authority’s “ability to pay.”
The MTA has a good case here. The arbitrators’ assessment of the authority’s ability to pay was laughable, with the two panelists suggesting that the authority use capital-projects money to fund labor costs, and with the same two panelists considering the matter only in the short term, not in the context of looming out-year liabilities for things like retiree health coverage. (Dall Forsythe, the third panelist, dissented.)
More on this tomorrow.
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