Long Island Railroad Workers Taking Strike Vote

Long Island Railroad Workers Taking Strike Vote
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/lirr-s-largest-union-to-vote-on-strik...

The Long Island Rail Road's largest union will vote Wednesday night on whether it will go on strike as early as next month -- potentially stranding 300,000 daily commuters.
The Sheet Metal, Air and Transportation Union/United Transportation Union, which represents nearly half of LIRR laborers, will cast their ballots at back-to-back meetings in Massapequa Wednesday night. SMART UTU general chairman Anthony Simon, who expects a unanimous "yes" vote from members, said he will also be handing out picket signs and coordinating strike captains.
Smaller LIRR unions have already approved similar votes to walk off the job as early as March 21. Simon said his union's vote -- the first of its kind in two decades -- is "the toughest for our members ever to make."
"This is going to affect their finances, their families, and the Long Island economy," Simon said. "But they are standing united with their union, because they have been pushed around far too long."
LIRR unions have been without a contract since June 2010. The unions have balked at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's demands that they accept a three-year freeze in labor costs. Workers could get raises, but only if they were funded through other concessions, including eliminating some work rules and increasing employee contributions to health care benefits.
Without the unions' acceptance of the "three net zeros" proposal, the MTA has said it would have to raise fares by as much as 12 percent next year.
In November, President Barack Obama appointed a Presidential Emergency Board to help resolve the dispute. After listening to arguments from labor and management during a weeklong Manhattan hearing, the board largely ruled in the unions' favor, saying that the MTA could afford to give workers raises without having to raise fares. The unions accepted the board's nonbinding recommendations, but the MTA rejected them.
On Tuesday, Simon's union wrote the MTA's labor director asking to schedule new negotiations, but an MTA spokesman said the Obama-appointed board "did not take the MTA's financial condition or its customers' sacrifices into account, and is not a template for productive negotiations. "
"The president of the United States appointed a board to recommend a fair deal. They recommended a fair deal, and now [the MTA] says, 'We want to start over again,'" Simon said. "We should not be going backwards."
The MTA has until March 21 to request a second Presidential Emergency Board. That would put off a strike until July at the earliest. MTA officials have said they have not yet decided whether to make the request.