LIRR strike agreement puts MTA budget claims under scrutiny

The LIRR strike agreement covers 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers. At a Wednesday board meeting, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials described it as “within [the agency’s] financial plan.” The agreement was announced Monday. This is reported by the railway transport news portal Railway Supply.

It ended a three-day strike that stopped service on the largest commuter rail network in the United States, located in the center of global finance.

The walkout began as contracts expired for 40,000 New York City subway and bus workers employed under the MTA. That raised the possibility of a much wider transit fight across the region. Instead, the strike was brought to a halt Monday evening. Workers received no vote and no meaningful chance to review or discuss the terms. The unions also refused to make the agreement public.

MTA budget claim and withheld terms

MTA CEO Janno Lieber praised the settlement after Wednesday’s board meeting. He gave no concrete details about what the deal contained. “We would have never made the deal if we didn’t think it was consistent with the MTA budget… We wouldn’t have made the deal if we thought it put the MTA in a financial hole again… We wouldn’t have made the deal if we believed it was going to take us backward financially, and it doesn’t.”

Lieber added: “I think that the key point is that we’ve accommodated it in our overall budget planning for the whole system. … We have a financial plan that will allow us—there are a lot of variables—but that are going to allow us to do that without extra fair [sic] hikes.”

These remarks are important because they point to a central issue in the settlement. The total value of the new deal may be no better for workers than earlier contracts they had rejected before striking. Both the MTA and the unions continue to withhold the full terms. They are treating the agreement almost as a state secret.

The only information made available to workers has been a short union email with a few bullet points. No full agreement has been released. After the meeting, Bloomberg asked Lieber whether the new settlement differed in cost from the earlier $133.8 million offer. He refused to answer.

One LIRR engineer told the WSWS Thursday: “We are waiting on the union. Members have not received anything, no highlights of the contract settlement and no MOA [memorandum of agreement].”

Wage terms and work rules

According to the union email, the deal includes 4.5 percent wage increases in the final year of the four-year contract. It also excludes the sweeping work rule changes management had sought. Still, that wage increase falls below New York City’s official inflation rate of 4.6 percent.

“If they do it every contract, below the inflation rate, it’s never a real raise,” another engineer said.

Before the strike, the MTA had rejected even this increase. It claimed the increase was unaffordable. Management has used versions of that argument for years, since the previous contract expired in 2023.

Lieber warned last Saturday that major costs would supposedly be passed on to the public through higher fares. He said riders “would have to pay the cost of a labor settlement that blew up the MTA’s budget.” Management’s alternative proposal combined a smaller wage increase with lump-sum payments equal to 4.5 percent of workers’ pay.

That argument is absurd in New York City, the richest city on earth and the center of the world financial industry. Vast wealth exists throughout the city. Yet it is controlled by a narrow financial oligarchy. The threat to shift the cost of decent wage increases onto riders amounts to a declaration that the ruling class will not tolerate concessions to workers.

Yet after three days of strike action, the same wage increase was suddenly described as fully budgeted. Management had previously called it unaffordable. The claim had been dishonest from the outset. At the same time, the MTA’s comments may also mean the contract is essentially unchanged from the earlier offer, with only minor adjustments.

As the WSWS wrote Thursday, the MTA may have made very small concessions. The aim would have been to end the strike quickly and prevent a combined movement of LIRR, subway and bus workers. But, as we stressed, “nothing is certain without access to the full text.”

Workers have every right to see the agreement that will shape their working lives. They should demand the immediate release of the full contract. They should also have sufficient time to study and discuss it before any ratification vote.

Ratification and worker oversight

The deal is already known to Kathy Hochul, Zohran Mamdani, MTA management and the union bureaucracy. The workers themselves are the only ones being denied the full information.

BLET National Vice President Kevin Sexton stated the reason bluntly Tuesday: “due to the nature of negotiations, we don’t want to go into specifics.” He added: “We don’t want to fail ratification. If they get part of this story through the media, it may impact their decision.”

In other words, workers might reject the settlement if they reviewed it outside the union bureaucracy’s tightly managed messaging.

Some damaging elements are already known. The agreement’s value is reduced by the inclusion of 16 hours of unpaid computer-based training. The 4.5 percent increase is also diluted by extending the final year of the contract by six weeks, as management had originally demanded.

Management has not dropped its longer-term effort to change work rules. It has attacked existing protections as “outdated antiquated and somewhat abusive.” Lieber said that “the offer remains open” for the unions to agree to “ease or alter or eliminate a work rule that is in our view wasteful.”

One worker rejected the claims about the work rules, saying: “The media was making things up about the work rules. They say we get extra days pay if we bring a train back to the yard. This is not true.” Yard engineers, he explained, prepare trains for service. “If I knew how to do a yard engineer’s work, then I could go and get extra days pay. Then they wouldn’t need the yard engineer.”

Another engineer said Friday: “it’s just unbelievable. I was like, I never made that kind of money. Who the hell’s making that money?” He said he worked 60 hours a week, adding that “without overtime, we’re not making any money.”

“I just wish we had dental and eyeglass [coverage],” he continued. “You get $100 for eyeglass, I think it is… That’s it.” Describing the cost of living on Long Island, he said that after retirement, “we’re not staying. We’re leaving the state. We can’t afford to stay here. The taxes are outrageous.”

MTA management is treating the ratification vote as a ritual, not as a real democratic decision. Lieber said: “We are letting the union following the normal ritual [emphasis added] of letting the unions go through their ratification process before we present it to our board and the details then become public.” This expresses open contempt for workers’ views.

Wider transit fight

At the same time, there is real fear among both the ruling class and the trade union bureaucracy. The strike demonstrated the strength of the working class at the heart of finance capital. Efforts to organize scabbing failed.

The strike also came into objective conflict with the Democratic Party. That includes pro-business Governor Kathy Hochul, who denounced workers as “reckless.” It also exposed the role of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the “democratic socialist” closely aligned with Hochul. Mamdani issued no statement supporting the strike. Instead, official messages from his office directed riders to use scab buses.

Workers must establish genuine democratic control over the struggle. They should form rank-and-file committees to demand the immediate publication of the full contract. They should also oversee the voting process themselves.

On the basis of what is already known, the WSWS urges workers to vote “no.” It does so as a matter of principle, given the undemocratic procedure being used. But this should mark the start of a broader fight based on a new strategy against the corporate oligarchy and the political establishment. Workers should reach out to MTA employees and others across the city. That would help build a wider and stronger movement.

There is broad sympathy for such a fight. One MTA worker told the WSWS Friday: “We’re without a contract so, yeah, I support the LIRR workers fighting for a fair contract. It makes sense to join our struggles. Every worker should have the right to fight for a living wage.”

When told that the LIRR unions still had not produced a contract for workers to review, he laughed and said, “it doesn’t need to be in your face for you to know what’s going on; these union officials front like they’re there to help then do nothing, it’s the same in the TWU.”

Speaking about the difficulty of surviving in the richest city in the world, he added: “It’s not easy, I talk about this all the time with people I work with. You can’t make it on your regular salary; we totally depend on overtime.”

Debt issue and democratic control

The resources needed for decent wages, benefits and public transit could be obtained by canceling the MTA’s $49 billion bond debt to Wall Street. Payments on that debt consume 15 percent of the agency’s annual budget. That would be an initial step in a wider fight to bring the trillions controlled by Wall Street under democratic control. It would also direct society’s resources toward affordable housing, good pay and high-quality, affordable transit for all.

The central question is workers’ democratic control over their own struggle. LIRR workers should demand that the full contract be released immediately. They should oppose any effort to push ratification through behind closed doors. They should also build rank-and-file committees independent of the union bureaucracy to supervise every part of the process.

News on railway transport, industry, and railway technologies from Railway Supply that you might have missed: