Coercive unionism (briefly) freezes Long Island RR

Over the weekend, five unions representing 3,500 railroad workers on the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) decided that they should shut down the commutes of roughly 300,000 New York City area commuters by striking against the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority. An agreement to end the strike was reached late Monday night, the details of which were not immediately publicly disclosed.

During the strike, local, state, and federal politicians blamed each other and, perhaps with an eye toward their fortunes in future elections, tried not to antagonize Big Labor in what is probably Big Labor’s strongest state. The New York Post editors placed the blame where it properly lies: “One and only one party is to blame — the unions.”

I got into the wrong line of work

Because union rhetoric hasn’t evolved since socialist politician Eugene V. Debs was leading trainmen’s strikes in the late 1800s, strikers presented their shutdown of a vital artery of America’s largest metropolitan area not as extortion but as the only thing keeping them in the middle class. AmNY, a New York City outlet, quoted striker Karl Bischoff saying, “She’s [New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D)] got money for everything except for our salaries […] I mean, we have free money to give to everybody across this entire state, but you have no money for the people to actually go out and work.”

Whatever you think of Mr. Bischoff’s opinions about New York’s welfare state, it is completely untrue that New York taxpayers have no money for him or his colleagues. According to the Empire Center for Public Policy’s “See Through NY” database of New York state government worker salaries, he made $292,435 in 2024, the most recent year for which the Empire Center had a record for him. Even in urban New York, that salary—which would place Mr. Bischoff in the 97th percentile for individual income nationwide, according to personal finance website DQYDJ—is hardly a pauper’s wage; the median household income in Nassau County, the large Long Island suburban county bordering New York City’s Queens borough, is “only” $146,202.

His colleagues are similarly overcompensated. The New York Post reported that 11 LIRR employees made $200,000 or more in overtime alone, with an additional 314 making a $100,000-plus overtime haul. (This is on top a typically six-figure base wage packet.) With this much money flying around, it shouldn’t be surprising that fraud follows: In 2021, five LIRR workers (including one who happened to be the son of an alleged Mafia captain) were charged with offenses related to committing timesheet fraud to farm even more overtime payments than those to which they were entitled. (All pleaded guilty to offenses related to the scheme; “Overtime King” Thomas Caputo was sentenced to eight months in jail.)

It’s the work rules, stupid

Returning to angry Mr. Bischoff and the Empire Center database, the data show that he is paid $50 per hour as an engineer (what the British call “train drivers”). It’s decent money for skilled work, but getting from $50/hour to $292,435 would require him to work 5,848 hours at his normal rate—two years of eight-hour working days, with no weekends. So, something doesn’t add up.

But this isn’t a case of illegal grift like the 2021 timesheet fraudsters; this is legally sanctioned union grift. As Ken Girardin of the Manhattan Institute told the Post: “The system is so distorted that it’s hard to tell what is legal waste and illegal waste.”

For complicated reasons, the state takeover of the LIRR saddled MTA with work rules designed for railroads of Eugene V. Debs’s day, not the 21st century. (In Debs’s day, trainmen had to always be fully on top of their dangerous work, lest the steam-powered controlled pipe bombs they were operating literally explode.) It is those work rules that MTA negotiators have sought to reform—even at the cost of increasing workers’ base wages—and that the unions stopped service to protect. In a statement, MTA CEO Janno Lieber said, “the unions have those outrageous work rules that allow these workers to pile up overtime, rules which they have refused to even discuss at the bargaining table.”

So, what are the rules? The Effective Transit Alliance explains the most notorious of them:

The primary work rules in question are for train engineers, represented by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET). Regardless of how many hours they work in a given shift, BLET workers are entitled to an additional 8-hour shift’s pay if they do any of the following:

• Drive both a diesel train and an electric train the same day
• Go from yard service to running a revenue train
• Work on special service and regular service, for example if an engineer’s work for the train comprises a regular Port Washington Branch run and also a special service baseball train to Mets-Willets Point.

Remarkably, this benefit is for each action performed, so a BLET worker could theoretically net three shifts’ pay for a single 8-hour shift. These payments effectively boost engineers’ salaries by an average of 15%.

Add in more rules, time-and-a-half considerations, and similar extra payments and you get taxpayers buying one year’s work for the price of two. It’s a nice racket if you’re part of it, and that is why the BLET (a division of the Teamsters Union) is one of the five unions that shut things down.

What is to be done

Now that the strike is over, New York State taxpayers and LIRR riders have to hold their breaths that the state government did not sell them out to ensure they continue not getting their tax- and fare-payer’s money’s worth. Governor Hochul says the state will not raise taxes or fares to pay for the deal, but that’s a matter of trust.

And for complicated reasons, local Republicans are unlikely to help the public-spirited side of this intra-liberal-coalition fight. As I have noted before, Republicans from New York tend to seek appeasement of organized labor rather than advancement of the Taft-Hartley consensus principles upheld by (most of) the national party. (The consensus principle most relevant here is protection of the public from other people’s labor disputes.) Longtime New York State Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno was an ally of 1199SEIU in its quest to prevent the state government from controlling Medicaid costs. In the Congresses of the 1990s (and later the 2000s and 2010s), Long Island Rep. Pete King (R-NY) led the small bloc of pro-union Republicans, putting him at odds with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich of right-to-work Georgia.

The Manhattan Institute has proposed one policy that might not require help from the intransigent, appeasing local GOP but would require Gov. Hochul to channel her inner Harry Truman (another pro-union Democrat with no time for extortionate rail strikes) to ensure this week’s shutdowns never happen again. Thanks to the circumstances of LIRR’s takeover by the state government, its workers have been covered by the federal Railway Labor Act (RLA), which allows strikes, and not the state’s Taylor Law that covers other government workers, which does not permit strikes.

But there is reason to believe that the circumstances have changed to the point where the RLA should no longer apply. Ken Girardin of the Manhattan Institute explains:

Much has changed over a century, and this exception should no longer apply. In 1966, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority absorbed the LIRR, making the railroad a public employer. In 1980, federal courts rejected an attempt to enforce New York’s strike prohibition, in part because the LIRR was still hauling freight at that time. It no longer does.

Girardin recommends that Gov. Hochul sue to have the state’s Taylor Law, and therefore its ban on strikes, given primacy over LIRR labor relations (as it is over New York’s other state-run rail transportation). At the very least, such a reform would ensure that this week’s strike would be the last (legal—anti-strike laws are toothless without political leadership willing to enforce them) strike on New York City public transportation.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/coercive-unionism-briefly-freezes-long-island-rr/