Unionized employees of the Regional Transportation District will meet Sunday to consider whether to accept a 10 percent wage increase over three years or authorize a strike in hopes of pressuring RTD’s elected board of directors to offer a better deal.
The package would boost the pay of top bus and light-rail operators by $1.80 an hour to $19.85 and raise mechanics $2.05 an hour to $25.20. RTD calls that its “last, best and final offer.” But even if the union spurns the proposal, it doesn’t necessarily mean the 1,750 members of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1001 will walk out. A strike vote only authorizes the union leadership to call a work stoppage. Union negotiators would first return to the bargaining table, using the strike vote as extra leverage in their bid for higher pay.
Likewise, RTD’s “final” offer isn’t exactly final. RTD negotiators would be willing to shuffle money between wages and fringe benefits or even sweeten the economic pot if they could win some offsetting reforms in costly union work rules.
Even if the union workers eventually do strike – something they last did in 1982 – the Denver area wouldn’t be hit nearly as hard as such transit-dependent cities as New York. RTD would idle its light-rail lines and redeploy its private contractors to operate its highest volume bus routes, including those that serve low-income or otherwise transit-dependent riders. Suburban commuters would lose their express buses but most could form car pools or drive their own vehicles to work.
Union leaders don’t really want a strike, even though they asked the Colorado Department of Labor to authorize a work stoppage. They were really hoping the state agency would forbid a strike, which would then force the union and RTD into binding arbitration. The union has traditionally fared well in such arbitrations.
State labor officials, by granting the strike authorization the ATU ostensibly wished for, forced it to bargain in a tough economic climate. Some union members hope to use part of the sales-tax hike authorized in the 2004 FasTracks election for higher wages. But that money is earmarked for new rail lines and expanded bus service, not higher wages for the same service the region already receives.
In the end, commuters can hope negotiations produce a new contract without a strike. If there is a work stoppage, any gains eventually won by the union might be offset by RTD shifting even more service to its lower-cost, private contractors.
