How union muscle keeps expensive rules, high fares in place on LIRR
The Long Island Rail Road’s costly work rules remain in force — despite repeated calls for reform — due to the tremendous clout held by its militant unions, and fears of a strike angering all-important suburban voters, say current and former MTA insiders.
A seven-month investigation published this month revealed the true toll of these rules: They force the MTA to charge commuters some of the highest fares in the nation and they dramatically limit the service the LIRR can run, meaning longer waits for trains and more crowded conditions aboard.
Despite the sorry state of the rails, as one former MTA executive told The Post: “Nobody is going to poke the bear here because Long Island is the most important voter constituency for a governor.”
Rail workers are among a select group of state employees who retain the right to strike thanks to federal law — and they’ve walked off the job dozens of times since Albany took over the LIRR in the 1960s.
One tally kept by the LIRR’s electricians union counted 42 work stoppages — both legal and illegal — between 1960 and 1995. That’s almost a strike per year, some of which became so nasty they required intervention from the White House and Capitol Hill.
Workers even staged a slowdown in protest of The Post’s 2019 series on overtime abuse at the railroad, which led to the indictment of five workers.
Simply bringing the LIRR’s labor costs and efficiencies in line with Metro-North would save the MTA more than $200 million annually — a spending cut the agency desperately needs as it seeks a bailout from Albany to help recover from coronavirus-induced ridership declines.
But those changes would run up against the LIRR’s biggest union — SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, headed by Anthony Simon, who wields great influence.
“It’s just easier to light more taxpayer money on fire than fix it,” said one MTA insider. “The union runs that railroad. Anthony Simon is the one in charge.”
Simon declined to comment.
Independent observers say those behind-the-scene considerations were a major reason why legal language drafted by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordering a now-aborted overhaul of MTA operations rejected making major changes to the LIRR.
“The failure to even consider merging or equalizing some aspects of Metro North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road operations in the ill-conceived 2019 ‘transformation plan’ tells you all you need to know about the politics around the commuter railroads,” said Reinvent Albany’s Rachael Fauss, the top MTA expert at the public interest group. “Parochial interests have too often won out over the public interest.”
Evidence of Simon’s clout can be seen in a photo distributed by the staff of Cuomo’s replacement, Kathy Hochul.
In it, Simon sits next to the governor as they ride to an October ribbon-cutting celebrating the completion of the $2.4 billion project adding a third track to the Main Line between Floral Park and Hicksville. The pair were all smiles.
The following month, Hochul would become the first governor in years to badly lose on Long Island while still winning office.
“The Long Island Rail Road unions were failures at delivering votes for Hochul,” said a longtime MTA hand about the election result. “Hochul doesn’t owe them anything.”
Hochul’s office demurred when asked to comment on her plans for the LIRR and its union agreements, many of which are currently up for negotiation.
“Coming from a union family, Governor Hochul knows how organized labor can create good-paying jobs and lift New Yorkers into the middle class,” said spokesman Avi Small in a statement. “Governor Hochul is always looking for ways to improve the MTA experience for riders, and she will continue working with labor and MTA leadership to deliver the high-quality, efficient service New Yorkers deserve.”
For generations, both Republicans and Democrats have moved mountains to win over Long Island voters and commuters.
Nassau and Suffolk counties were often home to the most competitive districts in the state and remaining competitive is an essential component to winning statewide office or control of the state Senate.
In 1994, a MTA push for work rule concessions triggered a two-day strike in the middle of then-Gov. Mario Cuomo’s failed bid for a fourth term.
Cuomo ordered his MTA chairman, Peter Stangl, to reverse course, which a furious Stangl described as a paying a “ransom.”
“He and his son [disgraced ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo] were very worried about losing the votes in the suburbs,” said one former official, recalling the 1994 dispute.
Just a few years later, Republican Gov. George Pataki and US Sen. Al D’Amato committed the MTA to build a link between the LIRR and Grand Central Terminal to give Long Island commuters an alternative to Penn Station.
The project, East Side Access, has become one of the biggest boondoggles in modern memory, with a price tag that’s jumped from a projected $2 billion in 1997 to more than $11 billion today.
History then repeated in 2014, with the younger Cuomo at the helm in Albany, seeking his first re-election as governor — as the MTA and LIRR unions faced off again and threatened a strike.
The end result left the generous work rules intact and awarded the unions a 17% raise over six and a half years, in exchange for employees beginning to contribute a small percentage of their salary for healthcare and retirement.
Officials at the MTA again signaled their desire to attack the work rules in 2019 after a Post investigation revealed how LIRR employees had filed time cards that claimed they worked physically impossible amounts of overtime.
But sources say that as the outrage quieted, Cuomo’s office made it clear it was not interested in taking on LIRR’s unions.
“The governor didn’t want to pick a political fight with a really important group in the most competitive part of the state,” said a former MTA executive. “And he had his priority, which was clean stations.”
A spokesman for Cuomo said the executive struck the best deals he could at the time, without consideration of politics or his father’s eventual loss.
“What happened in the past was the furthest thing from our minds at the time,” said Rich Azzopardi. “We negotiated as hard as we could to get the fairest deal for commuters and workers alike.”
