Contracts Update

Although there is not much to really tell you, I do feel obligated to give you a quick update as to where we are at the moment on all the outstanding contracts.

The MSII contract is being held by the Transit Authority because they say it is being reviewed by leadership. That is bullshit! The MSII contract is being held because they are trying to pressure me to accept terms in the buses contracts that I don’t want. And I don’t bow to pressure. With that said if this continues we will be filing a PERB charge for bargaining in bad faith. We are ready to do that but for the moment we are holding back.

The MaBSTOA, Queens and MTA Bus contracts are in limbo at the moment because, I have met with the President of the NYC Transit Authority several times on his desire to change all of the Bus Command Center (BCC) jobs that currently pick annually and have binding pick rights into resume positions. The Authority is willing to pay BCC dispatchers more for this change but I am not in agreement with this change for many reasons. I made a last offer to settle this issue and that was not accepted. So it comes down to this, are they going to force us into arbitration now or settle the contracts and take this issue up in the next round of negotiations. That is the answer I am waiting on.

The Long Island Railroad is ready to go on strike, the TWU Local 100 has their contract expiring in two weeks and almost every supervisor close to 6000 in total have been working since 2024 and 2025 without a contract and raise. You would think the smart and easy thing to do would be to at least settle the supervisor contracts for now, but they don’t care because no matter what they say, they don’t respect any of us.

We will continue to calmly do our best for now, to try and settle all of these contracts, but if that does not work and we are forced to go backwards into arbitration, we will show them the error of their ways.

Philip Valenti, President