NEW YORK – Two private Queens bus lines serving as many as 50,000 commuters shut down early this morning, as workers went on strike after contract talks their union held with the city’s transit agency again proved futile.
Commuters using Jamaica Buses Inc. and Triboro Coach Corp. lines should “make other arrangements for Monday and be aware that all buses and trains may be shut down on Tuesday,” the Transport Workers Union said in a message on its Web site.
After making little progress over the weekend, the union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority briefly negotiated Sunday afternoon in a midtown Manhattan hotel, but the talks were “not in the final analysis fruitful,” the MTA’s chief negotiator said.
“The MTA is quite concerned that we are now down to the last day before the union-imposed deadline,” MTA negotiator Gary Dellaverson said, referring to the union’s scheduled 12:01 a.m. Tuesday launch of a large-scale strike affecting the subway system and all MTA buses – and millions of commuters.
More talks were planned for Monday in the hopes of averting such a strike. The union had no comment Sunday night.
The union posted its online message Sunday with the headline, “No Buses Monday: Jamaica Bus and Triboro Coach on Strike.”
“We would not strike if there was any alternative, but there is none,” the union’s message read.
The 33,000-member union announced on Friday that the two private bus lines, which employ about 750 union members, would go on strike just after midnight Sunday. The lines are being taken over by the MTA but aren’t yet covered by the state’s Taylor Law, which forbids strikes by public employees.
“It is a little unsettling to be the first wave,” said union officer George Jennings, representing bus maintenance workers. “It’s going to be a rough deal. Nobody wants to go on a strike on Christmas.”
But commuters were making plans for a possible shutdown of the nation’s largest mass transit system, which would affect millions of riders a day at the height of the holiday rush.
“Let them strike,” said Tricia Rettig, who works in corporate finance in midtown. “Unions to me are kind of passe. I pay for health care. They should pay for health care, too.”
Lynne Shapiro, visiting New York for the weekend from Amherst, Mass., left a Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble store with arms full of children’s books. “We were very worried when we came down here and heard there was going to be a strike,” Shapiro said. “I’m happy to be leaving.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his weekly radio address Sunday, called a possible strike “reprehensible” and said it would drain $400 million a day from the economy.
The union, meanwhile, prepared to ask the state Public Employment Relations Board to dismiss pension benefits for new hires as an issue that would justify an impasse. State law does not allow pensions to be used as a reason for an impasse, union officials said.
A spokesman for the state board said Sunday afternoon it had not yet received a filing.
The union has opposed an MTA plan to raise the age at which a new employee becomes eligible for a full pension from 55 to 62. The MTA has said it made its best offer to the union hours after its contract expired at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The MTA also has offered the transit workers, who make between $47,000 and $55,000 a year, 3 percent annual raises for each of three years.
A citywide bus and subway strike would be New York’s first since an 11-day walkout in 1980.
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Associated Press writers Karen Matthews and Desmond Butler contributed to this story.
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