Public Employee Press

Local 375 seeks hiring for 2nd Ave. subway

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Local 375 is fighting for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to use in-house staff for design and construction management of the 2nd Avenue subway project, which is getting underway after decades of false starts.

Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375 estimates that the MTA would save $43 million a year by hiring 100 new architects and engineers for the $3.8 billion first phase of the project — from 96th Street to 63rd Street in Manhattan. The MTA plans to contract out the lion’s share of the work.

Local 375 President Claude Fort attended the underground groundbreaking ceremony for the on-again, off-again project on April 12.

Politicians, dignitaries and union leaders gathered for the ceremony in a 35-foot-wide tunnel built during the 1970s about 40 feet below 2nd Avenue and 99th Street. Fort took advantage of the occasion to discuss Local 375’s proposal with Elliot Sander, MTA’s chief executive officer, and Mysore Nagaraja, who heads MTA New York City Transit’s Capital Construction Co., which will carry out the project.

In March, Fort raised the issue of in-house work in a meeting with Sander, and after the groundbreaking ceremony, he sent him a letter detailing the proposal.

“We stressed our position that the assignment of Transit employees to design and construction supervision is a matter of good government and will ensure that the project is carried out efficiently,” Fort said about his chat with Sander and Nagaraja at the groundbreaking.

“We found that the executive director has a good understanding of the public sector and understands the value of civil servants, especially since he had experience as a civil servant before being appointed to his current post at the MTA. He listened to us and was very impressed with the work of our members.”

Consultants hired by New York City Transit typically receive two to three times what a civil servant earns and that includes profit and overhead, according to Local 375.

“New York City taxpayers should not subsidize huge profits for consultant firms when it is in the people’s interest to have a stable workforce, skilled in the technical requirements of building and maintaining our transit system, as we embark on a period of new expansion,” Fort wrote in his letter to Sander.

Beefing up the in-house staff would be in the long-term interest of New York City Transit, which would then have a cadre of employees with an institutional knowledge and personal commitment, which the consultants lack, according to the local.

Fort cited the work of Local 375 members on the reconstruction of the 1 and 9 subway station destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of the dedication and efficiency of the civil service workforce. When rapid completion of the job was urgent, the agency assigned most of the design and construction work to Local 375 members, and they brought the project in ahead of schedule.

Currently, Local 375 members are overseeing the $450 million renovation of the South Ferry station. Many Supervising Engineers are devoting their weekends to help the agency complete the job by the target date of August 2008.

In his letter to Sander, Fort also submitted a proposal for a step-pay plan to cover the 1,077 members who now work at New York City Transit. The pay of Local 375 members is lower than comparable workers in the private sector.

The savings from doing the 2nd Avenue design and construction supervision in-house could help fund the step-pay plan, which calls for raising the salaries of the civil servants represented by Local 375 by $10,000 over two years.