Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the Transport Workers Union Local 100 (TWU) advanced toward resolution late last month when a three-member arbitration panel was named to finalize a labor settlement.

Following a three-day strike in December, TWU members rejected MTA’s contract proposal by seven votes in January, then ratified the same contract in a March re-vote, which the MTA did not honor, opting instead for binding arbitration.

Basil Paterson, a member of the law firm of Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, which represents Teamsters Local 237 and several other unions, was selected by the State Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to serve on a three-member arbitration panel. In March, PERB ruled that a resolution could not be reached in the dispute and referred it to arbitration.

TWU faces stiff penalties for striking, including a $2.5 million fine imposed for breaking the state’s Taylor Law, which prohibits public employees from striking, and suspension of its automatic-dues deduction, which is vital to its finances. The union, which made its first monthly payment on the fine this month, has imposed a mandatory one-day leave policy, without pay, on about 80 of its staffers, according to a report in The Chief-Leader. It also sold its headquarters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for $60 million, the Post reported.

In a Newsday article, Gene Carroll, director of the Union Leadership Program at Cornell University, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, applauded the struggling transit workers for their achievements in the “job of being a union.” In the article Carroll says, “I see the transit workers carrying out the historic mission of a labor union.” He adds, “I see them acting as a countervailing power in the struggle for economic and social justice — not just to protect the interests of their dues-paying members, but to sound the alarm that the general interest of the vast majority of all New Yorkers and the vast majority of Americans, is at stake.”

Calling for reforms to the Taylor Law, Local 237 Recording Secretary and Legislative and Political Action Director Patricia Stryker said, “We don’t want to repeal it, just reform it, because it gives us the right to bargain collectively.” The state attorney general’s office is responsible for enforcing the Taylor Law, noted Stryker, and it’s an election year. “Everyone is skittish now, that’s why there are many proposals but no consensus.”