Good news: Commuters will be able to get to the city next week via the Long Island Rail Road, now that a labor agreement has been reached and a strike averted.
Tip your hat to Gov. Cuomo, Metropolitan Transportation Authority boss Tom Prendergast and the labor bosses for that.
Bad news: The unions, whose members are already the best-paid railroad workers in America, got nearly everything they wanted in the deal, as Nicole Gelinas notes on the opposite page. And, unlike other public-sector unions in New York, they retain the legal right to use strike threats to hold riders and taxpayers hostage in the future.
Remember, average LIRR union pay is already at $87,000 — 56 percent more than that of average Long Islanders.
Yet the deal calls for wage hikes amounting to an additional 18.4 percent over 6 ¹/₂ years (though workers, for the first time, will also contribute 2 percent of their pay toward their health-care costs).
Meanwhile, LIRR riders face average fare hikes of $118 a year in 2015 and another $122 in 2017.
Of course, the 300,000 people who rely on the LIRR each day are breathing easier, now that a strike has been averted. (So, too, must be Mayor de Blasio, who planned to leave for Italy tonight, deal or not.)
Had workers walked out, riders would have paid a stiff price.
And yet, a strike — as we've pointed out before — would have been perfectly legal. That remains a serious problem.
New York's Taylor Law bars strikes by public-sector unions, like those representing cops, teachers and transit workers. But because of an outdated federal law, LIRR union workers are exempt, and their labor talks are governed by federal oversight.
If Cuomo (and New York's congressional delegation) want to do riders a real favor, they'll prevent these unions from ever again holding a gun to riders' heads, by pushing Congress to fix the law.
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