SUBSCRIBEFor the TWU, arbitration included a nice bonus
Both papers reported this morning that “independent” arbitrator John Zuccotti, who was supposed to represent the public in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s contract with the Transport Workers Union, planned to donate his $116,000 fee — at $900 an hour, it can add up fast if you are, you know, working hard — to a TWU fund. The News reports that the MTA knew of this planned donation from the “outset.” The MTA and the TWU split the cost of Zuccotti’s fee.
This looks an awfully lot like the MTA paid Zuccotti an overinflated amount knowing that it would go to the TWU.
The American Bar Association reported the deal, too, today. Said one commenter, “it is completely improper for an arbitrator to donate his fee for presiding over an arbitration to one of the parties to the arbitration.”
Once again — more evidence that we need an investigation of this whole long, strange, and twisted contract process.
Such an investigation would actually help the MTA’s new management. The MTA is now appealing the arbitrators’ award to the TWU (paying more high lawyers’ fees to do so, partly as a result of its own initial on-purpose bungling).
But given the history of all of this, it is easy to wonder whether the MTA’s appeal is a trick of some sort.
New chairman Jay Walder should ask the MTA’s independent inspector-general to do a top-down public review of every aspect of this deal, from negotiation to arbitration to appeal, right up ’till the present.
It’s good that Walder is already investigating Zuccotti’s strange agreement, though, and that the MTA hasn’t yet paid the bill.
[...] The so-called “reform” bill wouldn’t have done a thing to curb the legislatively authorized growth in borrowing by public authorities, or make the borrowing process any more transparent than it already is. Nor would it necessarily promote significantly improved fiscal restraint in authority operations, aside from expanding the types of contracts subject to review and audit by the state comptroller. Indeed, the most costly and outrageous instance of waste by any authority in recent years–the recent arbitration giveaway by the MTA to its largest union—could have unfolded in precisely the same fashion even if the law had been in effect a year ago. That deal, which had the governor’s finger-prints all over it, is still wrapped in mystery, as Nicole has pointed out. [...]
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