By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 15, 2005

NEW YORK, Dec. 14 -- New York's transit workers are threatening a strike that would shut down the nation's largest subway and bus system at Friday morning's rush hour, in the midst of the holiday shopping season.

Negotiations between the 34,000-member Transport Workers Union and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are dragging, and the state has obtained an injunction against a strike (which is illegal under state law). City officials are gearing up for a shutdown. They have announced that police will allow no car carrying fewer than four people to cross into Manhattan, and that Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue will be closed to all but emergency vehicles, buses, commuter vans and motorcycles.

The rhetoric has turned hot as the deadline nears. Though labor analysts say both sides are under great pressure to settle, they warned that a strike is possible.

"An agreement will never ever, ever, ever be resolved by fear and intimidation," said the union's president, Roger Toussaint, a former subway cleaner and an immigrant from Trinidad.

"A strike would be more than just illegal . . . it will threaten public safety and severely disrupt our economy," said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R), whose lawyers were in court Wednesday demanding the imposition of fines against individual transit workers if they strike. Each worker could get docked two days' pay for every day of work missed.

A strike in the final shopping days before Christmas could cost the city's economy about $1 billion in the first four days; police overtime alone could top $10 million a day, city officials said. That will increase pressure for a settlement.

"They have their own audiences to tend to," Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign, an advocacy group for better subway service, said of the two sides. "Toussaint has his membership, and he's appealing to whatever class consciousness remains in New York City. And the MTA knows it is universally reviled. They don't have a big reservoir of goodwill if there's a strike."

The transit workers, pointing to a $1 billion MTA surplus, are asking for 8 percent wage increases in each of the next three years. The MTA has offered 3 percent per year and has demanded that workers pick up a greater portion of their health care costs.

MTA officials want to raise the minimum retirement age from 55 to 62. The union has responded by seeking to lower the minimum to 50. But analysts see the response as posturing during the negotiations; under state law, only the legislature can change retirement and pension terms.

"They have this big surplus, and for the last two contracts we took nothing for the first year," said Judith Caamal, 43, a subway-car maintenance worker who stood in the bitter cold earlier this week, cheering and chanting for her union. "They think we will be scared."

The last transit strike was in 1980, and it paralyzed the city for eight days. That strike occurred almost by mistake, as labor and management leaders tried and failed to choreograph a settlement. "This is a boisterous union with a history of union militancy," said Joshua B. Freeman, a professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and author of a history of the Transport Workers Union. "Brinksmanship is a complicated business, and I wouldn't rule out a strike."