Shame LIRR unions — and reveal their outrageous strike demands

Unions representing about half of the Long Island Rail Road’s workforce are threatening to walk off the job on Thursday if their demands aren’t met.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s response should be to show the public exactly what those demands are.

The LIRR is the busiest commuter railroad in the nation, moving over a quarter-million riders on a typical weekday.

It’s also one of state government’s oldest problems.

The system is unique among New York public agencies because it’s owned and operated by the state but operates under archaic rules designed a century ago for private railroads.

That combination has been awful, from the perspective of commuters and taxpayers alike.

Private commuter lines went out of business if they couldn’t keep trains running on time, so to speak.

By contrast, Long Island Rail Road went through bankruptcy beginning in 1949, got significant assistance from taxpayers and was again in bad shape when the state bought it in the 1960s.

Some of its worst baggage remained.

The constant threat of strikes and state government’s ability to raise taxes to pay for union demands have allowed the LIRR to keep rolling without making the sorts of changes that businesses or even government agencies would have no choice but to implement to keep operating.

Taxpayers and riders lose the most from this outdated arrangement.

The agency’s overtime spending regularly stands out by national standards (only periodically rivaled by the MTA’s other big rail outfit, Metro-North, which is stuck operating under the federal law that governs the LIRR).

LIRR employees in 2023 made an average of more than $26,000 each in overtime alone.

A few hundred workers made over $100,000 each, and a handful got over $200,000 — just in OT.

The LIRR was rocked by an overtime scandal prior to the pandemic after investigators found people were collecting OT improperly, sometimes while on vacation.

A few employees swapped their coveralls for orange jumpsuits after MTA investigators and federal prosecutors got involved. 

Later, at least one of the timeclocks installed to crack down on fraud was sabotaged.

That illegal bilking of LIRR overtime has been made possible by the amount of legal bilking, which continues today.

LIRR’s contracts dictate “union work rules” that give employees extra pay not for spending more time on the job but for doing certain routine things.

For instance, if a locomotive engineer operates both an electric and a diesel locomotive during the same shift, he or she must get an extra eight hours of pay. The railroad must pay him or her for another eight hours for operating a third locomotive under certain circumstances.

The inefficiencies aren’t limited to the rail yard.

Most LIRR tickets are sold through smart phones. But even as the workload behind the ticket counter has dwindled, LIRR can’t assign its clerks to other jobs, even during slow periods, due to — you guessed it — union work rules.

LIRR management has offered the unions — the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, Brotherhood of Railway Signalmen, International Association of Machinists, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and Transportation Communications Union — faster-than-inflation raises, but demanded changes to the work rules in return.

Those improvements appear to be the single biggest sticking points in negotiations.

Over the decades, the agency managed to win back some efficiencies. LIRR used to have to give engineers an extra hour of pay for cleaning their train’s windshield (until common sense prevailed and work-rule changes were negotiated).

What’s not changed since then is that paying public employees three times for the same day’s work offends the sensibilities of regular New Yorkers.

Taxpayers, and their affordability-concerned state lawmakers, would be hard-pressed to find a more egregious example of (lawful) waste. Ditto for keeping unnecessary ticket employees on the payroll.

And that’s all on top of LIRR employees paying less than half as much for their health insurance (2% of their pay) as most state workers (which itself is much less than what private-sector employees chip in on average).

Hochul needs to take that case straight to the public.

The governor’s blue-collar roots — her father was a union organizer at a western New York steel mill — make her better qualified than most to stand up for LIRR riders this week.

She understands and should explain the difference between workers at a private company going on strike for better pay or working conditions and public employees at the LIRR stranding a few hundred thousand passengers to defend indefensible government waste.

For their part, downstate Republicans should be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the governor and the MTA and LIRR leadership, who are pushing the public interest at the bargaining table.

Hochul’s administration has been enormously patient with the LIRR unions in closed-door talks. Now it’s time to explain to New Yorkers that the service they’re already paying too much for can — and should — be better.

Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.