With negotiations between the CTA and its largest union at a standstill, the union is lobbing a molotov cocktail at the transit agency with a pair of lawsuits, as well as a formal labor grievance.
Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241 said one of the lawsuits expected to be filed in federal court today seeks “millions of dollars” in unpaid training hours for bus drivers learning their routes.
A second lawsuit, which union officials say they're filing in state court, seeks to enforce 10 agreements that would each allow individual employees to come back to work. The union said the CTA originally said they would uphold the agreements, but last week reneged.
The grievance seeks to penalize the CTA for supposedly using part-time employees to fill the gap created by laid-off full timers, in the process violating the union’s contract by having part-timers work more than 32 hours per week.
If the union is successful in pressing that case, it will provide a monetary award for full-time employees who have been laid off, officials said.
“This will cost them money,” said ATU 241’s lawyer, Joseph Pass. “It will cost them money to defend [the suits and the grievance], and it will cost them money when they find out that they’ve lost [the suits and the grievance].”
All the while, it seems less and less likely that the CTA and unions will be able to roll back this year’s service cuts. An additional 500 union employees are scheduled to be laid off this Sunday, as the second wave of the service cut layoffs hits bus maintenance workers.
As recently as Wednesday morning, though, union chiefs said they hoped to lobby for more federal funding alongside CTA management, seeking a long-term funding fix for the system. ATU 241 President Darrell Jefferson said he’s still willing to do that, despite the suits.
“I will work with CTA to get to any type of positive conclusion, whatever it takes. I’ll go to the state, to the feds, to Mercury, to Mars, I’ll go there with them if it’s going to bring funding back for mass transit in the city of Chicago,” Jefferson said. “But if we’re not going to try to get something permanent, I don’t want to be a part of it.”
Asked why the lawsuits are coming out now, Pass said the union had to call the CTA’s hand.
“When they start putting everyone out of work, as they have, and they start not honoring things in agreements that they say they’re going to do, some day you’ve gotta say enough is enough,” Pass said. “We’ve gotten to this point.”
Windy Citizen 