I was away when this happened so I didn't get a chance to blog on it until now, but are you all aware the Transport Workers Union has rejected the contract agreement that ended the NYC transit strike? By 7 votes out of 22,451? (Were these votes counted in Florida?) So what does this mean, you ask, unless you've already gone on to someone else's blog because you don't care. Well, it probably doesn't mean another strike. They'll likely go from here to mediation and if that doesn't work, to binding arbitration. Binding arbitration, which both sides say they're against, could be valuable to both sides, because faces on both sides are all covered in egg.

On the MTA board side -- a group of folks about whom I've heard it said that they're thieves and liars; not that I'd say anything like that, just passing along what I've heard -- they got the governor all p.o.'ed at them by offering a concession related to pensions that he doesn't like, and what he doesn't like even more is that they didn't tell him they were going to do it, or had done it; he had to read it in the papers. Since he controls 6 of the 14 votes on that board, and especially, since he appointed the chairman, Peter Kalikow, about whom I've heard things that could get me arrested if I repeated them on this blog, the governor is way irritated by them. And their high-handedness didn't work: the union wants even more. So they look pretty stupid.

Meanwhile, the TWU has troubles of its own. Its President, Roger Toussaint, who travels with a bodyguard to protect him not from the MTA but from radical members of his own union, appears powerless to the MTA board, unable to control his members. And he's in a squeeze. If he goes back to the bargaining table and comes out with a better deal for the union, there'll be a lot of questions about why he couldn't have gotten that better deal before.

So the MTA board's under pressure, if they want to keep their featherbedding, access-to-power jobs, to take back some of what they offered, although if they do, the TWU surely won't ratify the contract and the citizens will blame the board. And the TWU leadership can't afford for the deal they end up with to be TOO much better than the one they, the leadership, negotiated, if they want to keep THEIR jobs.

Thus binding arbitration, which everyone is insisting they don't want, is the only face-saving way out for both sides.

So I'm predicting:

• an arbitrated settlement
• small wildcat strikes, nasty but quickly settled, against a few sub-branches of the MTA system, brought about by the radical faction in the union
• Peter Kalikow's head rolling as soon as Pataki feels a decent interval's passed
• Roger Toussaint's ultimate victory in a very bitter and close union election later this year

Stay tuned.