ATU members ratify contract that will ‘raise the bar’ at Metro Transit

(Union Advocate photo)

After authorizing their union leaders to call a strike last fall, Metro Transit workers voted over the weekend to ratify a new, three-year contract with the agency that will increase wages by 13%.

Mechanics are in for an even bigger wage hike, and a new shift differential will boost pay by up to 7% for workers who stay on the clock overnight – measures that union members and agency leaders hope will help Metro Transit attract and retain workers.

“We made our operators’ wages and, importantly, our mechanics’ wages more competitive,” Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1005 President David Stiggers said. “Metro Transit is trying to move their operations up to pre-COVID service levels, and to do that we need mechanics who are able to service these buses on a regular basis. Metro Transit had to raise the bar.”

Local 1005 represents about 2,000 Metro Transit workers, including custodians, office clerks, rail operators and others. Among members who participated in the contract vote, 82% supported ratification, according to the union.

The Met Council, which operates Metro Transit, must also vote to approve the agreement before it takes effect, retroactive to Aug. 1, 2023.

That’s when Local 1005’s previous contract with the agency expired. Negotiations between the two sides routinely stretch past contract expiration dates, but union members, by voting overwhelmingly to approve a strike in September, put management on notice that this round of talks would not be business as usual.

Between the strike vote and the final round of mediation Feb. 5, Metro Transit nearly doubled its proposed wage increases, from 3% in the first year and 2% in each of the following two years to 5.5% in the first year, 4.5% in the second and 3% in the third. The agency also agreed to bring mechanics’ wages closer to the industry standard.

“They moved a substantial amount,” Stiggers said of management’s proposals. “They moved far more than even what we maybe anticipated, looking at the contracts in the past. But I think they realized very quickly that what we were asking for was not pie in the sky, but actual pieces they needed to make the service run appropriately.”

Local 1005 also won expanded bereavement leave and language allowing part-time workers to get to the 30-hour threshold for employer-sponsored benefits without working a split shift.

Stiggers served as Local 1005’s vice president when contract negotiations began last spring. He was elected president in January after Ryan Timlin stepped down from the post.

“If you really want your employees and your agency to prosper, there has to be a mutual understanding between union and management, and we’re starting to develop a much better relationship in which our needs are being heard – and in this particular contract being met,” he said.

Local 1005 is among a group of public- and private-sector unions with contracts expiring this spring that have been meeting, planning and working in partnership to support each other in their contract campaigns – and potentially on the picket lines. While there won’t be a strike at Metro Transit, the union remains committed to showing its solidarity with the labor community.

“What we’re looking forward to now is helping our other union brothers and sisters in different unions secure great contracts as well, like the St. Paul teachers who just voted to authorize a strike and the janitors with SEIU,” Stiggers said. “We’re gearing up to support them.

“They too should be compensated appropriately. We all just want what we deserve.”

– Michael Moore, Union Advocate editor