"I put out a proposal that I thought would be most palatable to the union, and it turns out I was wrong," he said in an interview. Before the strike, Roger Toussaint, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, had repeatedly said he would not accept a pension plan that did not treat future workers the same as current ones.
Mr. Kalikow, who was appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki in 2001, defended the settlement reached last week as fair. He said the union's main concession - having workers for the first time pay part of their health-insurance premiums - was more valuable than the pension demands that were ultimately abandoned.
"It didn't matter to me where I got the savings," he said.
The curious thing here is that before the strike Kalikow insisted that the pension demand would not be withdrawn. That sort of brinksmanship looks downright stupid if, as he says now, he didn't care where the savings came from.
The tendency of management to act irrationally when dealing with labor unions is a pervasive feature of contemporary labor management relations. Managers frequently goad unions into striking by refusing to budge on issues where the cost of a management concession is swamped by the cost of a strike. My best shot at an explanation is that managers can't quite get their heads around the idea that the union gets a say in how the business is run.
But why is that so hard? It's not like managers are dictators unaccustomed to negotiating with anybody about anything. The deep problem, it seems to me, is that the hierarchies of the workplace give managers the idea that workers aren't their equals. This perception of inequality, in turn, seems to legitimize a practice of imposing conditions rather than bargaining in good faith.
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