News

NEW YORK, NY November 09, 2007 —A Brooklyn judge has ruled that the Transport Workers Union cannot resume automatically deducting membership dues from the paychecks of bus and subway workers.

The so-called dues checkoff was taken away earlier this year as a penalty for the union's 2005 transit strike and the union went back to court this week. But Judge Bruce Balter said the TWU had not gone far enough in pledging not to strike again.

Instead, he said Union President Roger Toussaint, quote, "merely parrots the statutory language" of the previous judge's order by acknowledging that state law prohibits a strike. The union says it will appeal and calls the decision a political football.

But Mayor Bloomberg, who had argued against restoring the dues checkoff, praised the decision. The MTA had wanted to restore the membership dues on a conditional basis to soothe labor relations and issued a statement saying its commitment to productive labor-management relations hasn't changed.