NEW YORK - The transit workers union is ratcheting up a class warfare campaign against MTA Chairman Jay Walder, the Daily News reports.
In the wake of painful service cuts and layoffs, Transport Workers Union Local 100 has already asked Walder to cut his $350,000 salary - and now has its sights set on the top exec's lifestyle.
Union leaders are seething over Walder's new $1.6 million apartment near Central Park - and a vacation at his country home in the South of France.
"It demonstrates he's a rich elitist completely out of touch with New York City transit workers and riders," Local 100 President John Samuelsen said.
"How many transit workers or riders are able to vacation in the South of France and can buy a condo on Central Park West?"
Local 100 members plan to protest outside the Central Park West pad Walder bought for his family, which is relocating from London. The TWU also has asked Paris transit leaders to demonstrate at Walder's stone house in the rolling French countryside.
Walder declined to comment, but has said he's not immune to the impact of fare hikes and budget cuts, calling the layoffs "extremely painful."
"They all have families," he said of pink-slipped employees. "They all have lives."
Walder arrived at the MTA after being a top tube executive in London, where owning a modest French country home wouldn't be considered an outrageous extravagance.
Still, as Michelle Obama's controversial trip to Spain showed last week, some American workers have a low tolerance for lavishness during bad economic times.
Walder has been forced to make tough choices because of the dire financial situation of the MTA, which has lost about $900 million in expected revenues since the fall. To balance the books, Walder has said workers shouldn't get raises for two years without productivity savings to pay for them.
Unlike prior MTA chairmen, who were born into wealth and lacked transit experience, Walder had a more middle-class upbringing.
He grew up in the Rockaways, went to public schools and a state college upstate. He earned a master's degree at Harvard University and rose through the ranks during a 12-year stint at the MTA in the 1980s and 1990s.
For nearly a decade, Walder worked with Transport for London, then as a partner at an international consulting company. That's when he and his wife bought the 1862 country home outside of St. Antonin Noble Val for about $500,000, a source said.
Secluded from the road, the house is perched on a small hill at the end of a long driveway. There is a built-in swimming pool on the property, one of the smaller ones in an area of sprawling farms and spacious farmhouses.
The TWU's tactics aren't new, said Joshua Freeman, a labor historian at the City University of New York. Unions sometimes try to win over the public by showing that "the people making the decisions that are hurting workers are living nice lives," he said.
"Whether it will lead to a change in policy, it's impossible to predict," he said. "No CEO is going to say 'I gave in because I was sick of pickets in front of my house.'"
(This item appeared in the Daily News Aug. 12, 2010.)
