Union Bulldog With a Loud Bark

Late Monday night, in the darkness outside a bus yard in the San Fernando Valley, the president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s mechanics union stood with a small group of men and considered the fruitless end of more than a year of labor negotiations.

As the clock struck midnight, Neil Silver checked the time, looked over his workers and calmly assessed the situation for a reporter. “OK,” he said, “this is the beginning of it. This is what [the MTA] has gotten for the public. After 17 months of no progress ... a strike!”

For a minute nothing more was said. The men looked somber. Then another side of Silver emerged -- the salty union boss, rallying the troops with a profanity-laced cry that he delivered with a smile: “Now let’s burn the ... place down!”

He’d just taken them out on strike, taken money out of their pockets. But the bus mechanics and drivers on the scene patted Silver on the back, laughed along with his joke, picked up their signs and started walking a picket line that’s now in its fifth day.

It was a vintage Neil Silver moment.

One minute he’s serious, sober and sometimes threatening. The next, he’s one of the guys, coarse and congenial, just as he was during the many years he worked nights, cleaning and fueling MTA buses.

“Depends on who I’m talking to,” said Silver, a moon-faced 59-year-old, reflecting on a personality that confounds some and comforts others. “If I got somebody that’s all tightened up in front of me and going to explode, I gotta try to lighten ‘em up. If I find out he’s not gonna get loose, that’s another story.”

However and whenever it is resolved, the strike that is crippling the nation’s third-largest transit agency is partly a result of Silver’s hard-charging leadership style at the Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1277. And its outcome may determine his future with the organization.

His bluster with the MTA is so legendary that agency officials snidely refer to “the Neil Silver show,” and one official there acknowledged that even after months of Silver’s threats, the strike caught the agency off guard.

“He’s a wild card,” the agency’s spokesman, Marc Littman, said before the strike began. The MTA, he said, was “not sure what Neil is going to do.”

Some within the union feel the same way. The roughly 2,500-strong membership voted to authorize the strike, but that was back in January, relatively early in the negotiations. The decision to walk off the job this week was made by Silver and backed by his top lieutenants, but it wasn’t universally embraced by the rank and file.

The local’s leadership election is scheduled for next month, and Silver recognizes that he is likely to face a challenge, although no other candidates have been announced.

“Neil has trouble on his hands, and he knows it,” said mechanic James Shirley, a frequent presence at the union’s downtown labor hall. “He has got to deliver.... If he really wanted our votes in the next election, we would still be working today. Because if he makes us unhappy, we will take this out on him.”

If this were New York, or the docks of Baltimore, Silver’s bust-your-chops persona would hardly cause a ripple. In Los Angeles, a town of velvet-gloved politics and passive-aggressive power plays, Silver sticks out like a loose lug nut on an MTA bus.

His direct manner, he says in the New York accent of his youth, comes from a lifetime of hard work, of relating to the men and women on the buses rather than those in the boardrooms.

“Been like this since I was a kid,” he said. “Living for the union. The everyday guy, on his hands and knees, picking the gum off of a bus in the middle of the night. You think that’s easy? I don’t want anyone messing with them or my retirees.... I’ll go to the mat for them.”

When the mechanics walked out Tuesday, the MTA’s other unions followed suit. About 400,000 daily riders have been left looking for other ways to move around the region.

Meantime, there’s growing pressure for Silver to explain himself. To a public suddenly having to deal without thousands of buses and hundreds of trains. And to the roughly 7,000 workers who are staying off the job because he decided to send the MTA a message.

The message was about control of the union’s MTA-financed, $17-million health care fund, now insolvent. Silver and four other union officials are part of a panel that oversees how the money is spent. They decide what insurance plans to offer members, who pay no more than $6 a month for their coverage.

The MTA wants to take over management of the fund, which the agency says is being handled poorly. And MTA officials figure they should have more say in how its money is spent.

Silver says he’s willing to have the membership start contributing $71 a month for their coverage, but he worries that the MTA would raise the fees much higher.

Silver was raised in the Bronx in a household led by a father who worked at a slaughterhouse. His first union job came at 18, when he joined the merchant marine. Silver said the job taught him diligence, kept him out of a gang and showed him the value of being a union man, if only because of the pay. He was soon bringing home a paycheck three times the size of his father’s.

Silver spent much of the 1960s at sea, working on container ships and in the Navy during the Vietnam War. When he returned home, he said, he joined the antiwar movement, further solidifying his belief that people banding together can successfully fight for change.

He settled in Los Angeles, he admits quite frankly, largely because, as a young man, he liked the strip clubs here. “It was heaven,” he said.

In 1974, he landed a job he would have for years, working for the Los Angeles County Rapid Transit District, a predecessor to the MTA, as a service attendant, washing, cleaning and fueling buses.

Despite the somewhat low-level status of his job, Silver soon became a union leader. Within a year he was a shop steward, out at San Fernando Valley Maintenance Division 15, in the eastern hills.

“It was clear that he was a different guy right from the beginning,” said Ken Barbara, who started working alongside Silver in 1976. Silver was a natural leader, a holy terror to management because of his bare-knuckled style of advocating for his workers.

“Guys would have attendance problems; some would be getting in trouble for drugs or for stealing something. But Neil would be the man there making sure management had to respect their rights,” said Barbara. “Everybody screws up on the job sometimes, but he knows the agency screws people too. Just like a defense lawyer, he was going to make sure you didn’t get railroaded.... It built his rep.”

The loyalty he earned at Division 15 catapulted Silver through the union’s ranks.

In 1980 he was elected vice president of the local. He was mentored by popular union boss Jerry Long, who was suffering from multiple sclerosis. Silver doted on Long, pushing his wheelchair around meetings and driving him to the region’s far-flung bus yards.

By 1987, Silver had taken Long’s place as president, a job that required a coat and tie, took him on lobbying trips to Washington and Sacramento, paid him nearly $50,000 and made him a key figure in the union membership of the nation’s second-biggest city.

“He loved every minute of it,” said Barbara. “It was like he was born to run a union. A natural.”

Then, in 1991, Silver was ousted as union boss. Mike Bujosa, who won the election, recalls that the mechanics were unhappy with Silver at the time over the local’s stalled contract talks.

“There was a general unhappiness with Neil,” Bujosa said. “At the time, the guys didn’t have a contract.... I guess you could say it’s sort of an irony. Because we don’t have a contract right now. Only we didn’t go out on strike back then.”

Silver was in his mid-40s. He had a young daughter and a wife, Carol, who worked as a planner at, of all places, the county transit agency. She didn’t make a lot of money. So he went back to what he loved and did best -- prepping buses for the daily grind.

Once again, Silver found himself working night shifts at the Sun Valley yard, mopping vomit off bus floors, scraping wads of gum off the seats with putty knives, using giant vacuums to suck the litter out of buses. He made about $15 an hour. He also decided he wanted his old job back. “I needed it,” he said.

In 1994, Silver ran against Bujosa and beat him by 500 out of 1,900 votes, retaking the ATU presidency. He consolidated his power, adding mechanics unions in Riverside and Palm Springs to his local, settling two MTA contracts and building connections with the state’s Democratic political elite.

Silver weathered the MTA strike of 2000, which was led by the bus drivers union, despite tactical differences with the drivers’ leaders. And for a time after that walkout, Silver’s union went about its business in relative calm.

Then the mechanics began hearing about problems with their health benefits. Silver told his workers he was angling for more MTA support and that the fund was struggling because of rising insurance rates. The MTA was making it clear that it thought the fund had enough money and that the problem was with the way the union managed it.

By the summer, Silver was warning that he would unleash the longest, toughest strike the MTA had ever seen if he didn’t start seeing more progress in negotiations.

Talks dragged on. Silver’s act confounded negotiators at the MTA and upset a good portion of his workers.

At the MTA, there was a growing frustration as Silver left several offers on the table and blasted the agency in the press. To him, the offers were an insult coming from a white-collar management stuffed with people making “well over a hundred thousand dollars, people who can’t ... understand the blue-collar guy cleaning those buses!”

Over the months, Silver grew increasingly upset and frustrated with the MTA’s lead negotiator, Brenda Diederichs, who is Silver’s opposite: calm to the point of unflappable, all business, hair never out of place. Silver found her preachy, condescending and prickly. He said repeatedly that she didn’t have enough power, that she would have to leave negotiations and check with MTA higher-ups.

Control of the health fund was emerging as a deal-breaking issue for both Diederichs and Silver. By Sunday, when a court-ordered cooling off period was hours away from ending, Silver had decided to have his workers walk off the job.

In a meeting at MTA headquarters, Diederichs’ team told him there would be no deal without the agency taking control of the union health fund. To the MTA, control was key to ensuring that the millions it put into the fund were properly managed. To Silver, the bid for control was a slap in the face.

“They can stick it. Who the hell do they think they are dealing with?” he said in a phone interview Tuesday. “Mismanagement? That place is telling me about mismanagement?”

He blistered the MTA. In the background, his lawyer and a union board member could be heard pleading with him, as they often do, to keep his mouth shut: “Neil, Neil, Neil ... please.”

Veteran labor negotiators who have worked on the other side of the table in contract talks agree that it is important for management negotiators to be able to steer clear of personalizing or being put off by Silver’s sometimes brazen approach.

They also say that for all of his public bravado, behind closed doors he is another person -- not quite calm, but practical and agreeable to give and take, so long as he doesn’t feel insulted.

“Neil is effective and creative and as imaginative at solving problems as they come,” said Tom Webb, a consultant who worked for the MTA in its 2000 talks with Silver.

“If you look at Neil Silver and set personality aside and look at results, the guy is amazingly effective,” Webb said. “He delivers.”

For all of the tough talk and flame-throwing rhetoric, Silver is facing a difficult battle as he tries to maintain control of his union. He is well aware that there is a groundswell of unrest. He claims many of those speaking out against him just don’t know the facts. He says he is hurt by this -- that all he wants, as he has always wanted, is what is best for “my workers.”

“I would be lying if I told you I don’t think about it,” Silver said. “But I don’t think about that in negotiations. I can’t. My job is to get the best deal I can, protect my retirees and protect the union.

“As for my future, I’ll let the chips fall where they may. And if I lose my position, so be it. I’ll get back on my feet again.”