Metro

De Blasio says new MTA contract won’t affect future negotations

A day after the MTA offered its workers a new contract with retroactive pay, Mayor de Blasio insisted the deal doesn’t set a precedent for the city’s ongoing negotiations with its unions.

“We have a very different reality here — we have our fiscal circumstances. We have a separate history in terms of labor relations than that which state and MTA has,” the mayor said Friday at a press conference in Brooklyn.

“So we’re going to do things our own way with our partners in municipal labor.”

Chuck Brecher, research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, agreed that the proposed MTA deal — an 8 percent raise spread over five years — doesn’t directly impact the mayor’s options.

“He doesn’t have to be bound by any other model, and to the extent there’s been pattern bargaining, the pattern is usually what’s happened to other city unions rather than state,” Brecher said.

He estimated that if the city were to follow in the MTA’s footsteps the tab this year would run about $3.5 billion — and that doesn’t even include teachers-union demands for retroactive pay dating back to 2009.

The mayor has said previously there’s no way the city could afford to pay full retroactive pay to all 152 unions that have been working under expired contracts.