Of all the skilled heavy equipment workers on the construction scene, crane operators are among the best-paid, making as much as $200,000 a year in jobs often passed down from father to son and backed by a powerful union, the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), that dates back to 1896. Like many unions founded over a century ago, where some rules have remained virtually unchanged for generations while technology has marched on, some of their locals are finding themselves accused of featherbedding and causing unwarranted cost overruns in big-ticket, big-city projects that recently include the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site.

The price of rebuilding the Big Apple’s icon is among a host of reasons that crane operators are feeling pressure to cut costs and change rules and regulations that in some cases find little favor not just among construction management and developers but with members of other unions and the public at large. In fact, public officials in New York City are being called in to enact new licensing arrangements that would require operators obtain a national license instead of a local one, opening up the labor market to workers from outside the city. Real estate honchos and New York’s Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith claim this would make for safer job sites. But the union sees another goal in the offing: the elimination of master mechanics and oilers, whose jobs many claim are obsolete and expensive in light of modern technology in the workplace.

“I’m hoping this will lead to real negotiations,” said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, a powerful lobbying organization. “If it’s nonproductive work, why are we paying for it?”

Although city officials don’t want to be seen as pressuring unions into giving up hard-earned positions, the demand is also coming from the public. Recently the tri-state Regional Plan Association’s report analyzing the structure and costs of unionized construction in New York revealed that open shops have grown from just 15 percent of the market in the 1970s to about 40 percent now--and are 20-30 percent less expensive than union shops. The report recommends elimination of wasteful work rules that add more than 20 percent to the cost of union labor, and finds that a 10 percent differential between union and nonunion construction is acceptable to union developers and contractors, while the current 20-30 percent differential is not.

Fuel for that fire is also coming from local newspaper revelations that part of cost overruns in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center may be due to unnecessary union jobs, making them seem somehow unpatriotic, and that this may have come from organized crime connections inside the unions.

Indeed, there’s fire behind some of that smoke, as Federal racketeering prosecutions in 2003 resulted in prison terms for most of the leadership of two local New York union locals followed by the appointment of a corruption monitor, George Stamboulidis, in 2009, to oversee Local 14, subsequently leading to the expulsion of two members and moves against several others.

Oilers, master mechanics, and stand-by relief operator jobs would be the first to go under new negotiations in progress, and there may not be much sympathy for them from their own union members. “They’ve become what we know in the industry as glorified timekeepers,” anonymously commented one veteran union crane operator.

Other workers who have been making concessions to keep their jobs while operating engineers have stood pat may feel the same.  Over the last three years, union plumbers, iron workers, carpenters and electricians have made concessions to their employers, but the relatively smaller group of operating engineers’ locals have not.

“A few years ago, I might’ve gone with these guys,” Robert Walsh, business manager of Iron Workers Local 40, admitted. “But those guys don’t want to work with anybody else. They don’t get it. Something has to be done.”

But the issues are both more complex and entirely local in this brewing showdown, likely to be brokered by city officials. Jessica Lappin, city councilwoman from the Upper East Side, location of two recent crane collapses, believes the issue is not so simple. “I don’t want someone from Kansas coming here with a national certificate and operating a crane on 51st Street,” she said, citing the site of one of the accidents. “We want to make sure our licensing regs are specific to New York,” a dense and unforgiving urban work environment .

Developers and union contractors want to eliminate the requirement for one master mechanic ($65 an hour) on sites to repair cranes where four or more engineers work, where they get another $30 an hour in benefits and get double wages after eight hours and on Saturdays. But tower cranes are not owned by the contractor the engineers work for. They are rented from crane companies, which usually insist their own engineers fix the equipment, leaving the contractor’s engineers relatively idle.

Contractors also want to dispense with “relief crane operators,” required to stand by for every crane on buildings constructed of concrete, and “oilers,” whose sole task is to fire up the crane for less than an hour each morning. Both are relics of steam shovel days when crankier equipment needed more continuous attention.

What will come of it? Deputy Mayor Goldsmith has said the city favors national licensing because national safety standards tend to evolve more quickly with changes in technology. Accordingly, the Bloomberg administration will be talking to contractors, the City Council and union officials about how to make it happen. The city would consider adding provisions to require operators to receive training in an urban setting to be allowed to operate a crane in the city.

The real estate board claims that doing away with 56 mechanics and oilers at the World Trade Center site alone could save $67 million in three years. But that analysis assumes the mechanics cost $700,000 apiece in wages, benefits and taxes. One real estate executive conceded that there were “unnecessary exaggerations” in the numbers, putting the potential annual cost of a master mechanic at $400,000, a figure many view with disbelief.

Future city involvement may bring both sides closer to needed agreement to keep new and ongoing construction projects fueling New York’s economy, but from current positions it would seem there may be some considerable way to go in the process.