A Letter to BART Management and Unions: You Can Both Bite My Shiny Metal Ass

Dear BART Management and Unions:
Bite my shiny metal ass.
No, really. BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS.
On Sunday, BART showed it what it can do when it does best, move a record number of people to one of the largest events of the year. Yes it was crowded, and yes it was hot, but BART still managed to get the job done safely and quickly. Well done.
On Monday, BART showed what it can do when it lets BS and pettiness get in the way of its core mission, and stranded hundreds of thousands of people trying to get to work, school, their doctor, the store, or ANYTHING ELSE PEOPLE USE BART FOR. Millions of dollars in productivity were lost, people wasted time burning gas in cars, and some may have even lost their jobs because they were late.
While people continue to insist that San Francisco and the Bay Area are a bastion of leftist thought*, if BART unions thought they’d win over the hearts and minds of workers, public and private for their cause, they have been sorely mistaken. That’s because the labor movement, particulary in the Bay Area, no longer covers a wide range of workers, public and private. Most “union” employees work for government agencies, and organizing at private workplaces is non-existent (see any organizers at Facebook or Google?)
Even with the talk of our area “avoiding” the recession, most people aren’t making a lot of money. They don’t get health care benefits. They don’t get raises. The BART unions have done nothing to explain themselves to the public that creates a sympathetic base of support. Rather, there’s a lot of resentment, because most people can’t see the median salary as “oppressive.” You know this list better than we do so please explain why you deserve our sympathy as we struggle to get around the Bay Area.
However, BART management, if you think this means I’m giving your asses a pass, think again. When I read that you paid out a $950,000 payment to FIRED CEO Dorothy Duggar, then gave her almost 2 years of salary while did no work, and gave her bonuses, all I can say is what the Hell is wrong with you people?
How do you give big pay and bonuses to someone whom you fired for not doing their job? We’re supposed to trust you to be the bastions of fiscal responsibility here? I can find better people, with more common sense, that don’t make dumbass decisions like that. Better yet, take 5 minutes out in the Real World, and see how this kind of nonsense goes with those who do Actual Work for a living.
Here’s a proposition – I’ll screw up BART and cost a lot less than a couple of million dollars**. Seriously. Hell, I’ll do it for 25% of that multimillion dollar salary. Sounds “fiscally prudent” to me!
Ok joke’s over. Time for a reality check: it is your consistent failures that have led us to the point where we build stations to nowhere that cost a fortune and don’t drive up ridership, and we have to keep bailing out your bad (and sometimes corrupt) decisions. So don’t think I’m buying you’re “it’s the greedy unions’ fault” line you’ve been pumping. You’re no better.
If you expect the public to support you when you demand more money to expand services and to do the maintenance and hard work required, both of you need to get off your asses, get back to the bargaining table, fix this sh*t now, or forever lose crucial public support to ensure that as we grow in population, we’re not stuck with a transit system from the 1970s in the 2020s.
Do it now. Otherwise, BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS.
Sincerely
Myself, and everyone else in the Bay Area.
*Let’s just jettison this idea anyone here is really a leftist. If this was say, Paris, or Brazil, we’d have mass riots. Here, we have mass bitching on social media, and it’s not “pro strike.”
**Remember Linton Johnson? The guy who was a total failure at his job as a PR guy for the agency? He was never fired. This promise is similar to the one I made in 2011 to do his job twice as good but for half the price. I can live on $75,000 + benefits. And hey, if I screw up, I can still get paid anyway!
Oh, and one last thing. The belagaured SFTMA deserves a round of applause for increasing service to try and help. They had to delay a major retrofit of the Automatic Tracking Control in the tunnel because of BART’s strike (an important repair.) I say BART should reimburse the MTA for its troubles during the strike. It’s only fair.