The N-Judah Chronicles

As someone who supported Proposition G, watching the opening salvos in the media, from both TWU Local 250 A (operators’ union) and the $100,000 PR folks the MTA hired (who never send us any of their press releases, hint hint) has been an extremely depressing experience.
That’s because the huff-and-puff rhetoric on both sides ensures a sh!tstorm for the next few months, and the likelihood that whatever we end up with won’t serve anyone. Employee morale? Improved service? A contract that is fair to all (owner/riders, operators, taxpayers, the agency)? Fuggedabout it.
That’s because the agency is taking the tack that “driver pay” is the Only Thing Killing the Agency (not true), and the union is taking the attitude of “it’s not our job to care about the agency’s problems, unlike other unions who made sacrifices” (also, not true). The end result is well-funded antagonism, a flurry of stupid blog comments, and once again an agency that is adrift, leaderless and not being honest with themselves, the public or its employees.
There is no doubt that there are things in the current Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the agency and the union contains legacy clauses left over from decades past, and all sorts of weird clauses that cause the infamous “pay me not to show up to work” situation, and so on lead to significant costs to the agency, and any sane person would agree they shouldn’t be there. No one is served by them, and the promise of G was simply that under collective bargaining (you know, that thing everyone supported in Wisconsin?) there’d be a way to negotiate these out, or take them to an impartial arbitrator. Anyone who thought G was a Magic Cure-All to all the agency’s problems was smoking ground up unicorn dust. Fixing these problems is merely one of many Big Changes the agency needs if it is to function properly.

Continue reading →