While we focus on New York around these parts, transit systems across the nation are suffering financially. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal examined a recent cost-saving phenomenon sweeping the transportation nation: Municipalities are outsourcing their transit operations to private companies to save money. Through streamlined management and the ability to pay below-union wages, these companies can bring cost savings to those cities have the flexibility to bring them aboard.
Of course, it isn’t all wine and roses. As Elana Schor at Streetsblog Capitol Hill noted yesterday, some outsourced deals — companies are loathe to use the word “privatization” — seemingly come with safety trade-offs. Organized labor suffers as well under these deals. The fight to make transit affordable continues.
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The “safety trade-offs” described in your linked post are one of the worst examples of anecdotal reasoning I have seen. The blog takes an example, a train operator hired by this company and who was responsible for the LA train crash, to imply that this one company’s standards are lax, and thus, by further implication, that all “outsourcing” will be equally lax.
I am sorry, but one example does not implicate an entire system. It’s like saying that because D.C. and Chicago (both of which have had crashes recently) have both have accidents, that implies that each city is lax in its hiring and by further implication, that all government operation of mass transit is inherently unsafe.
While I do believe that a market based system of transportation is both the most cost effective and the most safe (a company which had an unreliable would not only be unsafe, but would also be very delayed, both of which would decrease demand), I won’t say that just because D.C. had an accident means that the entire system is flawed. I will say that government run transportation over the long term is flawed, because its heavy subsidization and politicization means that it is not responsive to rider demands, which are shown through a price system. This makes the systems unreliable and unsustainable.
I agree with you on the safety trade-offs example. I tried to find a dissenting opinion to offer up as well, but there were none.
The bigger issue though are the labor contracts. In New York, for example, the MTA couldn’t really outsource anything because of the hold the TWU and other unions have over them. Municipalities not beholden to a strong union can more easily outsource operations, but they don’t have the same high labor costs in the first place.
Right, and while I understand that organized labor “suffers,” I don’t see that as a bad thing. Although organized labor is great for the people within the union, it tends to makes things worse for the people outside of the union. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the equalizing effect that unions can have. What I don’t appreciate is when they are able to aggrandize power (such as by being a monopoly provider of labor to a monopoly), which drives up costs for everyone while decreasing quality of service.
NYC may just be screwed in that regard…
The MTA is a monopoly as you say but there is no union that is a monopoly to them. The MTA deal with many many unions some strong and some very very weak. For example the operators on LIRR and MNR are represented by the brotherhood of locomotive engineers a very good and strong union. While the operators for NYCT are represented by the TWU a very bad and incredibly weak union.
Um, you can’t get a job that the TWU represents without joining the TWU. The fact that the MTA “deals with many unions” means squat.
The Teamsters (which includes the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers) are one of the most xenophobic unions in the country. I’m not sure I’d call them a good union.
Railway and transit unions actually seem to have one of the worst records of all the unions in the country regarding featherbedding and supporting bad employees — in fact it’s the *only* sector I can think of with a significant number of such scandals in recent years.
Not sure why that is. Presumably historical factors — being some of the *oldest* unions around, they’ve had time to grow sclerotic? Certainly some transit and rail union locals seem to be perfectly responsible.
The Teamsters are corrupt for historical reasons: because they could go on sympathy strikes and refuse to deliver to businesses that their allied unions were striking against, they started demanding kickbacks from everyone, enriching the union leadership. The pattern of corruption became entrenched, and has remained even though sympathy strikes became illegal in the 1950s.
I’m not sure about the TWU. It seems a lot better than the Teamsters. Part of it is historical, again – the union was originally very radical, affiliating with the CIO rather than the AFL. The worst unions are always the more moderate ones, which use racism to appeal to the rank and file and don’t give a damn about the broader labor movement.
Actually, the thing about safety trade-offs is clear: don’t take the lowest bidder!
The common trend when outsourcing operations is to take the lowest bidder, but it’s quite evident that you can bid lower if you’re sacrificing safety.
As far as I’m concerned, anything that weakens the hold of the unions on America’s transit operations is a good thing. The unions are only hurting the riders, and making a giant annoyance out of themselves. Good riddance, and smart thinking, outsourcing agencies. I wish there was a way to get rid of the unions without outsourcing, but for now that’s not practical, so this will have to do.