Second Ave. Sagas

A costly ruling on overtime for bus drivers

Written by

Benjamin Kabak

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On and off for the last few months, I’ve explored the way labor costs are dragging down the MTA’s overall financial outlooked. I’ve examined how rising pension costs will saddle the MTA with more debt and have explored the recent arbitration decision, currently under appeal, that would grant TWU workers an 11 percent raise over the next three years.

Generally, my tone has come across as anti-labor simply because of the costs. While organized labor is generally a net positive, the unions have not been too sympathetic to the MTA’s financially reality. While union leaders will always look out for the rank-and-file, bad economic times for the transit authority will eventually impact its workers as well. Oftentimes, unions lose sight of that reality.

Today, I have another tale of union support contributing to the MTA’s economic woes. As Pete Donohue first reported, the MTA has been ordered to use — and pay — overtime workers to dispatch shuttle buses even though other dispatchers on regular time are available to do this work. This ruling could cost the MTA up to $1 million in increased and unnecessary labor costs. The Daily News transit writer reports:

The arbitrator of a labor-management dispute in Queens recently ruled the [bus] dispatchers’ contract is silent on how weekend bus shuttles can be staffed. So the agency must stick to what it has done for more than 20 years: Fill shuttle posts with workers who volunteer to work more than 40 hours per week for higher pay rates, contract arbitrator George Nicolau said.

Looking for savings, NYC Transit last year began assigning shuttle posts to underutilized workers not assigned regular routes, a move challenged by a dispatchers union.

The “very unfavorable” decision means NYC Transit “literally can have a dispatcher…with no work to do but we cannot assign that dispatcher to shuttle work,” NYC Transit President Howard Roberts recently wrote to MTA board members. “Instead we have to leave that dispatcher idle and bring in another dispatcher on overtime to supervise the shuttle work,” he wrote in the letter obtained by The News.

In the grand scheme of the MTA, the $1 million per year this ruling could cost the agency is small beans. When budget deficits reach into the billions, a meager $1 million hardly makes a dent. But this ruling flies in the face of common sense. If idle workers are available to do this job and if the MTA can avoid paying overtime wages at the same time, why can’t the transit agency make use of those workers?

I don’t want to dislike the unions, and I want to believe they are sympathetic to the needs of the MTA. This story makes for bad press though. Maybe some of the pro-labor union members who read this blog can explain the rationale behind this ruling and the union’s position. For now, I just don’t get it.

Comments

14 responses to “A costly ruling on overtime for bus drivers”

  1. rhywun

    Well, if the regular dispatchers are “idle”, send some of them home. Except that’s probably against some contract, too.

    Reply
  2. PB

    There are a lot of things the Unions have blocked the MTA from doing which would have saved them money and helped service. However, they the union is not sympathetic to the riding public at all and have found myself absolutely disgusted with the unions “protecting” transit workers.

    Reply
  3. Tony

    This article is lacking details about the exact situation. But it doesn’t sound good.

    The only labor cost that is dragging down the TA is the cost of management. Managers that manage nobody, managers that have no real positions, managers that aren’t needed. With the restructuring and line gm program all of the superintendents and general superintendents have kept there jobs. Some of them have been given made up positions so they don’t have to get demoted to there former title which was what was advertised as going to happen to most of the superintendents because there jobs were being replace by the gm’s and assistant gm’s, as well as the group gm’s. Not one superintendent was demoted, fired, reclassified, or took a cut in pay of any kind.

    Reply
  4. Avi

    I think you lose sight of the fact that it is not the union’s job to worry about the MTA’s finances. The MTA does a bad enough job itself controlling its finances. Remember, this stupid practice was started by the MTA and continued for 20 years before they though better of it. The union cannot and should not be worried about the MTA, it is the union’s job to worry solely about its members. There is an adversarial negotiation process and the MTA should be able to take care of itself within that process (and by the way, the ban on strikes strongly favors the MTA). Stop complaining about the union and for once blame the MTA for being stupid, which this is another example of.

    Reply
    1. Tony

      Finally somebody else who realizes that the taylor law is completely one sided favor of management. Especially since we now see that binding arbitration is only binding if the union gets screwed like in 2005.

      Reply
    2. Benjamin Kabak

      Ask the UAW workers sitting at home in Detroit what happens when a union employee can’t afford to pay their workers anymore.

      Anyway, I don’t see how this is “another example” of the MTA being stupid. They wanted to use non-overtime workers who weren’t doing anything to do these jobs in order to save money. How is that stupid? I’m asking that seriously.

      Reply
      1. AB

        Again, if the authority was interested in having extra list dispatchers assigned shuttle work they had the opportunity for the past twenty year to negotiate it. They failed to so. Also, the article makes it sound like there are dozens of extra dispatcher available for this work, which is not true, at most on a given weekend there is probably only a couple of dispatchers that might be available.

        Reply
        1. John

          So why shouldn’t they be able to use those couple that are available? It doesn’t seem like this should have to be negotiated. If in fact it’s in the union contract that the MTA needs to call in overtime workers, even when other workers are available, that’s pretty insane and speaks very poorly of the MTA negotiators.

          Reply
    3. Nathanael

      Riiight. So the MTA finally decided to stop doing something stupid. The arbitrator rules that the contract says nothing about the stupid thing… and therefore the MTA has to keep doing it?!?!?

      No, I have no sympathy for the union. Where’s the contract clause which says “We get to keep doing it the way we’ve always done it, no matter how stupid it is”? Who on Earth inserted that clause and don’t they understand that it hurts *EVERYONE* in the end?

      Reply
  5. AB

    If this was a real issue for the Authority it should have been brought up in contract negotiations, which concluded in February 2008. It should be realized that the union represents the members that elect them to look out for their best interests. If this is the way the Authority choose to cover shuttle work for over 20 years,and then unilaterally decides to change that it is the responsible of the union to its members to challenge that decision. Both the union and the authority was given equal opportunity to present their case to the arbitrator and in this instance the union got the favorable decision. The union shouldn’t be criticized for doing their job.

    Reply
    1. Alon Levy

      It should be realized that the union represents the members that elect them to look out for their best interests.

      That’s why labor is in such dire straits. People who aren’t already union members get no help from the existing AFL-CIO affiliates, which are happy with their upper middle-class incomes. They can organize on their own, but because UAW- or TWU-style militancy costs the employer too much money, employers do whatever they can to stay union-free.

      Remember that unions were originally formed not to help upper middle-class rail workers, but to lift the entire working class.

      Reply
    2. Andrew

      What do contract negotiations have to do with it? I’m not a lawyer, but if the current contract doesn’t explicitly prohibit assigning extra list dispatchers to shuttle work, then why wouldn’t it be allowed?

      As for what’s been going on for 20 years, that’s hardly relevant. Perhaps someone only just realized the potential for savings here. Whatever the reason, if the contract leaves both options open, then management has both options, and I don’t see how the union has the power to stop management from switching from one option to the other.

      If the union doesn’t want to allow shuttle work to be filled off the extra list, then the union should have brought that up in contract negotiations.

      Reply
  6. Boris

    The whole idea of a public union like the TWU seems like a scam to me. The need for such a union implies that the government treats its workers poorly- as poorly as a private company. This “adversarial” relationship between the government and the union is nothing but a good cop-bad cop routine used for sucking out taxpayers’ money. Think about it- unions are some of the biggest campaign contributors. Why do they need protection- through unionization, the courts, and friendly arbitrators- from the very people they brought into office?

    Private unions are at least somewhat beholden to shareholders, because as an investor I have the choice to not invest in a particular company, like GM. As a New York State resident, I have no choice but to pay taxes to the unions. Public unions are absurd.

    Reply
  7. Phillip

    Great point, Boris! Public unions may have been needed 100 years ago. But the problem is that they have no reason to encourage efficiency. The slower and less efficiently they work, the more workers the government will hire, and the bigger the union will grow. Meanwhile the MTA pays workers to stand idle while others work overtime.

    Reply

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