Much of my coverage of the MTA’s labor costs have focused around union raises and generous pension plans. I would be remiss to neglect to mention the high costs and redundancies found within the agency’s management structure as well. These problems — triple-staffing in some circumstances — are just as problematic.
Today, Newsday’s James Bernstein highlights a problem with the agency’s public relations department. He reports that the agency employs a staff of 400 to meet its marketing and public relations needs. Says Bernstein:
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority still maintains a staff of 400 to work in its marketing and public relations division, at a time when the agency has drawn up plans to slash service, forcing students to pay for their travel to school.
MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin earlier this week acknowledged that about 400 people work in media, government and community relations and corporate and customer communications – departments that have not felt the budget ax being wielded by new agency chairman Jay Walder to close an unexpected deficit of nearly $400 million.
But, Soffin said, Walder and the MTA board plan to closely examine costs for public relations and marketing. “I would expect any review would certainly look at things that are not service-related, and that would include communications,” Soffin said.
Bernstein reports that the MTA’s corporate communications department features 16 people who work with transit reporters and bloggers. By comparison, Amtrak has just five. He notes, however, that the MTA’s daily ridership is over 100 times that of Amtrak’s. Perhaps then some of these myriad staff members aren’t redundant.
We’ve known for a long time that the MTA is not a lean bureaucracy. Because the authority consists of seven different agencies and a centralized headquarters that have not been integrated properly and were thrown together at the start, numerous people do, in effect, the same job as others. Cutting through the red tape to streamline operations though has never come easy.
To save money, the MTA must restructure itself internally. It can’t ask its workers to consider wage freezes or reduced staffing levels if the desk jockeys aren’t doing the same thing. The cost savings here aren’t estimated to be great enough to cover that $400 million gap, but as riders are expected to suffer through service cuts, so must the MTA’s corporate structure.
20 comments
As you’ve covered multiple times the MTA PR staff is awful. They continue to lose the PR battles with politicians and citizens blaming the MTA and reporters eager to listen. All 400 people in the PR department should be fired for incompetence and be replaced by a leaner, more efficient, and more effective staff.
Avi is right, there is no reason to have a staff of 400 who cannot do their jobs. A few years back, they added more authority subsidiaries and more redundancy, isn’t it time to reorganize the whole place?
If they use the opportunity to fire all the people at the other MTA departments, it will be even better.
For gods sake folks! How dare you people be so flippant with ANY NY’s Jobs! I thought all you cry babies understood that you attempt to CREATE jobs in a recession, NOT fire people!
I wonder how your jobs can be viewed from the outside looking in.
For Shame.
Harry, bear in mind that the federal government seems to agree with you. It’s doing its best to save every highly paid managerial job in the country, with few strings attached. If the job is in finance or car manufacturing, and if the person in question is an executive, then all the better.
But to the rest of us, it seems strange that a cash-strapped government would raise taxes or cut education spending instead of laying off PR managers.
I can agree that the Feds are trying to save high paying jobs, but you must also bear in mind that for each job loss comes also a loss of tax revenue for the federal government. It’s really a lose-lose proposition. And I would not necessarily assume that that the PR jobs that we speak of are “high paying.”
The more jobs that we lose, the more damaging it is to the overall economy. No one should have to lose their job so that you or I are spared a tax increase that cuts across the board.
I agree with the above comments (as I’ve said quite often before) that their PR groups could do a much better job. In fairness, though, does the staff of 400 PR employees include the guys who ride the subways with a stack of Service Advisories and a roll of masking tape?
or, for that matter, the former red-vested “token clerks” who’s jobs were to help relations with the public….
No both of the jobs that you mention belong to the stations department. They are not white collar high paid PR jobs.
Didn’t Walder say there would be a 10% cut for all non-union staff? Wouldn’t that include, well, all of these people?
Paying them 90% of their current salary is still too high. It’s like with executives at GM: cutting their pay from $10 million a year to $9 million still means they earn $9 million a year more than their value to the company.
Well, without studying the employee structure in detail, I’m not going to make any such sweeping generalizations as that. But given that they are employed in the public sector, it is likely that they make too much.
In order to live in NYC, you CANNOT make enough.
What *are* these 400 people doing? I feel suspicious that something *else* has been slipped into “media, government and community relations and corporate and customer communications”. I don’t really see how this can possibly employ 400 people, unless it *does* include the people putting up all the posters with masking tape. Maybe it includes the entire sign-manufacturing division?
I’d guess that there is no one single department of “media, government and community relations and corporate and customer communications.” There are probably several departments that contribute something to the PR puzzle, and the total staff count at those departments is 400. It still seems like a large number, but I don’t know what else it includes. Responding to letters from disgruntled customers and government officials? Updating maps and timetables? Submitting legal notices to the media? Posting signs with masking tape?
A staff of 400 and this is the best they can do!? iPhone apps could probably replace half of them.
I also wonder, just what are the duties of these people? With a staff this size, you think we’d see innovation, but there’s little to none. Is the TransitTransit “newsmagazine” their best media vehicle? I’ll leave it up to you to comment on that. (One thing, bring the video online.) They have a former NY1 transit reporter on their staff, but he’s rarely seen and he could try to defend the MTA better. And you know about the website, which has to be under this department’s purview (alongside their tech department). Are there not enough people telling the MTA that it must be redesigned to serve the people better, or is incompetence the word? Lastly, all these issues are compounded with the problems regarding the MTA’s mergers.
Meanwhile, have you seen SEPTA’s website? Their story behind the website’s makeover (as well as other transit systems) needs to inspire improvement in the MTA’s communications dept. That, and world-class standards, which hopefully Walder can share with this agency and not assimilation.
Finally, maybe the PR team is resigned to the view that the public’s perception (and populist view taken by the media like WPIX) of the MTA will be difficult if not impossible to change, especially negative ones.
It’s not just the website that SEPTA does well. SEPTA rearranged its regional rail system along S-Bahn lines in the early 1980s, building a new tunnel to connect the Penn and Reading terminals. Right now, trains in Greater Philly run from one suburb to downtown to another suburb, instead of stopping downtown and clogging station tracks.
Walder has promised (scroll down) that an MTA website redesign is due in the coming months. Anyway, I’d agree that 400 employees is quite a lot for a PR department that does so poorly. I can’t even remember seeing a letter to the editor from the MTA in response to the daily distortions put forth by the media. I’m sure it’s happened at least once in recorded history, but…
[…] misinformation campaign continues, and there’s seemingly nobody in the MTA’s 400-strong Public Relations department strategizing a campaign to deflect the […]