As the temporary restraining order preventing the MTA from firing 475 station agents remained in place throughout the weekend, the relationship between the authority and the TWU grew icier. Transit announced layoffs in spite of the injunction, and MTA Chair and CEO Jay Walder has engaged in a war of words with TWU President John Samuelsen over what Walder believes to be antiquated work rules hampering the authority.
The first development arrived on Saturday morning when Transit announced that 250 station agents would be let go this week while the remaining 225 would be retained until, as the agency anticipates, the temporary injunction is lifted. Since the restraining order focused only on keeping the booths open, the authority decided it could do so with a skeletal staff.
“A temporary restraining order issued by a court Wednesday night put the MTA’s closure of the 42 subway booths on hold for now,” Transit said in a statement on Saturday. “In light of the order, the MTA is refraining from laying off the employees needed to staff those booths while the litigation proceeds. More than 250 of the station agents, however, are not required to keep those subway booths open, and those layoffs are now scheduled for next week to ensure that we achieve the maximum savings possible in light of the MTA’s budget shortfall.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, those to be fired are the burgundy vest-wearing station agents who roam fare-control areas and help customers with directions and problems that may arise. Union officials have long maintained that station agents are an integral part of the system’s security, but the jury is decidedly out on that claim.
The bigger labor-related headlines this weekend, though, concerned the clash between Samuelsen and Walder. Pete Donohue has the story:
Rules embedded in labor contracts are hampering the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s efforts to increase efficiency – and save money, Walder told the Daily News. “That has to change,” Walder said. “It might mean some of our bus drivers aren’t as good at playing pool as they are now, but we might have to bear that cost.”
Some bus depots have pool tables in crew rooms for drivers to use on their so-called swing shift, a period of time when drivers receive half-pay but aren’t behind the wheel. A typical bus driver’s schedule can span 12 hours: driving a route for four hours during the morning rush and another four hours in the evening rush, the peak travel periods when service is most needed. During the middle four hours – say, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. – drivers don’t have any work-related duties but are still on the clock.
Transport Workers Union Local 100 President John Samuelsen bristled at Walder’s comments. “Our bus operators are away from their families 13, 14 hours a day and are compensated for it,” Samuelsen said.
Donohue details have competing union contracts prevent the MTA from assigning drivers to shifts in other boroughs after rush hour, and the authority is instead left with idle workers. This work rule, though, seems to make some sense. The authority can’t expect to ask its drivers to commute to and from work twice a day just to avoid a few hours of downtime. The flexibility should come in reassigning drivers.
Where Walder has a real gripe though is here, writes Donohue: “He also is miffed that when a driver who is behind the wheel eight hours a day calls in sick, he gets paid for the full 12-hour ‘run,’ including the swing span.” The sick day provisions have come under fire.
I don’t expect the unions to budge right now. They’re being assailed on all sides as the MTA looks to cut its number of employees and scale back compensation practices. Walder, though, is taking this fight to the media. “We should have a well-paid and well-compensated workforce, ” he said to the Daily News. “but the quid pro quo of that is we should have a productive workforce. I think we have a series of work rules and practices that have developed over many years that are all about how people effectively get paid for not working. I think that’s really where the shame of the system is.”
23 comments
The unions will never budge. They don’t know how to spell budge and they certainly do not know how to compromise.
I’m cringing… I don’t know how many appellate court decisions that I’ve read that say, in essence, “The correct way to get out from under a wrongly-decided injunction is to to appeal it, not to disregard it,” but it’s a pretty large number. State bar codes also stress that even if you’re 100% sure that a Judge’s order is wrong you still need to follow it and simply appeal. I hope that this fits within the wording of the injunction (e.g. does it say that the MTA is barred from closing booths, or that the MTA is barred from reducing station agent coverage?) else this litigation will be going on for a lot longer than it needs to.
I still haven’t tracked down the exact injunction, but from my discussions with a few people, the wording seems to concern closing the booths and not firing station agents. As long as the authority is keeping the booths open with whatever appropriate staffing levels are deemed to be in compliance with the TRO, they’re not violating it.
Exactly, which begs the question– if the booths can be effectively staffed with partial layoffs, how overstaffed must they be now?
Why do they have a 4hr nap time? That is retarded, no wonder why the MTA is in such trouble, the Union is killing them. Driving a bus is such a hard task, I mean only the elite can handle it.
Also “Our bus operators are away from their families 13, 14 hours a day and are compensated for it,”
Isn’t any working person away from their family when they work? Give me a break one of the dumbest counter arguments I have ever seen. Not only are his worker driving for a living, they are also receiving full benefits along with pensions. The MTA should just fire them all and pay non-union workers a little more but not follow union conditions.
It’s a basic tenet of labor law that when your employer is controlling your actions you’re on the clock. If they’re required to stay on the job site, they’re on the clock, and MTA should be grateful that they’re only paying half time. If they’re not required to stay there they’d still have to negotiate a salary that reflected that the drivers are working two shifts a day regularly (a highly unusual schedule).
So Joe from SI in your opinion an employee should not get any pay for hours that they are still working? These B/O’s are still on the clock during there swing shifts therefore they get paid. The TA set these schedules up NOT the employees.
So take them off the clock. They work two non-consecutive four-hour shifts. What they do between shifts is their business (short of illegal activity of course), but I don’t see why they need to be paid for it. I understand that’s not the most attractive work schedule, but that’s the schedule. If you don’t like it don’t take the job.
The TA makes the schedules NOT the employees. With that said there must be some reason why the management chooses to make the schedules the way they currently are.
The schedules are there because the peak hour is too prominent. The only way around short shifts is if the peak-hour shifts arise from overlapping a shift extending earlier and a shift extending later. This requires the pm peak to have no more service than the total of the midday and evening off-peaks, and the am peak to have no more service than the total of the midday and late night off-peaks. On many transit systems it’s doable for the pm peak; on none that I know of is it doable for the am peak.
Not every problem in the world can be blamed on management.
Note that, in New York, this problem is essentially limited to the express buses, which are very strongly peaked.
Anon256 suggests hiring part-time bus operators, which could potentially solve this problem. But that assumes that the union could be persuaded to allow part-time bus operators, which I think is very unlikely.
Most people want full-time jobs and, as you pointed out, this is largely confined to the express bus services… I find myself wondering what the cost of higher turnover, more training and double benefits would be vs. the cost of just paying a few drivers for that middle block.
I think one of the larger issues here is that our use of transit is largely limited to rush hours. Not enough people use transit at other times of the day to need those idling bus drivers. If transit use were to go up dramatically (due to the end of government policies that promote private automobile use and ownership, higher gas prices, etc), the use curve will flatten, simply due to the law of large numbers.
How about hiring two part-time workers, one to work all the morning shifts and one to work all the evening shifts? Then each can be paid only for the time they work, without obliging anyone to stay around the bus depot at mid-day. Part time workers can also be paid fewer benefits.
Well, that would be sensible. Let’s ask the union – see what they think.
Part-time workers can be paid fewer benefits, but they’re often paid more per hour worked. They aren’t only in major union-busting employers, such as Wal-Mart, which tweak working hours to be just short enough that employees (sorry, “associates”) don’t have to get health insurance.
There’s a big difference between normal benefits that everyone should get given the current state of the federal government’s social benefits, such as health insurance, and benefits that are just rent-seeking, such as defined-benefit pensions. (It’s important to have some national defined-benefit plan to avoid Singapore-style poverty among seniors; however, the US has such a plan, called “Social Security.” If you think it’s too little, spend your energies lobbying for greater SS benefits.)
The unions seem perfectly content with the fact that their one-size-fits-all benefit demands lead to fewer jobs, i.e. higher unemployment. The 10+% of Americans who can’t find work might beg to differ. Not everyone wants, or needs, full-time employment with all the bells and whistles, yet such people are effectively shut out of union-controlled industries (like transit).
I wish it were one-size-fits-all. A lot of social problems in the US would not exist today if everyone had gotten the social benefits the AFL members obtained after WW2.
Comments sections of the blogs become recruiting tools for union membership.
Personally, I am comfortable with two (or three) part timers taling Rhywun’s job (whatever Rocket Science that might be) with no Health or Pension benefits. Very comfortable, especially if those part-timers can handle all the blog posts.
[…] the TWU, protesting Walder’s agressive stance and the dismissal this week of 250 station agents, has upped the ante. As amNew York’s Heather Haddon details, the TWU has taken its protest […]
I think there are plenty of decisions made by the TWU that can be called into question (and I’m still pissed by their performance during the congestion pricing fight…). I’m alarmed by the pension and benefits projections, and there can be an entitlement among municipal workers that is definitely unfortunate (especially during a recession…)…
But, the knee-jerk, scorched earth treatment of anyone who has a union job is really annoying. Can any of you please qualify your statements just a little bit?
Driving a bus in NYC is one of the most impossibly stressful jobs in the city. I’m sure there are plenty of damning statistics on workplace burnout / stress / mental health for performing that job day-in, day-out. It doesn’t bother me they’re getting paid half-time for down time. 1 hour of driving a bus in the mayhem of nyc streets is unquestionably equal at least 3, 4 hours of sitting in an office doing “real work.”
[…] of sick-day abuse, the officials spoke about work-rule reform and controlling pension obligations through overtime monitoring. As the above chart shows, one […]