On December 23, 2005, I went out on a date. It was one day after the transit strike that crippled New York had ended. I was in a foul mood.
The night before, you see, I had been on another date. Throughout dinner, the woman I was out with complained about the transit strike. About how much she was inconvenienced (she worked in the publishing industry and her commute into Manhattan had been screwed up), how good the workers had it, how bad public sector unions were.
So on the night of the 23rd, as I walked into the bar, I was ready for the worst. When I met the woman I was due to have a drink with, I asked her how she was doing. “Oh fine,” she said, “if you like meeting strange men at bars.” (We had met online; this was our first date.) “Well,” I said, “I can make this really easy on you. Where do you stand on the transit strike?” She replied instantly: “You’ve got a bunch of working-class people led by a guy with a really cool Caribbean accent. What’s not to like?” On the right side, not too earnest, with just a touch of irony.
Seventeen months later, we were married.
All of which is to say: I really hate privileged people complaining about public-sector unions, especially when those unions make things inconvenient for them.
On Friday, the transit workers who run BART in the Bay Area went on strike. The technorati pounced, complaining about the workers’ salaries and the hassle of their interrupted commutes. My favorite tweet, making fun of the whole phenomenon, was this one:
“Can you believe the salary these BART guys get to drive a train?” —someone whose job is making internet ads more clickable.
— Jim Ray (@jimray) October 18, 2013
BART workers make a base pay of about $60,000. That’s $15,000 less than what it takes for a family of four “to get by” in the Bay Area. Even if you assume that that family has two wage earners making $60,000 apiece, that combined salary would, yes, put them above the median household income for the Bay Area but hardly make them rich. Which is exactly what union jobs are supposed to do.
But in the imagination of the high-tech professionals of the Bay Area, that’s precisely the problem with union jobs. (Or perhaps they have no idea what a middle-class life actually looks like—and costs.)
In any event, union workers—and union workers on strike—really piss these people off. So much so that one Twitter exec blurted this out:
What’s brown and black and looks great on someone causing the #BARTstrike? A Doberman. (Toooo angry? Long day in the car.)
As it happens, wages aren’t even the real issue dividing the BART workers from management. It’s work rules, and more important, control over work rules. Turns out transit workers like to have some control over their working environment. Not unlike all those high tech assholes in Silicon Valley.
The technorati like to think of themselves and their gizmos as “disruptors.” They want to see everything disrupted—except their morning commute.
{ 89 comments }
rm 10.20.13 at 11:40 pm
“Can you believe the salary these BART guys get to drive a train?”
Yeah, how hard or important is it to drive a f***ing train?
Phil 10.20.13 at 11:41 pm
Too kind. In at least some cases, I think public sector unions – and the workers’ interests they protect – are actually one of the things they want to disrupt.
Phil 10.20.13 at 11:48 pm
See also comments 21, 46 and 74 on this post (or just look for my name).
Martin Holterman 10.20.13 at 11:50 pm
Wait, we’re not allowed to complain about a public transport strike? Huh?
Alan Bostick 10.21.13 at 12:02 am
Martin Holterman @ 4: Complain all you want. Just be sure to put the blame where it belongs.
GiT 10.21.13 at 12:09 am
This is tangential, but do people actually use “disrupt” earnestly?
afinetheorem 10.21.13 at 12:12 am
Life is full of tradeoffs. The base may be 60, but the average line worker pay at BART is over 76,000, and benefits are also very high. This average is 25% more than the highest school district average pay anywhere in the bay, and substantially higher than CalTrain, Muni, etc. (nice charts at http://www.mercurynews.com/bart/ci_23742276/bart-workers-paychecks-already-outpace-their-peers).
This doesn’t even seem like a union v. non-union issue to me. Executive pay at BART doesn’t seem that high – the director was paid 316,000 last year, or 4x the average line worker pay. I haven’t seen any reports suggesting that the union is concerned about capricious treatment by management, particularly burdensome work rules, biased hiring practices or the like, which a new deal might ameliorate. Rather, it seems like people are upset because BART employees are already the highest paid public sector workers in the region, and when they strike, it really does harm huge numbers of people, primarily the poor who are especially reliant on public transit.
Main Street Muse 10.21.13 at 12:13 am
To GiT – YES – companies like to launch products that disrupt markets. It’s MBA speak… so nothing really “earnest” about it.
Alex K. 10.21.13 at 12:14 am
“The technorati like to think of themselves and their gizmos as “disruptors.—
Train driving seems like one of the easiest things to automate, safety features included — certainly easier than building self-driving cars.
So it will be less than twenty years until one of the technological disruptions of the technocrati will be to not have their morning commute disrupted by train workers’ strikes.
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 12:17 am
afinetheorem: The problem with your last sentence is twofold. First, as all the reporting suggests, the workers aren’t striking over wages; it really is control over changes in their working environment. So salaries are not the issue. (This is an important point: during the Chicago teachers strike in September 2012, everyone in the media dwelled on salaries even though both sides acknowledged that salaries were not the key issue.) Second, the BART workers offered to have these outstanding issues settled by a binding outside arbitrator; the BART executives refused. The union was willing to have an outside mediation resolve the issue for them, but BART management is so pig-headed in its desire to assert its power and privilege that it won’t allow that. So on this one, it’s very much the BART executives who are at fault and who should be blamed. If the people you’re really talking about care so much about the poor, they might want to focus their complaints in a different direction.
William Timberman 10.21.13 at 12:17 am
Great story, Corey. The complainers should be glad Jamie Dimon isn’t driving their train.
poco 10.21.13 at 12:30 am
2 BART workers killed last night by managers operating trains:
“Safety during train operations has been a point of contention between BART and its unions, especially when it was suggested that the transit agency was training management workers so that they could be certified to run passenger trains if the strike lingered on.
While BART said a number of managers, most of them former train operators, already were licensed to run the trains for needed maintenance and repair work, the unions said those operators did not have the current experience needed for safe passenger runs.
But Oversier refused to discuss what, if any, effect Saturday’s fatal accident could have on the strike. ”
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-BART-workers-killed-by-train-in-Walnut-Creek-4909974.php
I really think these horrible deaths prove the union’s point.
MPAVictoria 10.21.13 at 12:32 am
Really appreciate you writing about this issue. There is so little support for Union Workers in these troubled time.
Tom Slee 10.21.13 at 12:34 am
Rebecca Solnit’s piece on the Google Bus from earlier this year makes the tech companies’ attitudes to public transit pretty clear.
DonBoy 10.21.13 at 12:37 am
I don’t know if it’s supposed to go without saying, but be it noted that the, uh, “classic form” of the Doberman remark is directed at black people, which you’d think would count for something, somehow.
Watson Ladd 10.21.13 at 12:42 am
Corey, if the salary was $1 million, the unions would probably accept the work rules. In negotiations you trade off different issues against each other, so you can’t say the failure is due to some issues rather than others. It’s also difficult to apportion blame: who exactly can say what is “deserved” by the BART workers?
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 12:44 am
“If the salary was $1 million….so you can’t say the failure is due…” And yet it’s not, so I think we can.
Daniel 10.21.13 at 1:09 am
California farm workers ought to get certified as municipal employees, with a union to match, then there might be some sympathy for their plight ($8 dollar/hour wages) instead of having their their work brushed aside by California leftists as just another example of work that Americans just won’t do, besides if you oppose mass immigration into the lower end of the work force you are racist, etc……
StevenAttewell 10.21.13 at 1:18 am
God yes, check out any of Erik Loomis’ posts on the BART strike over on LGM for many examples of privileged supposed progressives not being that down with unions.
Reminds me a lot of the old Phil Ochs’ song: “ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally…”
adam.smith 10.21.13 at 1:31 am
uhm Daniel – all the lefties I know (as opposed, maybe, to some for the Democratic party liberals you may be thinking of) have been all over farmworker issues. The Roosevelt institute, for example (and they’re not even that far left), just gave an award to the coalition of Immokalee workers
http://rooseveltinstitute.org/in-the-news/coalition-immokalee-workers-receives-award
While the relationship between Cesar Chavez and the union movement was certainly not without friction, organized labor was still – and unsurprisingly – one of the UFW’s strongest supporter etc. etc. But I’m guessing you’re just here to troll anyway.
@Corey – that’s a great HIMYM story
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 1:32 am
StevenAttewell: I just went over to the LGM site and I didn’t see any posts on BART by Erik (or anyone else for that matter). Do you have a link?
StevenAttewell 10.21.13 at 1:41 am
I was primarily thinking about this and this.
Daniel 10.21.13 at 2:05 am
BART management is not threatening to replace BART workers with imported labor as Zuckerberg, Gates, Page, Scmdtt and Brin are attempting to ( with the backing of the “progressive” party) do with Silicon Valley employees. Just sayin.
Curmudgeon 10.21.13 at 2:24 am
Your attempt to champion the rights of the oppressed would look a lot less hollow if you spared a moment’s thought–much less a single word–for the working poor who can’t afford to drive and for the working disabled who who can’t drive. For these people, not being able to get to work, get to school, or get to a supermarket, due to a transit strike is much more than an inconvenience. It is a threat to their survival.
As a socialist, I believe the selfish rich should be taxed into destitution but as a humanitarian I have utterly no sympathy for employees with secure jobs who think nothing of throwing temper tantrums that will cost the disabled and poor both their independence and money they can’t afford to lose.
Being willing to take out your aggressions on people who are below you in the social order is not an admirable trait to be celebrated.
In cities which have effective public transit, is an essential service just as much as fire fighting or the police, and the employees who provide it should not be allowed to strike. If transit employees choose to strike, they deserve nothing but contempt from the public and punishment from the state.
dilbert dogbert 10.21.13 at 2:24 am
Trying to remember. I think in the beginning, the trains were supposed to be driverless. In those days that was a bridge too far as the Westinghouse control system was a mess. Google could do it today.
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 2:34 am
“As a socialist, I believe the selfish rich should be taxed into destitution but as a humanitarian I have utterly no sympathy for employees with secure jobs who think nothing of throwing temper tantrums.”
The second half of that statement makes me doubt your credentials as a humanist — and a socialist.
adam.smith 10.21.13 at 2:47 am
@Curmudgeon – what a crappy argument. Your job is super-important so you have no rights? As Corey says above, if you want to blame people, blame BART officials. Why blame the workers? (and by your “essential” logic – any public sector workers that you don’t consider essential?)
And since we’re comparing to police officers and fire fighter: “The current annual entry-level salary for Police Officers [in San Francisco] is: $88,842 to $112,164” http://www.sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1655
Base pay for SF firefighters “ranges from $75,000 to $105,000 a year” http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/03/24/san-francisco-firefighter-salaries-grew-during-recession/
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 3:00 am
Not to mention that this type of argument could easily be extended to a great many other situations. When nurses go on strike, sick people — who are among the most vulnerable of all — get hurt. When teachers go on strike, students, including very young students — again among the most vulnerable — get hurt (and if they’re poor, their parents who have to take off work to take care of them get hurt). Hell, you could probably make an easy case that in any strike, vulnerable people get hurt (when textile workers strike, the people who are lower down on the commodity supply chain get hurt because there’s no one to buy their wares).
Also, what kind of socialism is it that says workers have no right to withhold their labor? I can, however, think of a different word for a regime that forcibly returns men and women to work when they’ve decided they’ve had enough. Hint: it also begins with an s.
Jeremy 10.21.13 at 3:23 am
These “temper tantrums†are the reason that they have secure jobs.
In general, I think it’s a pretty shitty state of affairs that we have in this country where unionization is concentrated so highly in the public sector, while the private sector has been largely free to decimate pay, pensions, other benefits, and basic working conditions for decades. But I try to remind myself that hating other parts of the working class for having advantages that I don’t is the sort of thing that keeps the plutocrats in their positions.
speranza 10.21.13 at 3:23 am
I can confirm that talk of “disruption” is every bit as widespread in the tech industry as it’s rumored to be, and yes, it’s used entirely without irony. I have yet to meet anyone who’s the least bit troubled about the wider social effects of disrupting existing markets, or even aware that it could be a zero-sum game — that while the disruptors profit the disrupted necessarily lose.
Tangentially, it’s at least slightly refreshing from a rhetorical perspective to see this sort of mindless market worship coming from self-styled “progressives,” so that at least we’re spared the spectacle of “conservatives” reveling in the market-driven destruction of the existing social order.
Watson Ladd 10.21.13 at 3:36 am
The right to strike isn’t about withholding labor. Strikers aren’t resigning their jobs en masse, rather they are not working and preventing the employer from replacing them (scabs lose their job when the strike ends: it is illegal to fire striking workers in the US). It’s this that makes striking a viable threat: the short term disruption caused by having to replace a workforce overnight is in most places not big enough to force concessions. Likewise, a management can only force a lockout: they cannot choose to work with workers willing to accept the deal and not the union workers who don’t. Supporting the right to strike is not merely being opposed to slavery: it means supporting a specific set of legal protections aimed at permitting workers to extract concessions from their employers.
Doctor Memory 10.21.13 at 3:49 am
It’s worth pointing out that saying that the strike is not over wages is somewhat mis-stating the case. The union and management only came to an alleged agreement on wages after well over six months of negotiations and a weeklong strike several months ago. (BART workers took a serious salary cut a while back while ridership numbers went consistently up since then — the unions were understandably eager to claw some of that back.) Then after finally coming to terms on wages, management decided with hours left to go before the strike deadline that it was time to re-negotiate work rules. The unions called bullshit (as do I) and so here we are — there’s an agreement-in-principle on wages, but given that management has for the this entire process seemed determined to provoke a strike by any means at their disposal, it’s really unclear how serious they were.
As far as the techie/nontechie divide in SF goes, as a resident of the trenches there, I’d say based on my entirely nonscientific observations that tech workers in general are supportive of the union, but to be fair it’s a pretty apathetic sort of support. Tech company executives… are corporate executives, with all that that implies.
(Grousing about the Google etc busses always struck me as a serious case of misjudging cause and effect: the corporate shuttles exist as a result of 50 years of robustly terrible public transit policy across all of Northern California. Absent an unlikely revolution in the political leadership of Santa Clara, San Mateo and Marin counties, the busses are an unfortunately necessary compromise.)
GiT 10.21.13 at 4:13 am
@Speranza – I’m not even reacting so much to the implications of what it means to “disrupt” something. It’s just like the exact sort of word one would choose to parody “syngergize” or “paradigm.”
adam.smith 10.21.13 at 4:15 am
Thanks Doc Memory, that’s good background.
I read speculation on twitter that BART provoked the strike to trigger a backlash that could go as far as banning public sector (or at least transportation) strikes in CA. Not sure if that’s too conspiratorial, but doesn’t sound entirely implausible to me.
My cursory impression (some light reading and a brief visit to the area last week) is that the unions haven’t done a particularly good job on outreach, though I could be wrong. The exceptional job that the Chicago teachers’ union did on that was the basis for the success of their strike. Not really blaming the union here, this is hard to do and probably easier for teachers than for transport workers, but it is increasingly important for any major labor action, particularly in the public sector.
adam.smith 10.21.13 at 4:22 am
actually, that comes from Steve Greenhouse, NYTs labor reporter, so doesn’t seem so far out there: https://twitter.com/greenhousenyt/status/391957876194820096
StevenAttewell 10.21.13 at 4:29 am
adam.smith – public relations can always be done better.
I’ve had this idea going around in my head for a while now about how the idea of “civic unionism” (as discussed by Rosemary Feuer) could be applied to strikes as well as bargaining demands. For example, BART workers could have chartered a bunch of buses, put up a toll-free number, and offered rides to low-income folks during the strike – it would be mostly symbolic, but a great way to show that the unions are looking out for the community as a whole.
However, it’s a bit too late for that kind of 20/20 hindsight – right now, there’s a strike, and I know which side I’m on (ATU 1555/SEIU 1021).
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 4:29 am
Have any polls been done in the Bay Area? I ask b/c during the NYC transit strike, if you simply read the press or listened to the radio/TV (except for Brian Lehrer, who was fantastic on this issue), you’d think the entire city was against the transit workers. But then I remember polls showed that the public thought the workers’ demands were fair (not as supportive as in Chicago but surprisingly supportive given the media coverage). Also, to come back to the issue of poor people, during the NYC transit strike, blacks overwhelmingly favored the union and supported the strike (as opposed to whites). Obviously race and class are not exactly correlated, but to the extent that blacks tend to be poorer than whites, well, you get the point.
Brett 10.21.13 at 4:34 am
@Corey Robin
Unionized workers in “critical services” where striking is illegal have every right to withhold their labor. They just don’t have the right to escape being fired from their jobs over it. If they want to strike despite that, then they can go ahead – but I’m not going to be sympathetic if they then get fired over it.
StevenAttewell 10.21.13 at 4:35 am
It took a bit to hunt it down, but I found some polling. It’s not good news, but it’s rather a mixed bag. At least from this poll, folks are against the strike, but there’s only a plurality that wants the union to accept management’s offer and a larger plurality that either wants management to give in or negotiations to continue.
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 4:45 am
Brett: Not sure what the law is in California, but in New York, if you’re a public sector worker and you strike, you face much more than being fired. Massive fines and prison time. I’d say losing your liberty because you withhold your labor rather compromises any notion of having the right to withhold your labor.
adam.smith 10.21.13 at 4:45 am
right – it’s also possible that the union simply didn’t expect a strike. The binding arbitration offer would have seemed like a great deal for management if they were really concerned about work rules. But obviously this isn’t just hindsight but also learning lessons for the next chapter, so thinking about things like
strikes me as important. I think that should be possible to do that without taking away from solidarity with the workers.
Re polls: This is the only polling I’ve found http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/10/10/kpix-5-poll-finds-most-opposed-to-bart-strike-as-deadline-nears/ and it doesn’t look great for labor Here’s the full text and some cross-tabs http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollPrint.aspx?g=d9dd8b40-8e73-4e25-ab10-30c2294a30e2&d=0 — looks like reasonable questions to me.
Brett 10.21.13 at 5:00 am
@Corey Robin
Prison time for an illegal strike by critical services union members is overkill, but firing is not. They and their representatives knew that strikes in those positions were illegal when they took those jobs and began negotiating those contracts.
Mark Jamison 10.21.13 at 5:11 am
Thank you Dr. Robin.
I’m a retired postal employee who spends his days writing about postal issues. The “crisis” the Postal Service is in is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to break the back of one of the largest unionized public work forces.
The assault on public workers and public infrastructure is a critical front in the Right’s attempts to destroy American labor. In the last four years we’ve lost 200,000 good middle class jobs and tens of thousands more have been degraded. The attacks on BART workers and the way this has been portrayed in the press is another example of this assault.
js. 10.21.13 at 5:14 am
Tho obviously Dimon should be driving their train. :)
The Raven 10.21.13 at 5:39 am
Corey, publishing industry people in 2005 aren’t even remotely elite, except for a tiny minority of senior managers and owners.
I think part of the problem the Silicon Valley types have is that inflation has done a number on our intuitions about salary. Time was, $75,000 was a good engineer’s wage. Nowadays, it’s a modest family income.
But, as you say, people miss the point: you organize first so that the bosses will treat you like human beings. Then you negotiate salary.
maidhc 10.21.13 at 5:49 am
dilbert dogbert is correct. BART was originally designed to be driverless. But a few days after the system opened, there was an accident and they decided they’d better have drivers after all. And the most recent accident was caused by moving trains by remote control.
All of the media in the Bay Area has been on a full-scale rant about the fat salaries that BART drivers get. NPR had a long segment about it today. For the union to get its side out is an uphill battle.
Hector_St_Clare 10.21.13 at 6:21 am
Corey Robin,
Just throwing this out there, but there were no strikes in the Soviet Union. nor in Cuba today.
I rather think the Cubans are further Left than you.
john b 10.21.13 at 6:34 am
No it wasn’t.
It happened whilst the train was being driven in automatic mode, with a qualified driver at the controls who has full manual override – this is how most metro systems that use professional drivers are operated worldwide, and is equivalent to a plane operating on autopilot.
It’s not at all analogous to a driverless metro system running under remote control, like the actually operating ones (with better safety records than BART) in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Singapore, etc.
Dr. Hilarius 10.21.13 at 7:14 am
The Republicans and the lickspittle mass media have done a wonderful job of instilling the “crabs in a buckets” mentality in much of the population. “How dare that union employee enjoy a decent wage and benefits! Everyone should have a crappy minimum wage job like mine.” It’s rare to hear anyone in power suggest that more people should have good pay and some control over work conditions.
adam.smith@ 27: Thank you for posting data on police and firefighter pay. It’s not commonly known just how well these jobs pay. Police in particular seem to occupy a special place where their unions, no matter how inimical to the public good, are above criticism.
Living in Seattle, I do bump up against a fair number of Amazon, Microsoft etc. types. Many are reasonable, thoughtful people but there are an uncomfortably large number who disdain anyone who works with their hands, that is, until their toilet overflows or their roof leaks. They may still disdain the needed trades but at that point have figured out that social media can’t fix the problem.
Sebastian H 10.21.13 at 7:34 am
“The “crisis†the Postal Service is in is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to break the back of one of the largest unionized public work forces.” This is the kind of statement that makes the Postal Union difficult to support. The crisis the Postal Service is in is about communication via computer.
wkwillis 10.21.13 at 8:23 am
Nah, the postal service is just going to be a parcel delivery service like UPS and FedEx. Mail goes away, but parcels don’t.
maidhc 10.21.13 at 8:28 am
john b: I went with what the newspaper said, but they’ve been wrong before.
Pete 10.21.13 at 9:06 am
I think it’s important to recognise that involving bystanders in your dispute, disrupting them, and then forcing them to take sides may be counterproductive in the long run. I’m mindful of the UK in the 70s, where strike action frequently deprived the country of electricity; that and the eventual miner’s strike in the 80s were the time at which the country switched from being generally supportive of unions to supporting measures to keep the country functioning by smashing union power.
These days, it’s only really possible to have a union in a public sector job that’s neither outsourceable nor doable by cheap immigrants. Everywhere else, if you shut down the factory it stays closed forever and a new one opens in China.
maidhc 10.21.13 at 9:06 am
wkwillis: Certainly with people buying things on-line I would imagine parcel delivery is going up. My wife sells on EBay and Etsy, and the USPS is quite competitive with FedEx and UPS.
I’m sure that a lot of mail can be replaced by electronic communication, but I don’t think all of it can. And part of the remnant would be legal documents, which it could be argued are an essential service. If you’re doing parcels already, mail is not difficult to add.
It’s also been proposed that the USPS go back to offering postal banking, which it did until 1967, and is common in other countries. This would also help protect people against the predations of check cashing services. There are quite a few services that could be operated out of post offices and would primarily benefit low income people.
A hard sell in our current world, no doubt.
We had bill-paying at our local PO for phone and utilities, but they seem to be cutting back on it. Some people are always looking for more ways to charge fees to people who live in the cash economy.
david 10.21.13 at 9:17 am
Surely there’s some literature on how essential-services employees are supposed to get their interests underlined without service disruption, from back during the 1950s with the 1952 steelworkers strike.
david 10.21.13 at 9:23 am
Aha, e.g., the state labour-dispute mediator escrowing both pay and operating revenues until agreement is reached. But this only applies for a dispute fundamentally over wage terms.
maidhc 10.21.13 at 9:36 am
Pete: I’m a union member, and our union leadership has often pointed out that the key to a successful strike is public support. We haven’t actually gone on strike since I’ve been a member, but we have threatened to, and the fact that we had public support was a big factor in getting management to compromise. Managing public perceptions and relations with politicians, particularly on the local level, are an important part of the day-to-day operation of a union. You need to have this in place a long time before you consider threatening to strike.
I think the British unions in the 1970s missed that point, and in the long run they were worse off by paving the way to Thatcherism.
As far as the BART strike goes, I don’t think the union has done a very good job of articulating what they want. There seem to be all kinds of issues on the table. Management has offered a pay raise combined with saddling the worker with increased contributions to benefits, which of course have the effect of lessening the pay raise. Then there are working conditions questions. I think you might say that by introducing all kinds of side issues, management is trying to dilute the union’s public position.
ajay 10.21.13 at 9:58 am
Train driving seems like one of the easiest things to automate, safety features included — certainly easier than building self-driving cars.
So it will be less than twenty years until one of the technological disruptions of the technocrati will be to not have their morning commute disrupted by train workers’ strikes.
Can’t wait. Driving a tube train is apparently one of the worst jobs you can have in terms of stress, horrible working conditions, danger and so on – at least, that’s what we keep being told every time they go on strike for easier hours and more pay (now on £46,000 average). The sooner this hideous job is swept away by a humane technological advance, the better.
john b 10.21.13 at 12:57 pm
maidhc: newspaper reporting on technically complex issues is the worst, but given the reports and a basic knowledge of how BART’s signalling system works, this is the only possible setup. It doesn’t have the capacity to run driverless remote-controlled trains.
Would tend to agree with you about both management and union strategy.
Trader Joe 10.21.13 at 1:12 pm
Its a mistake to assume that unions “don’t care” about the hardships their strikes cause. They definitely do. Public perception is a key piece of the equation – not least because quite often its friends and neighbors who are directly impacted by the union’s decision. My mother was a local leader and fully expected taunts and jeers when she was on the line – far harder was the more subtle, but also more hurtful, taunts or jabs from neighbors or strangers in the grocery line, at church or at school functions.
One can sit and pontificate as to whether a driver is worth 75k or some other number – but clearly the work they do collectively has value or no one would have noticed the strike. If BART provides value to its users, the workers deserve their share of the value created – whether they choose that value in cash, benefits, job security or anything else is the choice of the union members.
Work rules are always the hardest to articulate and often hardest to defend because its often hard for those outside the situation to understand why the union wants what it wants. Often the requests seem less focused on serving the public good than on things like job protection (I’m not sure the specifics here). So many are quick to bemoan the ‘ruthless fatcats’ after a 1,000 person layoff – but then not accept that the bosses will use attrition and work rules to silently accomplish the same thing if they can. While it would be nice if the public could understand and support – its not the only consideration.
Labor works best when it’s not working.
Josh G. 10.21.13 at 1:18 pm
Sebastian H @ 50: “This is the kind of statement that makes the Postal Union difficult to support. The crisis the Postal Service is in is about communication via computer.”
The Postal Service is losing money because the lame-duck Republican Congress in 2006 passed a law ordering them to pre-fund pension benefits for 75 years – and to do so in a 10-year period. No one else has to do this – no private corporation and no other government agency.
Without this mandate, which was deliberately designed by Darrell Issa to screw over the post office, the USPS would have made a profit over the past 4 years. Instead they showed a $20 billion loss and are laying off workers – which was the intent of this absurd legislation.
Foster Boondoggle 10.21.13 at 2:31 pm
Corey – you write, apropos the work rules issue: “Turns out transit workers like to have some control over their working environment. Not unlike all those high tech assholes in Silicon Valley.”
First, allow me to suggest that you don’t win a lot of converts to your point of view by gratuitously calling a large segment of the regional community “assholes”. The value of the BART system and the well-above-average pay of its workers is, one might guess, somewhat dependent on the economic value brought to the region by all those assholes.
Second, this is not just about the man wanting to “control” the workers. The work rules highly constrain how the system is run. You might want to look into the history of the SFO extension that was completed a few years back. BART lengthened one line so that on some runs the trains would go all the way out to the airport instead of stopping at Milbrae. But because of scheduling and ridership those longer runs only happen on a limited basis – you can’t get there at all times BART is running. Early in the planning, there was discussion (or so I read) of building a spur line from Milbrae to SFO, instead of running the Pittsburg train all the way out. That was nixed because of a work rule that stipulates that train operators must have a 15 minute break at the end of each run. Perfectly reasonable for the long runs that take a couple of hours, but they were talking about a 5-10 minute run. Negotiating a change to this rule was apparently more difficult than just extending the line and limiting the hours. So this is not just some arcane issue – rigid (and seemingly pointless) work rules can have very real and lasting consequences for the system. My understanding is the BART management is asking less for specific work rule changes than for greater flexibility in how they get changed.
Mark Jamison 10.21.13 at 2:31 pm
Sebastian H & wkwillis:
No, much more to it than that. The postal network is still vital infrastructure and still fills a necessary role for tens of millions. Print is not nearly as dead as some folks would have it. Most of the volume losses are attributable to the Great Recession and efforts of postal management and the direct mail industry to undermine the value of first class mail while creating a captured agency that subsidizes the mailers.
The postal network’s last mile capability keeps UPS and FedEx from charging monopoly rates – or perhaps you think repeating the monopoly characteristics of broadband delivery in the US is a good thing.
A lot of folks tend to make trite, uninformed comments about what’s happening with the Postal Service. That’s unfortunate because there is much more involved. The ongoing efforts to privatize postal services speak directly to how we view public goods and public infrastructure.
Josh G. – Yes, PAEA was the cause of much of the problem. Unfortunately it was a bipartisan effort. While there isn’t much good to say about Issa, PAEA wasn’t his baby. The pre-funding was for retiree healthcare benefits, other pensions are funded at over 100%. Against, the story is much more complicated than the problem of the mandate.
Foster Boondoggle 10.21.13 at 3:12 pm
For anyone still reading, I found a reference to the 15 minute break / Millbrae-SFO shuttle issue: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Worker-exec-pay-2-sides-of-BART-deficit-3242870.php
Phil 10.21.13 at 3:26 pm
that and the eventual miner’s strike in the 80s were the time at which the country switched from being generally supportive of unions to supporting measures to keep the country functioning by smashing union power
The coal and energy strikes in the 70s and the miners’ strike in 1984/85 were very different things. The 70s strikes inconvenienced us all – I remember evenings playing board games by candlelight – but they didn’t seem like a political event. They did feed into a swing to the Right, but it wasn’t an anti-union thing as such; I mean, they didn’t necessarily win the unions any friends, but they reflected more discredit on the government than anyone else, relating to its basic competence more than anything else. A Labour government, after all, was supposed to stop this kind of thing from happening.
By contrast, the great miners’ strike hardly inconvenienced anyone apart from the strikers – which was why it went on so long – but it was politicised from the word Go, largely by the government. It was a deeply polarising event: lots of people just knew, without really thinking about it, which side they were on. It mobilised a lot of anti-union feeling, but it mobilised a lot of support for the strikers as well. The trouble is, the strikers lost, and their version of events lost – both in the media (the BBC coverage of the strike was disgraceful) and in the political bubble, the Labour Party very much included. To put it another way, the strike created two groups of people with new levels of political interest and motivation, one consisting of those who believed the strike should have been won (defeated, tired, embittered) & one consisting of those who believed it should never have started (victorious, energetic, optimistic). Politicians would rather be surrounded by energetic optimists than bitter old hacks; most politicians since 1985 have fished in the second pool rather than the first.
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 3:27 pm
Thanks for posting the article re the 15 minute break, Foster. It does of course sound ridiculous. And I’ve certainly known unions that defend silly work rules. The only thing I would say in this instance is that the article is very unclear on what went down. All it says is this: “Take the train operators, who get a 15-minute break at the end of every run. The problem: When BART begun running a five-minute shuttle between SFO and Millbrae, the drivers still got their 15-minute break – after every five-minute trip. BART’s solution: It eliminated the shuttle.” Nothing in there about the negotiations over this work rule, what went back and forth. All we know is BART set up a five-minute shuttle, there’s a work rule requiring workers to get a break at the end of it, BART shut it down. Unless we see a lot more details about this, I’m not ready to draw any conclusions about it.
adam.smith 10.21.13 at 3:38 pm
right, and that’s kind of the crux, isn’t it? If management wanted to negotiated certain work rules, I’m pretty sure that would be possible with relative ease. But are you really surprised that a union balks at management wanting to just be able to unilaterally change work rules?
Foster Boondoggle 10.21.13 at 4:15 pm
Corey, Adam – “If management wanted to negotiated certain work rules, I’m pretty sure that would be possible with relative ease.”
I think the evidence is that it’s not. That’s the point of that story of the SFO spur line, regardless of the details. When any change, however trivial – such as changing the break rules to exclude 5 minute runs – has to go through a full contract renegotiation process, that creates quite a bit of rigidity. And of course in exchange for bending a rule to deal with a circumstance that wasn’t contemplated when it was originally agreed to, the union will want some other benefit. Seems like that would create a ratchet where the union is always looking for ways to increase the rigidity of the system so that it can trade off rules for better wages/benefits.
There must be a large literature on the political economy of public sector unions, but it’s way outside my specialty. The evidence seems to be (at least from what I see in California) that when times are flush, politicians are happy to dole out favors – everyone benefits! (except of course the general public when things get tougher) that later create trouble all around. Who here wants to defend the prison guards’ union which for years has put substantial financial muscle behind the boom in CA prison construction and promotion of tougher sentencing to keep those prisons full. When Gray Davis last ran for reelection with their help, I was ready for the first time in my life to pull the lever for a republican, because he was so deeply in their pocket. (That was If the GOP had nominated LA mayor Richard Riordan. Instead they nominated some right wing nutball whose name I can’t be bothered to look up, so it was never an issue. I held my nose & voted again for Davis, and even against his recall shortly after. In case you cared.)
Larger point: it’s not just an issue of BART labor vs. management. Anyone who’s been around for a while sees this mutual-aid-society thing happen over & over, and eventually gets pissed at both the politicians and the unions. So we end up with term limits and a public not all that sympathetic to labor. I don’t know how to fix that. Do you?
Fu Ko 10.21.13 at 4:15 pm
Just FYI, from wikipedia:
The term disruptive technologies was coined by Clayton M. Christensen and introduced in his 1995 article Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave,[4] which he co-wrote with Joseph Bower. The article is aimed at managing executives who make the funding/purchasing decisions in companies rather than the research community. He describes the term further in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma.[5] Innovator’s Dilemma explored the cases of the disk drive industry (which, with its rapid generational change, is to the study of business what fruit flies are to the study of genetics, as Christensen was advised in the 1990s[6]) and the excavating equipment industry (where hydraulic actuation slowly displaced cable-actuated movement).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation
MPAVictoria 10.21.13 at 5:46 pm
“Politicians would rather be surrounded by energetic optimists than bitter old hacks; most politicians since 1985 have fished in the second pool rather than the first.”
This is brilliant!
Corey Robin 10.21.13 at 6:07 pm
My reading on why the public opposes public sector unions — though be careful here; at least in some places, the public is divided on this; people of color tend to be much more sympathetic to public sector unions — is that they feel these workers have benefits that people in the private sector don’t. And that’s because the assault on labor, which really gained traction in the 60s and 70s, went after private sector unions first (public sector unionization tended to actually develop in the wake of the 60s). So as public sector workers are either gaining benefits or holding onto them, the private sector is losing them all over the place. So now we find ourselves in a situation where the public (again, with due caution for the above) has no memory of a time when they themselves enjoyed these benefits and wonders why is it fair for workers to retire with the kind of pensions that no one else has. The answer to this is not to join in the feeding frenzy but to organize the private sector. Easier said than done of course but that is the answer. There’s nothing at all surprising when you have one small sector of society enjoying a benefit while the vast majority don’t that that vast majority would resent the small sector. That’s why unions historically thought it was so important to organize the vast majority.
Substance McGravitas 10.21.13 at 6:44 pm
Union and management bargaining committees.
Tircuit 10.22.13 at 2:04 am
The press has been virulently anti-union since the threat of a strike began. The worst has been the Chronicle. I expect that now that subscriptions are such a low percentage of their revenue and advertisments so high, the paper is more pro-business than ever. I’m shocked at how many people I talk to around down parrot what the paper says, how many complain about people without college degrees getting “100k” and so on. When pressed, you usually get a rant about the workers in the booths being lazy. From my own observation, workers in the booths are primarily black, and I think the race angle has been overlooked. It is the booth workers, after all, that are the face of the transit system.
People in general, even here in SF, have no clue as to the value of unions. I’m a tech worker and I try to point out to my co-workers that if we had a union we could fight back against the stagnant wages and visa-worker importation that is such a big problem lately. Imagine if tech workers stopped work for a couple of days!
The other problem does seem to be a dearth of quality union spokespeople. When I do happen to hear them interviewed, they are incapable of explaining their position. Here is their letter to avert a strike: http://www.seiu1021.org/files/2013/10/SEIU1021ATU155-Letter101813.pdf
QS 10.22.13 at 2:44 am
It continues to amaze me that some would rather focus on bringing down those who are paid “well” (by this, I mean solidly middle class a la BART employees) rather than devote their energy to bringing people up. Everyone should make a BART salary and find collective mobilization strategies that get them there. We shouldn’t trash BART workers for striking because it hurts the poor, we should trash the political economic system that keeps a solid chunk of our society impoverished.
StevenAttewell 10.22.13 at 6:52 am
Tentative agreement has been reached; strike is over.
Congrats, ATU/SEIU!
QS 10.22.13 at 12:06 pm
The supposedly “left-of-center” former SF mayor and current Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom:
“This has got to be the last time that this happens,” Newsom said in stressing the chaos the strike caused Bay Area commuters and noting the dysfunctional relationship between BART and its employees. “This was a reminder this weekend that this was about people. Lots of people have had their lives affected by this.”
Alex K. 10.22.13 at 3:33 pm
” if we had a union we could fight back against […] visa-worker importation”
Of course, that would be fighting the good fight because the visa workers are _brown_ people, who are just not a natural fit for high paying technical work.
At least the early progressives would come out and justify such legal separation between well paid insiders and unemployed/underemployed outsiders with straightforward appeals to eugenics and racist twaddle.
Today’s progressives have to perform a more complex dance — you should ask someone who knows all the right moves, in case you want to make your argument at some other time.
Tircuit 10.22.13 at 4:19 pm
Alex K #77
I don’t think any such thing, please don’t put such absurd words in my mouth.
I am a brown person myself. I’m very pro-immigration and pro-immigration reform. I know there are kinds of visas that should be granted for exceptionally talented workers. I also know that in this case the is no shortage of the types of workers that get the majority of these visas, that the tech industry is exploiting workers, and that these visas are keeping wages low and tech unemployement higher than it should be.
mud man 10.22.13 at 5:38 pm
QS:
You don’t think that’s a “left-of-center” comment? Would a right-of-centrist characterize the situation as a “dysfunctional relationship” or as perhaps as “inadequate respect for hierarchy”?
Reading the other day that there’s lots of construction jobs available in SF, so why aren’t unemployed people from elsewhere moving in? … because they
can’t affordwon’t get paid enough to live there. Soon the assholes … I used to work there, the usual term for self-important unaware privileged people is apt … will drive all the service people away and the managers will have to drive their own trains, and we already know how that works out.p.s. #25, since the managers don’t understand the system adequately, why do you think Google programmers do??
Daniel 10.22.13 at 7:14 pm
@Alex K
>> if we had a union we could fight back against […] visa-worker importationâ€
Of course, that would be fighting the good fight because the visa workers are _brown_ people, who are just not a natural fit for high paying technical work.<<
In the mind of today's "progressive", everything is subordinate to racial considerations. One cannot fight for the basic dignity of a decent wage without being scrutinized by the smug, ever-vigilant "progressive" for imagined transgressions towards "the other", and of whom I suspect, as regards his own life, does all he can to separate him and his kin from.
Pete 10.23.13 at 11:55 am
Addendum: Workers at Grangemouth refinery/chem plant (Scotland) go on strike. Owner points out that plant is unprofitable anyway, demands “survival plan” of wage freeze and pension cuts. Union rejects survival plan. Survival does not happen: plant to close.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-24631342
In a global world, you can only have a union for an unexportable capital asset. This is why unions are now limited to mostly public sector workplaces.
QS 10.23.13 at 12:53 pm
@79
A leftist would not say that this must be the “last strike.” It undermines the idea that workers have a right to collective action, including work stoppage.
Tim Wilkinson 10.23.13 at 3:50 pm
Pete: and notice that the dispute didn’t begin with INEOS demanding cuts, but was over the treatment of a union official who appears AFAICT to have been target for non-work-related matters.
INEOS – a private company – opted to shut down both the refinery (which they haven’t announced plans to close, though IIUC they’re threatening to do so absent a no-strike guarantee) and the chem plant until the initial dispute was resolved, despite the union withdrawing the threat of a 48hr strike. http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/union-call-off-grangemouth-strike-to-protect-national-asset.1381902917
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-24560471 explains that claims of economic unviability are highly dubitable, shall we say, and has other interesting info.
adam.smith 10.23.13 at 4:08 pm
@81
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Metall
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports
but thanks for trying.
Joseph Brenner 10.24.13 at 8:54 pm
Tircuit: “The press has been virulently anti-union since the threat of a strike began. The worst has been the Chronicle.” Correct. The “San Francisco” Chronicle is owned by Hearst and is essentially an establishment rag. It sneers at Republicans on the front page to score points (it hardly matters, in true blue SF) but it’s never seen a big real estate deal it didn’t like, and the union point of view has been notably absent in it’s pages.
Tircuit: “When pressed, you usually get a rant about the workers in the booths being lazy. ”
That used to be one of my complaints too– they’d lock themselves in the bullet proof booths, and pretend you’re not there if you tried to ask a question. They’ve seemed better in recent years (half of the time working with the doors open, even).
Myself, I’ve been largely neutral on the BART strike. On the union side of the argument: they took nothing last time, on the promise of getting a better deal this time, and instead management hired an expensive ball-buster to do the negotiation. There strategy, in my opinion, was to provoke the union into stepping on their dick by declaring strikes– since management owns the media, that’s a dangerous thing for them to do. Strikes, like nukes work better if you don’t actually use them.
It’s not entirely clear to me that the track worker’s deaths were entirely the fault of the train drivers, by the way: one of them was supposed to watch for trains, no? Were they assuming there wouldn’t be any because of the strike?
Tim Wilkinson 10.25.13 at 1:00 pm
Now the Unite union has caved in to all of INEOS’s demands, and it has revoked its threat to shut eth plant permanently – and presumably it will now end the management lock-out, or strike. This saves the poor impoverished company something like 1.6m on the wage bill + whatever the pension fund savings are. Unite have also given a 3 year no-strike commtment – I don’t suppose INEOS has given a no-lockout commitment.
Oh yeah , almost forgot: INEOS mentioned in passing that “The Scottish government has indicated it will support the company’s application for a £9 million grant to help finance the terminal and the UK Government has given its prequalification approval for a £125 million loan guarantee facility.”
dax 10.25.13 at 1:25 pm
“Imagine if tech workers stopped work for a couple of days!”
I’m imagining nothing – no consequences. I’m wrong?
jeff 10.26.13 at 4:29 pm
BART is not primarily designed for the poor. It’s strictly to shuttle people from the suburbs to downtown areas.
I’m fairly sure most poor and working people in the area supported to strike.
jeff 10.26.13 at 4:32 pm
Also, if $60,000 is too much – how much should they make ?
After all, someone somewhere is always going to make less.
Comments on this entry are closed.