General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

[underground]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Pay no attention to the Forward Funding and Big Dig Debt Service behind the curtain. Go throw a bucket of water on the Evil Union!!!

 

[bigeman312]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Pay no attention to the Forward Funding and Big Dig Debt Service behind the curtain. Go throw a bucket of water on the Evil Union!!!

Forward Funding and the Big Debt is obviously a problem. But so are the corrupt union practices.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Forward Funding and the Big Debt is obviously a problem. But so are the corrupt union practices.

Exactly, the T is one of those basket cases where you list the problems, and the answer is ALL OF THE ABOVE.

This is at the point where you almost need to kill the patient and just start over with a completely clean slate. There is essentially nothing about the operations, financing, unions, etc. that is not corrupted beyond repair.

 

[FitchburgLine]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Maybe it's just me, but I think there's plenty of space between employees sleeping on the job and employees being chained to their work stations with the exits locked. And I'm not sure what improvement in quality you'd hope to see by running the T like Walmart. Walmart screams "quality" to you? But hey, it's cheap so who cares!

Walmart screams efficiency to me, which, compared to an agency that takes an order of magnitude more money than it should to build a 2 track LRT line adjacent to an existing ROW, doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. A decrease in quality sounds fucking great! Crappy, wooden platforms alongside cheaply constructed stations that work is vastly preferable to pretty renderings of beautiful stations we can't afford to build. If running the T as a jobs program is more important than the T as a transit agency, why do we even have a capital budget?! Just give the first X workers 315k for showing up, spend the whole budget that way and pat ourselves on the back for constructing a jobs program so inefficient and corrupt it'd make the military blush! Since the MBTA has a set number of $ and a vastly greater # of ways to spend it, someone has to get screwed over, and no amount of posturing can disguise that. Call it "chaining people to their jobs" or whatever, but money doesn’t grow on trees and I'd love to spend it where it does the most good.

 

[bigeman312]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Walmart screams efficiency to me, which, compared to an agency that takes an order of magnitude more money than it should to build a 2 track LRT line adjacent to an existing ROW, doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. A decrease in quality sounds fucking great! Crappy, wooden platforms alongside cheaply constructed stations that work is vastly preferable to pretty renderings of beautiful stations we can't afford to build. If running the T as a jobs program is more important than the T as a transit agency, why do we even have a capital budget?! Just give the first X workers 315k for showing up, spend the whole budget that way and pat ourselves on the back for constructing a jobs program so inefficient and corrupt it'd make the military blush! Since the MBTA has a set number of $ and a vastly greater # of ways to spend it, someone has to get screwed over, and no amount of posturing can disguise that. Call it "chaining people to their jobs" or whatever, but money doesn’t grow on trees and I'd love to spend it where it does the most good.

Post of the year.

 

[Tombstoner]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

OK, I can agree that the average employee is likely not the source of the problem, but they are complicit.

If you take the money and look the other way, you are part of the problem. Employees can vote out a union. T employees are happily profiting from the sucky situation we all pay for.

This.
I mistakenly introduced the stealing analogy which bigeman312 was right to call me on, but the logic that people cannot be blamed for profiting from self-serving policies that clearly disadvantage others (taxpayers and transit users) absolves them of ethical responsibility as citizens. McCarthy was also able to work the system completely within legal parameters, until someone rightly asked "sir, have you no shame?" I think MBTA employees should be expected to have a sense of decency even if they are not legally required to. And yes, I have had jobs that I could have milked to my advantage (at a cost to others) but didn't. Doesn't make me a saint, it makes me a citizen.

 

[bigeman312]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Fair enough. I'm sold. What they did was wrong. They are not responsible for the problem and should not be blamed for the Ts problems. Nonetheless, I concede that what these employees do is wrong and unethical and we should expect more.

The T is FUBAR.

 

[AmericanFolkLegend]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Forward Funding and the Big Debt is obviously a problem. But so are the corrupt union practices.

What's corrupt? Call the union workforce, fat, overpaid, slow, whatever, but where does corruption markedly impact the MBTA union?

 

[whighlander]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

What's corrupt? Call the union workforce, fat, overpaid, slow, whatever, but where does corruption markedly impact the MBTA union?

AmFolkLeg --The Corruption comes from the positive feedback between the employees, the Union Leadership, the T Management and the Politicians who enable the process

Here's the theoretical foundation:
Unions exist to prevent "evil greedy capitalists" from abusing and exploiting the "workers" -- they act in an adversarial structure that pits their representatives [the union leaders] against the representatives of the owners [the management of the company]

This works because the owners, the managers, the workers and the public consumers of the product or service all have alternatives, e.g., if you don't like the way Ford treats its employees you can buy a Chevy

The problem comes from the concept of the "Public Sector Union"
Following the definition the adversaries are the union's workers, and the public [the ultimate owners] through their elected or appointed representation

So ostensibly the elected or appointed political types are supposed to act adversarially to protect the interest of the public [both the active consumers of the service and those members of the public with only a passive interest as tax payers]

However, the politicians are not as dumb as we make them out to be -- they cut the ultimate corrupt deal with the union -- help me get elected and I'll make sure that when we negotiate you'll do well -- and the unions help the pols get elected and the pols do as well for the unions as they can get away with doing

This is why Franklin Roosevelt was opposed to unionization of Federal Workers -- at the state and local levels the direct feed forward [positive feed back] is even more blatant. At least at the Federal-level we have the protection of the Hatch Act [restricts overt political activity of Federal employees]

Short of a formal Bankruptcy by the T -- the Financial Control Board gives the public the best possible opportunity to reform the T system as a whole and the labor issues specifically

While its too much to hope for a decertification of the T's Union -- a lot can be done starting with abandoning binding arbitration for any financial matter, and then dealing with the work rules including overtime and finally cleaning up the benefits to make them similar to the private sectors benefits

Bottom line is that working for the T should be adequately compensated and shouldn't subject the employee to abuse or excessive stress any more than working for a private T-like entity. However, given the fact that the public has limited choices, working for the T should not enable the employees to abuse the public trust though their work practices or to scam the system.

Any employee who does either something that puts the riding public at risk [e.g. tieing the throttle] or puts the taxpayers at risk [e.g arranging work and leave to receive $350,000 in salary and overtime payments or faking a disability to retire early on a full pension] should be immediately subject to serious penalties including dismissal

 

[Proposition Joe]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

So after Charlie Baker fixes all these labor issues at the MBTA, what are the chances that he goes on to fix the revenue and debt issues? 0% or 1%?

We all know that the MBTA is mismanaged, but there is a game being played here in regards to what issues the MBTA is most maligned by versus what gets the most space in the papers and you're all falling for it.

 

[JeffDowntown]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

AmFolkLeg --The Corruption comes from the positive feedback between the employees, the Union Leadership, the T Management and the Politicians who enable the process

Here's the theoretical foundation:
Unions exist to prevent "evil greedy capitalists" from abusing and exploiting the "workers" -- they act in an adversarial structure that pits their representatives [the union leaders] against the representatives of the owners [the management of the company]

This works because the owners, the managers, the workers and the public consumers of the product or service all have alternatives, e.g., if you don't like the way Ford treats its employees you can buy a Chevy

The problem comes from the concept of the "Public Sector Union"
Following the definition the adversaries are the union's workers, and the public [the ultimate owners] through their elected or appointed representation

So ostensibly the elected or appointed political types are supposed to act adversarially to protect the interest of the public [both the active consumers of the service and those members of the public with only a passive interest as tax payers]

However, the politicians are not as dumb as we make them out to be -- they cut the ultimate corrupt deal with the union -- help me get elected and I'll make sure that when we negotiate you'll do well -- and the unions help the pols get elected and the pols do as well for the unions as they can get away with doing

This is why Franklin Roosevelt was opposed to unionization of Federal Workers -- at the state and local levels the direct feed forward [positive feed back] is even more blatant. At least at the Federal-level we have the protection of the Hatch Act [restricts overt political activity of Federal employees]

Short of a formal Bankruptcy by the T -- the Financial Control Board gives the public the best possible opportunity to reform the T system as a whole and the labor issues specifically

While its too much to hope for a decertification of the T's Union -- a lot can be done starting with abandoning binding arbitration for any financial matter, and then dealing with the work rules including overtime and finally cleaning up the benefits to make them similar to the private sectors benefits

Bottom line is that working for the T should be adequately compensated and shouldn't subject the employee to abuse or excessive stress any more than working for a private T-like entity. However, given the fact that the public has limited choices, working for the T should not enable the employees to abuse the public trust though their work practices or to scam the system.

Any employee who does either something that puts the riding public at risk [e.g. tieing the throttle] or puts the taxpayers at risk [e.g arranging work and leave to receive $350,000 in salary and overtime payments or faking a disability to retire early on a full pension] should be immediately subject to serious penalties including dismissal

I actually believe that the only answer for the T is formal bankruptcy and receivership. It is not just the unions, benefits, work rules, it is also debt, financing, revenue, criminally deferred maintenance, overall management. As I said above, this is an ALL OF THE ABOVE problem set.

There are no band-aids, no easy pills to pop. We are talking major surgery at minimum, on a patient that is critically ill with multiple organ failures.

 

[underground]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Walmart screams efficiency to me, which, compared to an agency that takes an order of magnitude more money than it should to build a 2 track LRT line adjacent to an existing ROW, doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world. A decrease in quality sounds fucking great! Crappy, wooden platforms alongside cheaply constructed stations that work is vastly preferable to pretty renderings of beautiful stations we can't afford to build. If running the T as a jobs program is more important than the T as a transit agency, why do we even have a capital budget?! Just give the first X workers 315k for showing up, spend the whole budget that way and pat ourselves on the back for constructing a jobs program so inefficient and corrupt it'd make the military blush! Since the MBTA has a set number of $ and a vastly greater # of ways to spend it, someone has to get screwed over, and no amount of posturing can disguise that. Call it "chaining people to their jobs" or whatever, but money doesn’t grow on trees and I'd love to spend it where it does the most good.

Wait, so now you're blaming the union for the design process, the bidding process, and the bids that the contractors submitted? You want to blame the union for Global Warming too?

And the idea that "someone has to get screwed over" is ridiculous. "Has" to get screwed over? You've drawn up all possibilities and they all result in screwing someone over? I bet not.

 

[The EGE]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

I actually believe that the only answer for the T is formal bankruptcy and receivership. It is not just the unions, benefits, work rules, it is also debt, financing, revenue, criminally deferred maintenance, overall management. As I said above, this is an ALL OF THE ABOVE problem set.

There are no band-aids, no easy pills to pop. We are talking major surgery at minimum, on a patient that is critically ill with multiple organ failures.

Two connected problems have reasonable legislative fixes that could be sold as "we're releasing the T from things that are preventing it from getting better" especially if a high percentage of the budgetary changes are then funneled directly into state of good repair work. Neither are revenue-positive for the state, but they may be politically salable if the message is "we're making the T fix its problems".

The first is the crippling Big Dig-related debt. In the late 1990s, the MBTA had a better bond rating than the state, so it was essentially used as a dumping ground for debt - like the expensive Old Colony and Greenbush projects, and the GLX - that were mandated as Big Dig mitigation. These projects should have been paid for by the state directly as a cost of the Big Dig, not shuffled off to the MBTA.

The Romney administration's, uh, creative solution was forward financing - where the MBTA only relies on internally generated revenue plus a percentage of the state sales tax. This relied on very optimistic projections of sales tax revenue; of course politicians are going to claim their plans result in high growth! Sales tax revenue has never met these projections; especially during the financial crisis, the MBTA has several times been stuck with a very low floor. That's a big part of why the state of repair backlog is so bad - tens and often hundreds of millions of dollars a year that the MBTA isn't getting from sales tax, that make it impossible to pay off a crippling debt that it shouldn't have had in the first place. And that means that projects go slower because there isn't enough money up front. If GLX had been completed in 2011 as originally planned, I bet it would have cost half as much. It certainly wasn't projected to, and bloat just gets worse the longer a project takes.

The 'criminal' part isn't in MBTA management for the most part - they've actually done a pretty good job allocating money so that the system still functions at all. There are certainly huge improvements needed to be made, though.

Any changes to the unions will work a lot better if the union doesn't have to be in constant conflict with MBTA management and the state. Professionalism begets professionalism. Treat them as professional workers, demand competence and quality results and absolutely safety, but give them a reasonable environment to expect that of. If every year the union has to fight real battles like getting needed positions filled, it's no wonder they'll fight things that don't need to be fought too. The old Boston Elevated Railway should be a model of this. Workers were expected to be there on time, rain or shine, and to give their all as a representative of the Elevated. But the Elevated worked with the workers and the unions to ensure safer working conditions and better hours, and the public treatment of BERy employees was significantly better than that of MBTA employees now. Carrot and stick works a lot better than stick, and that kind of professional environment is one in which the best workers flourish and stay, and the worst find themselves unhappy and leave.

 

[bigeman312]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

UPDATE: Drawbridge issue delays early morning MBTA commuters

Several trains on the MBTA's Newburyport/Rockport line were delayed or cancelled Wednesday morning due to a drawbridge problem in Saugus.

The issue has since been corrected and trains are running on a normal schedule.


Both inbound and outbound trains were affected. Some inbound trains stopped at Lynn Station for passengers to take buses into the city.

The problems never stop.

 

[whighlander]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Two connected problems have reasonable legislative fixes that could be sold as "we're releasing the T from things that are preventing it from getting better" especially if a high percentage of the budgetary changes are then funneled directly into state of good repair work. Neither are revenue-positive for the state, but they may be politically salable if the message is "we're making the T fix its problems".....

MBTA management for the most part - they've actually done a pretty good job allocating money so that the system still functions at all. There are certainly huge improvements needed to be made, though....

Any changes to the unions will work a lot better if the union doesn't have to be in constant conflict with MBTA management and the state.

EGE -- two connected problems:
1) the T management was incompetent and bureaucratic to a fault -- think VA on tracks
2) T employees and Union there-of -- they have always viewed the T as an easy path to the lifetime sinecure of the T pension -- hence Mr. Bulger's Transit Agency

Until the two are cleaned-up even thinking about the rest is a wasted effort

Luckily the new team at the top appears dedicated to fixing things, and the legislation creating the Control Board provided at least on a temporary basis some relief from the evil works of the bureaucracy

Unfortunately, there has been no public olive branch from the Union leaders -- they remain totally adversarial

 

[datadyne007]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Fare hikes being discussed by the FMCB right now:

Fare hikes options: a) all fares 5%, b) most fares 5%, monthly linkpass 10% c) all fares 10%; d) most 10%, monthly linkpass by 12%

Via: Nicole Dungca, Boston Globe - https://twitter.com/ndungca

Edit: The chopped off grey column on the right is some sort of comparison to other systems. MBTA prices look substantially lower than whatever average they are using in that grey column. Nicole told me she'd try to get a picture of that following the meeting.

UPDATE:
Brian Lang says putting out four options is too complex and wants to put out two options. Everyone else is agreeing.

The ‪#‎MBTA‬ FMCB has narrowed the fare hikes down to 2:
- Increase single-rides by 5%, monthly linkpass 10%
- Increase single-rides by 10%, monthly link pass 12%

 

[whighlander]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Here's the latest on the overtime situation -- its looking as if the Control Board needs to get the Legislature behind it to restructure the Carmen's Union contract -- without the Legislature's backstoping there could be a strike threat

From the Herald
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2016/01/t_loophole_allows_fat_ot_paydays

T loophole 
allows fat OT paydays
Full work week not required

Erin Smith, Matt Stout Tuesday, January 05, 2016

The MBTA doled out nearly $32 million — or 43 percent of OT spending in fiscal 2015 — to staffers who worked fewer than 40 hours the same week they received overtime pay, new agency data shows.

The T’s top earner in 2015 worked more than twice as many overtime hours as regular hours, records show. The maintenance worker, whose annual pay rate was only $85,000, raked in more than $315,000 last year by banking 2,648 hours of overtime. In contrast, he worked fewer than 2,000 hours of straight time — the equivalent of less than 40 hours a week.....
MBTA staffers who call in sick can also earn overtime during the same week by working more than eight hours during a single shift — even if they only work half their normal hours that week. That’s because union contracts don’t require MBTA workers to hit 40 hours in a work week before earning overtime.

“To some extent, absenteeism and overtime are linked,” said MBTA Chief Administrator Brian Shortsleeve. “One of the things that we started on over the summer ... is a whole set of new leave policies.”

Here's a link to the data
http://www.bostonherald.com/news_op...me=&department_name=&order=overtime&sort=desc

27 employees made over $200,000 in 2015 -- none of whom had base pay over $110,000

This is not just obscene its very close to a criminal conspiracy -- where's Whitey these days? -- where's RICCO?

 

[bigeman312]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

I would rather force a strike than continue the status quo. If there is a strike, that means the Fiscal Control Board is probably doing their job, in my opinion. I'm glad this is being discussed. Something has to give from both the revenue and the cost side of the equation. While we have a long way to go on both revenue and cost, I welcome these reforms.

 

[Riverside]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

The T’s top earner in 2015 worked more than twice as many overtime hours as regular hours, records show. The maintenance worker, whose annual pay rate was only $85,000, raked in more than $315,000 last year by banking 2,648 hours of overtime. In contrast, he worked fewer than 2,000 hours of straight time — the equivalent of less than 40 hours a week.....
MBTA staffers who call in sick can also earn overtime during the same week by working more than eight hours during a single shift — even if they only work half their normal hours that week. That’s because union contracts don’t require MBTA workers to hit 40 hours in a work week before earning overtime.

Soooo he worked an average of 53 hours a week on overtime, and then "something less" than 40 hours additionally on straight time.

So let's say he pulled one day a week of straight time. That puts him solidly at 60 hours of work a week. So he's definitely doing shifts longer than 8 hours- whether that is 10 hours/day, 6 days/week, or 12 hours/day, 5 days/week, or the occasional 12+ hour shift... the guy's not doing the 9-5, you know?

He's in maintenance, so he's on his feet all day. His labor requires significant training (especially if he works on some of the T's more idiosyncratic equipment). If there is that much demand for his services, then he's either pretty damn good at his job, or there aren't many others who can do his job, or both.

Working more than 8 hours a day should get you overtime. Period. Working longer than an 8 hour shift should also get you overtime. Period.

How do we know his manager doesn't like, doesn't encourage, this guy's unusual schedule? It's easy to imagine circumstances in which longer, less frequent, more flexible shifts are more useful than the converse. We're not privy to those details, so we don't have close to the whole story.

Should the contract be improved? Probably. I imagine both sides could sit down and come to something reasonable.

But, yeah. No matter how you slice it, this guy is working a lot, and he's almost certainly doing valuable work. I'm not gonna get at all worked up about him getting paid well. And it's a red herring- pennies on the dollar to the Big Dig debt.

 

[bigeman312]

Re: Driven By.... Uhh... Hello? Anybody?

Don't make this about one maintenance worker. Make this about tens of millions of dollars lost annually to silly loopholes in a union contract.

pennies on the dollar to the Big Dig debt.

That. I agree with.