F-Line -- isn't the solution to every problem just a 1-liner?
Consecutive ad hominem streak intact.
The article in Commonwealth points out some of the the difficulties with the T's employee compensation structure [including the defined benefits pension].
One of the interesting ironies for the T is that its really hard to get the experienced Union guys [and gals] to take the leap to management -- because they can make more as "hourly workers" with their seniority and they have less responsibilities by not having management authority. A major Consequence of this is that the T has to hire management from outside with no direct experience in the T. A Further consequence is that there is a lot of learning curve for the new managers, and then frustrated by the T's "Culture" they sometimes go somewhere else and so the process starts again.
That is not what the article said. They have two problems:
- So many maint positions are unfilled they cannot meet, much less speed up, their timetables for state-of-repair. And so the capital allotted for it isn't being spent, and is at risk of having the funding expire when it's time-limited in the budget or per grant rules. The existing staff are stretched thin and working punishing amounts of overtime, which is an extreme cost drain on the agency. They are being asked to stretch their responsibilities by absorbing more of their bosses' chores...but without working more overtime.
- They are not filling management positions for the project managers and other layers who are the people who make the strategic decisions on how to provide relief for #1. Because they aren't offering competitive salaries for the industry. This leaves the very hiring managers who fill the vacancies in #1 vacant.
This has nothing to do with being in too-cushy a job. These aren't bus drivers; these are the highest-skill maintenance workers with full trades education in their field. They can't absorb more responsibilities because they're spread thin and under-equipped to do the job they're tasked for. You can't speed up a tie-changer machine to work faster. You can only hire more track gangs and rent/buy more tie changers...which they're unwilling to do. And you can only add more hours to the maint shift...which they're unwilling to do because they're short on resources to do late-evening shuttle buses, don't want to pay the overtime, and aren't hiring the people or the hiring managers who hire the people in any effort to control the OT. Why in the hell would a skilled tradesperson be interested in a "promotion" to a career-killing beatdown in management getting the (not-) buck passed to them and being expected to show results with three limbs tied behind their backs? Would
you do that if your employer offered you a position that was a transparently obvious sacrificial lamb, and you couldn't come up with any trade-up-and-trade-out upside for taking it? Why are the humans in these positions any different?
There is no bigger bounty of experienced transpo works in North America than along the entire length of the Northeast Corridor. It's a very competitive hiring market in both the public sector and the private sector. And it's a very competitive hiring market for both union rank-and-file and non-union upper management. Transit agencies, freight and passenger railroads, private carriers like bus lines, consulting/management firms, thinktanks, etc. all poach from each other all the time. The T has at various times in its history been on both the giving and receiving end of poaching other people's talent. They won't pay the going rate to hire this talent, so the positions remain unfilled. And nobody's going to sign up for the beatdown job in management when a competitive hiring market lets them move up in the world at some other employer.
That's not union politics. That's the freeeeeeeeeeee market speaking loud and fucking clear when it comes to the premium-skill positions. They won't pay the going rate for qualified people in those trades or middle management positions, so they can't fill those positions. Internally or externally. Union or non-union. The ugly comparison for what this buys you is NJ Transit right now. State of NJ hired zero management for years on end; total systemic paralysis ensured; they had a mass exodus of talent emptying out the middle management and trades ranks because the unfilled higher-level positions left no mechanism for relief; and they got plundered on the free market by other Tri-State area transpo employers--public and private--poaching the talent that was left (including their own agency head jumping ship this year to the MTA). Now it's gone completely nuclear on them with the Hoboken Terminal disaster and char-broiling in public and media over how they let this brainrot happen. To point where it has literally swung the election polls and put several Legislative leaders who let this fester in grave danger of getting turfed next week, and will be one of the Top Three defining issues in next year's off-year gubenatorial race to replace termed-out Christie.
This level of inaction has direct consequences. In any organization. Go name one private company where mass understaffing at both the decider level and the front line through unwillingness to pay a market rate is survivable as a long-term strategy or lackthereof. It has nothing to do with lack of motivation, everything to do with employees possessing basic survival instinct against committing career suicide.
While -- It's certainly good to not be incestous in your management -- And bringing in an outside perspective is great -- But you need that competent cadre at the next level down to actually implement -- the "Next Great thing."
Rehash of facts already in evidence.
How are they expected to hire Great Minds™ when they won't pay for them. Again...look at NJ Transit. Their top mgt. got sucked dry by competitive hiring in their own home job market, and they just left the positions vacant or made the next level down cover the vacancies at little to no increase. Their new director was an auto-promoted middle manager who's been universally panned as in way over his head and a sacrificial lamb for the fallout with Hoboken and their abysmal safety record. They had to reach very far down to find somebody willing to take on the suicide mission. That's rationality and survival instinct at work.
You tell me how many Great Minds™ are going to treat that as an opportunity when their Vision™ has never ever been in greater demand across all sectors of the transpo industry than right now? That new and very much non-union MIT whiz kid they hired several months ago to be their outside-the-box strategic thinker...you think he's long for that job if his dept. gets shit for resources and he's not allowed as a hiring manager to advertise staff positions that'll attract anyone worth their salt? Fuck no...he'll get poached within months. Because that's how the free market works.
Some fast growing companies have faced the same kind of issue -- senior line engineers didn't want to move on to become management. Yet, they had risen to the top of the engineering hierarchy of jobs -- clearly you didn't want to lose such a person to a start-up or a competitor. The solution for both Raytheon and Analog Devices was to create a parallel track for engineers to become mentors and internal consultants with levels of compensation similar to managers with the same years of service and / or specialized expertise.
This observation is absolutely useless and anchored in no reality without any context of how well-functioning the organization was at the time they were failing to draw interest in those positions. How many successful organizations with high-skill workers ever end up with a workforce unwilling to better their situation? Pay, stature, experience, resume-building, bolstering competitive leverage? Where on earth is self-motivation to advance ever a problem when the workers have gone through all the trouble to learn their trade?
No...bettering one's situation is the motivation. And when a promotion to management offers so little betterment or way too much peril for the trouble, interest is going to be low. When low interest in promotion manifests itself, it is almost always because the organization is fucked up to hell from top on down and needs to take massive corrective action. It's not personal laziness or lack of motivation to step out of one's comfort zone. It's the free market; workers with leverage will not choose a raw deal when they have better options for a not- raw deal. The organizations that try to over-personify basic-ass rationality as a
personal failing...end up failing to retain their best personnel. Most of us have spent time in organizations hitting the skids like this.
The only thing that example empirically offers is that Raytheon and AD likely did something substantial and productive to address a serious problem with their job market competitiveness before it became a destabilizing factor that left them end-stage paralyzed like the other examples we're talking about.
This might be a "Lifeline" for the T -- take some of the experienced senior Union folks and to or three years before they retire -- give them a second career as internal consultants -- this could be especially valuable where the T chooses to outsource some functions to the private sector.
No, it wouldn't. Because rational workers won't trade up to a raw deal that is de facto trading down in grief and stability and aims to trade laterally on compensation. Again...these are not the station attendants and bus drivers. This is maint staff, project managers, procurement specialists, and managers who have to make day-to-day decisions. The positions are unfilled because the terms of employment and prospects within the role are shit. And they are equally shit for the non-union management jobs they can't fill, the Innovation™ jobs they can't fill...and last but not least, the competent private contractors they have been unable to attract. Why do they keep getting single-bidders or no bidders at all on RFP's, inexperienced unknowns, and desperate low-bidders overleveraging themselves to their own impalement? Maybe because the talent is exercising its own rationality.
How exactly is privatization supposed to be an answer when they're not offering positions that'll attract anything to flypaper in any other private context? The private sector isn't any more immune to this trap than the public sector; private organizations fail every day because of this. It's completely naive to give a Pavlovian "well, privatization will fix this" when killing one's own hiring leverage is as fatal in the private sector and guns-for-hire, be they individuals or organizations, exercise the same basic rationality on what's a viable opportunity and what's a "DO NOT WANT" bear trap.
