Riordan Urges Transit Workers Not to Strike

With time for negotiations running out, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairwoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke on Wednesday called on the agency’s unions not to strike, warning that a walkout will strand hundreds of thousands of people, including the poor, senior citizens, students and the disabled.

The last-minute appeal to the MTA’s 6,800 bus drivers, train operators, mechanics and clerks came with a renewed demand that their unions agree to concessions on “outmoded and antiquated” work rules that drive up the cost of operating the nation’s second-largest bus system.

Riordan and Burke, joined by six members of the MTA board, vowed to stand firm in insisting on work rule changes in the next MTA contract, including a four-day, 10-hour workweek for some bus drivers. It is that issue more than any other that is pushing the agency toward a crippling strike early Friday morning.

“We’re not conceding there will even be a strike,” Burke told reporters. “We want to work out new contract agreements and avert a work stoppage.”

But her remarks and those of the mayor and others only served to reinforce the impression that the MTA board is willing to take a strike to force changes in work rules.

Riordan--the most powerful member of the MTA’s board--made it clear that the transit agency’s directors are not willing to forgo this opportunity to redefine work rules and lower the agency’s cost of operations. “We are standing firm as a board on behalf of the citizens of Los Angeles,” he said. “We want to get rid of the antiquated work rules that, like a cancer, are destroying our transit system.”

That message, delivered at a late afternoon news conference at MTA headquarters, was not well received at a Pasadena hotel where union leaders were negotiating with the transit agency.

Goldy Norton, spokesman for the United Transportation Union, which represents bus drivers and train operators, said, “There is going to be no further extension” of the strike deadline. “There will be either a contract in place at midnight [tonight] or there will be a strike.”

The drivers’ union has adamantly refused to consider the work rule changes that MTA has demanded. MTA wants to institute a four-day, 10-hour-a-day workweek for 400 of its drivers instead of paying them overtime.

“Their plan would cut earnings,” Norton said. “It wouldn’t cut the wage rate, but it would certainly reduce earnings and reduce them substantially.”

Norton hinted that there may be another way to cut costs. “There can be other ways of doing it other than what they put on the table.”

Both sides said they were willing to resume negotiations and work up to the deadline in hopes of achieving a new contract.

Burke said the time has come for the two sides to tone down the rhetoric and get down to serious bargaining. “I’m appealing to the UTU to stop threatening and stop scaring our riders,” she said.

About 450,000 passengers use MTA’s bus and rail lines every day. A walkout by the United Transportation Union would shut down the agency’s bus and rail operations. If Teamsters union members honor picket lines, the MTA acknowledged, it will not be able to offer any bus service, including the five “lifeline” bus lines it has planned to run using private contractors.

If a walkout occurs, Riordan urged Angelenos to “open up their hearts” and pick people up at street corners and give them a ride, if they have no other means of transportation.

Riordan said the MTA simply cannot spend so much more than any other transit operator in Southern California and expand its bus and rail operations in the future. He said it costs MTA $98 an hour to operate a bus, compared with $77 for the Orange County Transit Authority and $65 for Santa Monica’s bus line.

MTA Chief Executive Julian Burke reported some limited progress in Wednesday’s discussions, after no progress was achieved Tuesday.

State mediators dispatched by Gov. Gray Davis have been shuttling between the drivers union and MTA management, trying to bridge a substantial gap on a new contract that threatens to trigger the seventh Los Angeles transit strike in the last 30 years.

But the two sides remain far apart on key issues, particularly the four-day workweek, which union spokesmen say would threaten passengers’ safety.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, also an MTA board member, criticized the drivers union for raising the safety issue when some members are already working a 10-hour day, five days a week.

Yaroslavsky asked how can it be unsafe to drive four days a week, 10 hours a day on straight time, when, as unions contend, it is safe to drive the same amount of time five days a week on overtime. “Does being paid overtime make you a safer driver?” he asked.

The workweek issue prompted state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sylmar), chairman of the Senate Committee on Industrial Relations, to threaten to introduce legislation to further restrict the number of hours bus drivers can drive.

State law restricts bus drivers to 10 hours a day behind the wheel, spread over no more than 15 hours. To cover the morning and evening commutes, many transit districts have drivers work a split shift with time off during the middle of the day.

“The current MTA proposal extending on-duty hours to potentially 14 hours may have serious health and safety implications,” Alarcon wrote in a letter to MTA officials.

“If they are within the limits of the law, I’m willing to change those limits to ensure the safety of the public and the drivers,” Alarcon said. “This is the key issue. If we can take this issue off the table, all the other issues can be negotiated.”

A transit strike would hit hardest at the MTA’s predominantly poor and minority passengers, many of whom have no other means of transportation. It is precisely this characteristic that some observers cite as the reason Los Angeles has seen so many transit strikes in the past quarter of a century, ranging from five days in 1982 to 68 days in 1974.

Wendell Cox, a former top MTA official and now a consultant for transit unions, said the problem has to do with the nature of Los Angeles. “Transit isn’t that important to the people who drive policy in Los Angeles. . . . Politically, the people who depend on transit don’t have much of a political voice . . . and that is who gets hurt the worst. Whereas in New York, you are shutting service [for people] who do have a political voice.”

Indeed, New York City has seen only one transit strike in the last 20 years.

Al O’Leary, a spokesman for New York City Transit, said the subway and bus system is essential to the functioning of the city, with more people using transit than another mode of transportation, including cars.

In New York state, strikes by government employees are illegal and union members who do walk out can be fined at a rate of twice their daily pay, O’Leary said.

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Los Angeles Transit Strike History

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Date Union That Started Strike Length Feb.-March 1972 Amalgamated Transit Union 6 days Aug.-Oct. 1974 United Transportation Union 68 days Aug.-Sept. 1976 Amalgamated Transit Union 36 days Aug.-Sept. 1979 Amalgamated Transit Union; 23 days Brotherhood of Railway, Airline and Steamship Clerks Sept. 1982 United Transportation Union 5 days July-Aug. 1994 Amalgamated Transit Union 9 days

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Source: MTA