End the Pain

The pain of a transit strike in metropolitan Los Angeles begins with low-wage workers, high school students and elderly people who depend on buses and subways as their sole transportation, but the pain will not end there. As freeways and streets jam up with new traffic, as laborers and garment workers and housekeepers can’t get to jobs or arrive late and exhausted, as high school students lose their ride to class, as immigrant shopping areas like downtown’s Grand Central Market empty of customers, the harm could cost the Los Angeles economy up to $2 million per day.

Even in car-obsessed Los Angeles such pain has kept transit strikes on the short side. The 1994 strike lasted nine days, and the one previous, in 1982, lasted five days. That, however, was when the MTA had money, or at least thought it did. This one, with bargaining at a halt on the third day of the strike, may be harder to end. But for the city’s sake, it must.

First, the MTA and the union representing 4,400 MTA bus and rail operators must get back to the bargaining table. The silence of the two sides is an insult.

The three unions with which the MTA is negotiating certainly have ground to give. One example is a work rule covering mechanics that requires $24-an-hour employees to be brought in to do even minor jobs whenever a tool is used, even something as simple as a screwdriver, although employees earning much less could accomplish the same task.

But the MTA has gone much further in demanding that the union give ground on work rules, including overtime, even though the agency has already reduced bus operating costs from $108 per hour of service to $98. Is a reduction of just $2 more per hour of service worth going to the mat?

The MTA cannot blame the unions alone for the fact that it faces a $438-million operating deficit over the next 10 years, not when it is negotiating bad deals like getting 10 small public restrooms in its stations in exchange for as much as $50 million in advertising space.

The agency’s taste for grand plans is also still causing trouble. When the MTA was lobbying hard for rail and bus expansion plans in the San Fernando Valley, on the Eastside and on the Westside for example, there were those who believed that it was again biting off more than it could chew. Sure enough, the ambitious building plan would add $287 million to the operating deficit by 2010, meaning that the MTA has plenty of money to build rail and bus lines that it cannot yet afford to operate.

The unions cannot refuse to discuss prudent cost savings, but neither can the MTA pretend that work rule changes will pull the agency out of a deep hole of its own making.