Drivers, Riders Lose Their Identities in MTA’s Lust for Projects

There was a picture on the front page a couple of days ago. Eleven men and women were standing on a bridge above the Pasadena Freeway, waving signs that said they were on strike. Some were heavy; some were thin. Some were yelling; some were closed-mouthed. Some wore baseball caps and some had sunglasses. Some were laughing. Some looked scared.

Aside from the fact that they were all idled and all bus drivers, they looked, in other words, like the people the rest of us work alongside--each with an opinion, each worried about his or her paycheck.

To the people who run the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, however, they are “The Union” now.

“The union is refusing to allow even lifeline bus service,” Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who is also head of the MTA board, charged in a statement this week. “The union is thumbing its nose at the MTA and taxpayers,” she also claimed.

Not only that, but “the union”--not drivers, not people, not even union members, just The Union--walked out of contract negotiations, did a “terrible disservice” to taxpayers and chose to hold “our city’s poor and middle-class residents hostage.”

When the bus drivers notified the MTA that they planned to strike earlier this month, the MTA’s chief operating officer slammed, not “bus drivers,” but “unions,” “union leaders,” “union issues” and “union contracts.” In his statement, the phrase “bus drivers” was used only as a modifier for the word “union,” which appeared 19 times in 11 paragraphs.

It has to be painful for the politicians on the MTA board, many of whom have historically supported labor. As The Times’ Nick Riccardi pointed out on Wednesday, Burke backed the janitors’ strike and pushed for living wage laws. But that was then. Now, there’s pressure to cut labor costs to finance new, big-ticket rail projects desperately needed right now! by--well, it’s not clear whom they are desperately needed by right now, besides politicians with a taste for pork and transit contractors with an eye for the next main chance.

But somebody up there on the MTA board doesn’t want to have to stop cutting ribbons just because bus drivers want to hold on to an eight-hour workday and overtime.

Thus, where there used to be “workers,” we now have “The Union.”

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Those who want to transform human beings into a faceless buzzword haven’t stopped with the people who are on strike. They also are after “The Riders,” who are evoked, depending on the scenario, either as sad-eyed victims or a tally of rear ends on bus seats. Never mind that they, too, are individuals, many supportive of the bus drivers, some supportive of the MTA management, some up to here with both sides. Suddenly, they’re being whipped out right and left for propaganda purposes--a big, handy club.

Well, all’s fair in war. But there’s a genuine problem behind the buzzwords, and it has to do with the culture of transportation spending here. There are two kinds of public transit money--money for construction and money for day-to-day expenses. The first kind is easy for state and federal lawmakers to throw around in flush times; the second commits tax revenues far into the future. The first kind is easy to muster, the second is harder. The first is time-honored pork for ambitious politicians. The second has to be scraped together, mostly from sales taxes, the kind that fall hardest on those least able to pay, and fares, the kind that already make it hard for the people who live from paycheck to paycheck to break even every week.

It is just about impossible, in this vast city, for the MTA to resist either form of transit money. But because construction funds are so much more available, the new projects have gone up, even as the operating budgets have gotten tighter by the year. And nothing has changed in these flush times. As The MTA and The Riders and The Union go at it, the construction pledges continue to flow from Washington and Sacramento: $236 million in state money for a new light-rail line to the Eastside, $150 million for new clean-fuel buses, $40 million to finish the Pasadena light rail.

How the MTA will afford to operate them, only they--and “The Union”--know.

There are, of course, answers other than the exploitation and demonization of the MTA’s workers. Sacramento and Washington could come up, for example, with money, not just for ribbon-cuttings, but for operating subsidies. The governor, who is involved now, hasn’t been keen on such commitments. But shouldn’t “The Taxpayers” also be made to realize that nobody rides for free?

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.