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Time for another BART strike? (Contract rejected)

fawndog said:
Basicly you agree that contracts mean nothing, and any tool to force honest working people out of thier jobs is ok.

Yes, I am very much pro UNION, pro fairness, and pro American.
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No I didn't say contracts mean nothing. Bart management has yet to ratify the contract, and I said I hope they find a way out of it and come back and stick it right up Bart Unions' asses. I hope they negotiate in bad faith in the worst way possible. lol

Why are you so supportive of the Bart Unions? Do you work for Bart? Do you have a relative that works for Bart?

fawndog said:
I see it the way I see it, you may assume that but one sided is stretching it. Enlighten me as to how this bad faith bargaining was a fault of said union.
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So what if its bad faith bargaining? Call it whatever you like but most of the general public is very much against the Bart Unions. They should really be glad they even have jobs to go back to and that Bart didn't fire all of them and hire a whole new deserving crop of people.

$100k+ to push some buttons and full paychecks for the rest of their lives as retirement? Shiieet.

Unions that work for the taxpayers should never exceed the pay and benefit levels of the people that pay their salaries.
 
Wow. 6 weeks paid sick time is a joke. How can anyone take the union seriously when they put shit like that in their contract?
 
mlm said:
How can anyone take the management seriously when they miss shit like that in the contract?
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FTFY

So they signed it after months and months of delegation, and missed something as major/minor as this?
 
i_am_the_koi said:
FTFY

So they signed it after months and months of delegation, and missed something as major/minor as this?
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I'm not excusing management, I just think it says a lot about the union state of mind asking for it.
 
stoltzf4 said:
Take a deep breathe. There is a reason why the public (even in the uber liberal bay area) have overwhelmingly sided with Bart management during this debacle. You have very low skilled workers, earning far above market wages, holding the general public hostage while they continue to fight for absurd benefits that no one in the private sector enjoys. No one wants to see the people whose salary we pay get fat at the trough while still crying about having to pay something towards their own health care (one example). Very out of touch with the reality most of their ridership face.
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BART wages are somewhere in the middle when compared to other major cities' transit systems. I agree that their benefits package is above average, but not that much... again, we're comparing them to other transit agencies.

mlm said:
I'm not excusing management, I just think it says a lot about the union state of mind asking for it.
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It's called bargaining. When you want to sell a bike, do you ask what you want for it or do you pad the price a little bit because you know you're going to be talked down? Likewise, when you buy a bike, do you offer less than you figure you're going to pay knowing that the owner will probably come down to something in your range? That's exactly what happens when unions and management sit down at the table to hash out an agreement.

954Rider said:
No I didn't say contracts mean nothing. Bart management has yet to ratify the contract, and I said I hope they find a way out of it and come back and stick it right up Bart Unions' asses. I hope they negotiate in bad faith in the worst way possible. lol

So what if its bad faith bargaining? Call it whatever you like but most of the general public is very much against the Bart Unions. They should really be glad they even have jobs to go back to and that Bart didn't fire all of them and hire a whole new deserving crop of people.
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Okay, so you understand that there're laws against doing what you're proposing? I get the point that you're upset that a BART train operator earns a decent chunk of change... However, federal law, and state law dictate what can and can't be done in this situation- and what you HOPE they do frankly, isn't ever going to happen. It would cost BART far too much money.

And "bad faith bargaining" is a legal term. It's technically what BART has engaged in when they agreed to a contract, had the unions vote on it, then decided they didn't agree to the contract. It's against the law, and it's likely to cost BART a lot of money in some way or another.
 
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boney said:
BART wages are somewhere in the middle when compared to other major cities' transit systems. I agree that their benefits package is above average, but not that much... again, we're comparing them to other transit agencies.
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We SHOULD be comparing them to other private service workers in similar positions of responsibility.
 
Eldritch said:
We SHOULD be comparing them to other private service workers in similar positions of responsibility.
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Show me a private service worker who drives trains and what they earn.
 
stoltzf4 said:
Take a deep breathe. There is a reason why the public (even in the uber liberal bay area) have overwhelmingly sided with Bart management during this debacle. You have very low skilled workers, earning far above market wages, holding the general public hostage while they continue to fight for absurd benefits that no one in the private sector enjoys. No one wants to see the people whose salary we pay get fat at the trough while still crying about having to pay something towards their own health care (one example). Very out of touch with the reality most of their ridership face.
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I know full well why people are so jealous that they despise the Union employee. So what's wrong, besides someone has a better job and benefits than you (figurative) ? You wanna debate that, well it's ok to, however Bart was done negotiating and signed a contract, backing out only after realizing they didn't "win".

If the Bart unions did something that illegal, you'd all be "storming the castle, pitchforks in hand".
 
boney said:
Show me a private service worker who drives trains and what they earn.
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OK, ask CSX or Union Pacific for starters. :dunno

fawndog said:
I know full well why people are so jealous that they despise the Union employee. So what's wrong, besides someone has a better job and benefits than you (figurative) ? You wanna debate that, well it's ok to, however Bart was done negotiating and signed a contract, backing out only after realizing they didn't "win".

If the Bart unions did something that illegal, you'd all be "storming the castle, pitchforks in hand".
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All Public Sector Labor Unions are a bald faced robbery of We The People.
 
From the article linked in the original post, it doesn't sound like it's 6 weeks of sick time like most of us in the private sector would understand it. In quotes it says "six weeks of paid time off to take care of a seriously ill child, spouse, parent or domestic partner or to bond with a new child". Unless it's universally abused, it doesn't read like something where it's acceptable to call in and say "I don't feel well today, so I'm using my emergency sick relative paid time off". Sounds like a union perk-addendum to FMLA. I'm not a fan of unions, but if it's used how it's written, it doesn't seems quite as gluttonous as having "6 weeks of sick time".
 
byke said:
From the article linked in the original post, it doesn't sound like it's 6 weeks of sick time like most of us in the private sector would understand it. In quotes it says "six weeks of paid time off to take care of a seriously ill child, spouse, parent or domestic partner or to bond with a new child". Unless it's universally abused, it doesn't read like something where it's acceptable to call in and say "I don't feel well today, so I'm using my emergency sick relative paid time off". Sounds like a union perk-addendum to FMLA. I'm not a fan of unions, but if it's used how it's written, it doesn't seems quite as gluttonous as having "6 weeks of sick time".
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Yes, this is special time to care for a loved one in an emergency. One of the Non-profits I work with offers this benefit to their staff at a rate of one paid day per month (in addition to normal Sick and Vacation Leave) to a maximum accrual of 2 weeks. It's a nice extra benefit, but 6 Weeks is CRAZY.
 
Yeah, but unless it's abused, it's 6 weeks of crazy that very few people will actually use.
 
byke said:
Yeah, but unless it's abused, it's 6 weeks of crazy that very few people will actually use.
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They have a similar benefit on the books now and based on use of that benefit (which I assume gave less time) they expect the cost to BART for this 6 week thing to be measured in Millions.
 
If the average BART employee earned $70k/yr, six weeks works out to about $8k...which would mean 5500 employees would need to take advantage of it to hit the $44M number (or 175-725 employees if you went with the union estimate of $1.4-$5.8M over 4 years, which of course is one fourth those numbers annually - divided among 375k daily users, wtf does that math out to at a cost/pp/py??).
 
You also need to add the overtime for the fill in worker, that is where it starts to cost more.
 
The one that particularly irked me was that in a five day work week, Monday through Friday, a Bart employee could call in sick on Monday and then work the Saturday and receive overtime wages. They actually fought to keep this. :shocker
 
cartoon_imagine-no-unions.jpg
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BART's cost claims for paid leave don't add up
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/openf...laims-for-paid-leave-don-t-add-up-4994627.php

In 2012, 7.4 percent (171 out of 2,301) of SEIU members used paid family leave for an average duration of 4.3 weeks. At this level, BART claims that the new paid-family-leave language would cost $5.8 million over the four years of the contract. That's $1.45 million a year. But BART also says that most of that $1.45 million cost comes from paying for replacement workers, which would be the case whether the leave was paid or not. So when you do the arithmetic, the additional cost to BART of paying for family leave would likely be around $700,000 a year.
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BART Boasts of $128 Million in Savings on Same Day it Spurns Workers' Family Leave (vs. claimed $44mil over 4 yrs)
http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2013/11/bart_family_leave.php

So, it might come as little surprise that, on the very day BART's board declared a family leave provision pegged at between $1.4 million and $10.5 million a year too costly, it gratuitously boasted of $128 million in savings via an accelerated train car procurement deal.
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