The 2013 showdown ended with BART employees winning a 15.4 percent raise that the San Jose Mercury-News reported made them the best-compensated transit workers in the U.S. While the end to the strike made the public happy, critics said the deal would hurt BART’s finances in the long haul and didn’t do nearly enough to reduce the cost of benefits and perks with few parallels in public employment.

Now, promises to address these issues were put aside in the latest contract talks, which recently concluded with an extension of the previous deal for four years that also included cost-of-living pay hikes.

Forty-two local leaders praised the deal as a step in the right direction. But local media coverage — and some politicians — paint a different picture.

No-strike provision left out of deal

State Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, called the deal a compromise he could live with for now. But he also told the Mercury-News that the deal didn’t address a range of important issues, starting with the urgent need for a no-strike clause to prevent the chaos seen in 2013. 

Orinda called on BART to withhold “cost-of-living increases from highly paid managers; undertake a salary survey of agency workers before the next contract talks; establish a capital fund so repairs and replacement parts can be paid for on an as-needed basis instead of by massive bond measures; release clear projections of retirement costs; … and commit to training replacement workers in the event of another work stoppage.”

Bay Area News Group columnist Dan Borenstein suggested the pact was irresponsible. The deal increased BART’s projected $400 million operating deficit over the next decade to nearly $480 million. Borenstein noted that negotiators raised no questions about some uniquely generous provisions:

• Retirement savings account: On top of pensions, workers also receive BART-funded retirement savings accounts. The annual district contribution for each worker is $1,869 plus 1.63 percent of salary.
• Health care coverage: Workers and most retirees receive full family health care coverage for $138 a month, regardless of the number of dependents.
• Work week: Train operators, station agents and other members of the Amalgamated Transit Union work only 37.5 hours per week, not 40.
• Leave time: BART workers receive up to six weeks paid vacation annually, of which they can cash out a week each year. They receive 12 days of sick leave, and can apply unused portions toward their pension service credit or cash it out. Plus they receive 13 paid holidays.
• Annual bonuses: Workers receive $1,000 annual bonuses for each year that ridership exceeds projections by 2 percent.

Were maintenance dollars used for compensation?

Borenstein, among others, has suggested that one reason the November bond is so big is that for years, normal BART maintenance may have been scaled back to pay for worker compensation. Such maintenance is considered crucial to keep infrastructure and rail cars in good shape.

What this wide-ranging criticism means for the fate of the BART bond is uncertain. In a February letter, 32 Bay Area elected officials seemed to link their support for a multibillion-dollar bond to hard guarantees of no future strikes. Now, many of these officials, starting with Glazer, are no longer taking that hard line.

But commuters may not be eager to support a bond after BART approved a contract that offers no protections against an encore of the 2013 disruptions they endured.

The lack of public support for the strike is striking in that the union is arguably the state’s most sympathetic public employee union. The union says that 99 percent of its food workers, custodians and respiratory therapists are income-eligible for some form of public assistance, which it contrasts with the bloated salaries and lavish benefits provided to top UC administrators.

Despite the clear income inequality among the 190,000 faculty and staff at the University of California, a majority of Democrat elected officials have failed to publicly comment on the upcoming strike.

High-paid BART employees undermined low-paid UC workers

Since last summer’s strike by Bay Area transit workers, Democrat politicians have become fickle friends of organized labor.

Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “among the best-off in the country,” the 2,300 BART mechanics, custodians, station agents, train operators and clerical staff earned an average base salary of $71,000 per year plus $11,000 in overtime pay. That was before the union received a 15.38 percent pay increase over four years in exchange for increased pension contributions. Previously, BART paid both the employee and employer pension contributions.

Several Democrat leaders, including Assembly candidate Steve Glazer, publicly opposed the strike, signaling an intraparty split on labor issues.

“The prospect that well-paid Bay Area Rapid Transit system workers with lavish benefits and little-known perks might inconvenience rich white-collar liberals in the San Francisco area,” wrote CalWatchdog’s Chris Reed, “has finally triggered an intraparty battle of the kind that California Democrats have somehow managed to avoid for decades.”

Field Poll: Public sours on unions

Following that bruising battle at BART, for the first time, Californians have a negative view of organized labor. Last December, a Field Poll found that a plurality of registered voters said that unions “do more harm than good.” Forty five percent of those surveyed viewed unions negatively, a 16-point swing in just two years.

Union approval has even fallen among union households. Thirty one percent of union households have a negative view of unions, a huge increase from the 18 percent result reported in March 2011.

“It seems like they keep winning the battles,” Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said back in December when the poll was released. “The question becomes, ‘Are they moving the public in the direction where they may lose the war?’”

That first casualty in the war against unions are the low-paid service workers at the University of California. Earlier this month, AFSCME 3299 released a  list of elected officials throughout California who “have united in support of AFSCME 3299’s pursuit of a fair contract settlement with UC.” Just eight state legislators were included on the list.

Even former union members are jettisoning their union credentials. State Sen. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, who recently launched her third campaign in three years, wasn’t among the small group of state legislators to publicly back the lowest-paid workers at the University of California. Her absence was noticeable given that she’s a former member of AFSCME. Since being elected to the Legislature, Torres has distanced herself from the union by omitting her union activities from her official biography.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez stands with UC workers

Not all Democrats are shunning labor unions out of political expediency. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, a former secretary-treasurer of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, has repeatedly offered support for UC’s lowest-paid workers.

“UC continues to disregard the well-being of its lowest wage workers,” said Gonzalez, one of the eight Democrat legislators to publicly stand up for UC workers. “It makes no sense for the Legislature to continue to write the UC system a blank check while they continue to increase the wages of those at the very top, while leaving our service workers to be subsidized by taxpayers through safety net programs.”

She added, “All work is dignified and all workers should be accorded respect by our public university system.”

In addition to Gonzalez, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who serves on the UC Board of Regents, has voiced his support for AFSCME 3299 on various social networks. The union adds that more members are silently with them.

“Whether on picket lines, phone lines, in letters or in statements to the press, the overwhelming majority of the state Legislature’s Democratic Caucus has stood shoulder to shoulder with AFSCME 3299 members throughout their struggle for fairness and dignity at the University of California, and we are deeply grateful for their support,” AFSCME 3299 said in a statement. “We are equally grateful to the members of the GOP Caucus who have stood with us.  Our fight is not a matter of right and left, but right and wrong.”

96 percent of UC service workers and patient care workers voted in favor of the strike authorization. AFSCME 3299 represents 8,300 service workers and 13,000 patient care technical workers.

The eight legislators who publicly back AFSCME 3299

• State Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett
• Assembly member Marc Levine
• Assembly member Paul Fong
• Assembly member Jimmy Gomez
• Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez
• Assembly member Shirley Weber, Ph.D.
• Assembly member Rob Bonta
• Assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer

The first is the fact that many Golden State public agencies routinely act in ways that would yield criminal and civil legal action and shareholder lawsuits if the same shenanigans took place in the business world.

The second is that in special districts — exemplified by the Metropolitan Water District but seen in water, transit and other agencies around California — there is a disincentive for top officials to play tough in salary negotiations because they personally benefit from overly generous pay and compensation practices. If such practices lead to higher bills sent to ratepayers or to poorer services, so be it.

Take it away, Dan:

“… what the district calls ‘perhaps the most significant change agreed to by unions’ … amends a decades-old contract provision that required union approval before BART managers could alter past work practices.

“That provision has impeded attempts to improve technology, reduce paperwork and increase efficiencies. BART leaders made its elimination a top negotiation priority; they got an alteration instead. Nevertheless, they claim the new language will enable them to improve technology and switch equipment without union approval.

“In fact, changes must still be negotiated with the unions. Unresolved disputes will be subjected to binding arbitration. And the arbitrator may provide relief, including ‘additional compensation.’

“That means unions will demand, and likely receive, more money in exchange for modernization, thereby eroding cost-savings BART desperately needs.”

This part is particularly rich: The concession-that-didn’t-happen was treated as if it happened.

“BART officials cite the contract modification as a key reason for agreeing to the financial terms. But they also misrepresent the monetary aspects.

“For starters, they claim employees, already some of the best paid transit workers in the nation, will net a 9.4 percent increase over the four-year contract. That counts salary increases offset by increased contributions to pensions and health care. In fact, the net benefit to workers is 11.7 percent.”

Will BART bosses pay for their perfidy?

Wait, there’s much more — a list of BART’s financial deceptions:

“First, officials claim the deal will save $2.7 million due to retiree health care changes. New employees will now be required to work 15 years before vesting in the plan, rather than the current five years.

“But most of the savings will materialize decades from now. Nevertheless, BART calculated the savings for 30 years and then credited half of that during just the next four years, thereby grossly inflating the contract savings. It’s fictional accounting.

“Second, BART claims it will save $5 million by encouraging employees with spouses who have health coverage to opt out of the transit district’s insurance. Employees will be offered $350 a month to do so. The question is how many people will take the deal. BART estimates 150 employees will, but they really don’t know.

“Third, the district left a $16 million retirement item out of its accounting.”

“The transit system not only provides traditional pensions, it also funds retirement savings accounts similar to 401(k)s. The district currently contributes $1,869 per year. And until 1991 it also kicked in 1.627 percent of salary.”

So as bad a deal as it looked when it was first reported, it was actually far worse. Will top BART officials face any repercussions for their dishonesty and profligacy?

In a just world, of course. But not in California.

The truth? It’s an assault on the middle class

Allowing BART employees higher salaries and benefits on their already-high compensation will only result in increasing costs and increased fares for the riders.

It’s too easy to negotiate with other people’s money, and even easier to end up giving it away.

“SACRAMENTO — The head of the Senate Transportation Committee praised Gov. Jerry Brown for preventing Bay Area transit workers from walking off the job Monday and said he is still considering legislation that would permanently take away their right to strike.

“Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) said in an interview that workers in the Bay Area have rights that few of their colleagues around the state share.

“’Of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, Los Angeles and the Bay Area are the exception,’ he said. ‘All of the other large systems do not allow transit workers to strike.’

“DeSaulnier, who called himself ‘pro-labor and pro-transit,’ said neither labor nor management seems to want to change the current law, but the frequency of labor strife in the Bay Area Rapid Transit district has led him to look at the issue. The former Contra Costa County supervisor says that in the 22 years he’s been in elected office, workers have walked off the job or come close four times.”

Now when will minority lawmakers wake up?

The fact that affluent white Democratic lawmakers are beginning to internalize that union power isn’t always benign raises hope that California will finally have the much bigger political catharsis that it deserves: the eruption over the fact that the teachers unions which run Sacramento don’t care about struggling Latino and African-American students who make up a majority of kids at public schools.

I wrote about this last year for City Journal:

“[The California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers] enforce a Sacramento status quo that holds minorities in contempt and elevates teachers’ and unions’ interests above all others.

“Consider the modus operandi of nearly every California school district. Where are the best teachers most needed? In struggling schools with impoverished, mostly black and Latino students. But thanks to union power, where are those teachers concentrated? In affluent, safe schools. The struggling schools wind up with newly hired teachers and, often, bad or troubled teachers who couldn’t make the grade at better schools but who, thanks to union rules, can’t be fired. The problem is even worse than it appears, because revenue-deprived school districts often lay off the most junior teachers to ease budget woes. Some schools lose most of their teaching corps, destroying any continuity or momentum a school in a poor neighborhood may have managed to build. In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the practice led to a successful ACLU lawsuit to end the ‘last hired, first fired’ policy in poor neighborhoods.”

Speaker Perez: Is this really ‘social justice’?

Attention, John Perez: When are you going to stop siding with the CTA and the CFT over the kids in your district?

Gloria Romero — like Perez, a Los Angeles Democrat — is right: The California public schools system’s practice of giving more weight to the interests of adult employees than of students deserves to be seen as a civil-rights issue, not a political scrap. If the BART dust-up makes even a few more elected Democrats think about this bigger picture, it will be for the good of nearly all Californians. The K-12 status quo has got to go.

So all you can do is groan when Dennis Cuff of the Contra-Costa Times reports on an insanely generous and pointless BART employee perk and calls it “little-known.” Why is it little-known? Because there is such consistently horrible coverage of how government bodies work.

“In a little-known perk at a transit system struggling to control the cost of benefits, BART gives its employees and their families free travel passes on its system — even after they retire.

“Although other Bay Area transit agencies offer their own free-ride programs, BART’s is among the most generous. It provides the same lifetime travel benefit to board members and their families, the only one of seven surveyed Bay Area transit operators to do so.

“The cost? All together, BART forgoes more than $2.1 million a year for the free rides — $741,000 of it for families.

“At a time when labor-management strife may lead to a second strike this summer, some critics say the extensive free travel policy is part of a tradition of overly generous benefits at BART.

“‘It sends a wrong signal that in a time when fares continue to go up there are people who have never worked for BART who ride for free,’ said Fred Wright Lopez, a Lafayette attorney and unsuccessful BART candidate last fall. ‘It’s an insult to BART’s riders.’“

Bosses benefit from lavish treatment of rank-and-file

This cavalier giveaway reflects another central truth about BART, many big transit agencies and scores of water districts around California — especially the gigantic Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The bosses don’t care if the rank-and-file get absurd salaries and benefits — because they’re getting even more absurd salaries and the same or better benefits. Who looks out for taxpayers inside BART? Nobody.

Which brings us back to how fundamentally horrible coverage of government is in California. I’ve lived here since 1990 and been a voracious consumer of newspapers the whole time. I have read thousands and thousands of stories about budget decisions at water agencies and other special districts, literally millions and millions of words.

Yet far less than 1 percent of these stories noted that the upper management has a substantial personal windfall to expect if it goes along with raises for rank-and-file workers. In most of these special districts, the board of directors is completely dependent on the staff for information and institutional history.

Instead of a sharp MBA type diagnosing this fundamental disincentive to control spending and district leaders adopting obvious reforms, we have a Senior Staff Analyst III testifying that automatic step raises on top of regular raises are the norm, and always have been, and the special district’s general manager nodding in agreement.

Fix is in from the top-down

There’s no need for a public employee union fix. The fix is in from the top-down.

Isn’t this important? Of course. But how often have you seen this explained? Just about never.

Thanks, state press corps. Thanks so very much.

By Chris Reed

We’ve been talking seriously in California since the middle of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s second term as governor about the need to rein in insanely costly public employee benefits, and not just pensions. This has led to progress in cities like San Diego and San Jose and to modest reforms for almost all public employees approved by Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2012.

But every now and then, a labor fight comes along to remind you of just how ridiculous the situation has gotten and remains in much of California. We’re in the middle of one right now with the strike of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System. The San Jose Mercury-News offers the key details:

“BART employees — including management and nonunion workers — earn an average of about $83,000 annually in gross pay, contribute nothing toward their retirement and $92 monthly to health insurance. Their pay and total compensation are both the highest in the Bay Area among transit agencies.

“BART has offered an 8 percent pay hike over four years and wants workers to pay more toward their medical and pension benefits. The local Service Employees International Union and Amalgamated Transit Union, which represent more than 2,300 train operators, maintenance employees and other blue-collar workers, are looking for a 23 percent pay bump and are willing to contribute more toward benefits, just not as much as management wants.”

All this with a transit system that already is heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

Given that these workers “contribute nothing toward their retirement and $92 monthly to health insurance,” their total annual compensation has to be worth upward of $130,000 a year. (Take a look at all BART pension options here; 60 percent of final pay is just the start for a veteran BART worker who retires.)

Boy, with that extremely generous pay, BART must be a well-managed jewel of a public transit system.

Well, no.

Highest-paid 2012 employee? She didn’t work a day

“With a gross salary of more than $333,000, BART’s highest-paid employee last year wasn’t its general manager, police chief or a worker who racked up gobs of overtime scrubbing grime from filthy train seats.

“It was someone who did no work at all for BART in 2012: Dorothy Dugger, the agency’s former general manager who resigned under pressure more than two years ago.

“Under a lucrative retirement scheme, Dugger, 57, quietly stayed on the books, burning off nearly 80 weeks of unused vacation time, drawing paychecks and full benefits for more than 19 months after she agreed to quit in May 2011, according to an analysis by this newspaper. By remaining on BART’s payroll, she accrued almost two extra months of vacation, while sitting at home drawing a six-figure salary for unused time off.

“The months of extra pay were on top of the $920,000 that BART paid Dugger to leave after the agency’s board botched an effort to fire her by violating public meetings laws.”

That’s also from the Mercury-News.

When governance resembles looting

Wait, the Merc-News has more.

“It turns out that Dugger and other management employees can collect ‘terminal leave benefits.’ When managers are hired, they earn three weeks’ vacation each year, gradually increasing to six weeks after 19 years on the job. They also have 13 holidays. Naturally they don’t use it all, so they’re allowed to save unused vacation and holidays without limits. Many can even add some unused sick leave.

“In San Jose, top management and some unions can accrue time like this for a huge payoff when they retire. BART’s system is even more outrageous. When managers leave, they can use that accrued time to actually stay on the payroll — to continue receiving full salary, incentive pay and health benefits, and to accrue work credit that boosts their subsequent pensions. They even — get this — receive holiday pay and accrue more vacation time that they can use to further extend their time on the payroll.”

The same sort of scam has happened in many other agencies, starting with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The bosses don’t care if the rank-and-file get absurd salaries and benefits — because they’re getting even more absurd salaries and benefits. Who looks out for taxpayers inside BART? Nobody.

How insane. How California.