What’s up with the Globe and the unions, anyway? They’re really unhappy that Governor named well-known union organizer Janice Loux to the new MassDOT board. I don’t actually know that much about Loux, so I’m not taking a position on whether she should or should not have been named.
But this line of reasoning is really weird:
Loux’s union connection is also a problem. While one seat on the MBTA board was reserved for organized labor, the law creating the MassDOT board makes no such provision. The omission was deliberate. The state officials who created the agency believed it should be managed for the benefit of the public – not its employees, whose interests are protected through collective-bargaining. A key challenge for the new board will be to bring health and pension benefits for some transportation workers in line with similar public- and private-sector jobs. Although Loux’s supporters insist she won’t be an automatic vote for unions, Patrick easily could have quelled such doubts by choosing someone else.
Whoa. Did it occur to the Globe that having a union organizer on the board might be useful because a lot of working folks ride the T? The assumption that she’s on there just to represent the interests of unionized T employees seems very strange, and entirely unjustified, to me. The rest of the new board consists of a guy who runs an insurance agency, an engineer, a management consultant, and a business lawyer. Seems to me that it might actually be useful to have, in addition to those four no doubt very highly-qualified individuals, someone who has spent her working life with people who aren’t rich and who depend on the T for their livelihoods.
This is not the only really peculiar Globe editorial lately. Who’s running the show there, now that Renee Loth is gone?
Apparently former DC bureau chief Peter Canellos took over for Loth at the Globe’s editorial page.
I don’t know anything about the guy.
because apparently you didn’t try to read his inside-the-beltway-scorekeeping-as-policy-pronouncement stories in the Globe when he was Washington Bureau Chief.
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p>Lighter weight you could not find.
For an example of Canellos’s total focused earnest cluelessness, look no further than today’s unsigned editorial about how Obama failed to do…something.
When they run down people who work for a living and belong to a union. When the millionaire heir Sulzberger who owns the Globe threatened to shut it down, many, many middle-class union members sympathized with the people who worked at the Globe. But I also recall reading lots of editorials in the Globe that looked down their noses at teachers and cops and transit workers who have unions to maintain middle-class wages.
A big wha … ?
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p>So, the problem is that she’s worked for a union that has absolutely nothing to do with the MBTA?
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p>That’s as dumb as anything I’ve ever seen on the Globe op-ed pages, and that includes Jeff Jacoby. Yowch.
Union people can’t be involved in management. They’re only interest is destroying the company. Didn’t you know that?!?!
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p>Better the DOT should be yet another incestuous circle jerk like they’ve got at every company on Wall Street. ‘Cuz those are all run on the up and up!
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p>You can’t even put someone who’s been a labor lawyer on the National Labor Relations Board without dire warnings about the severe potential consequences of such a move.
There’s nothing bizarre about this editorial. In fact it’s entirely sensible. You just happen to disagree with it.
The Globe simply overlooked an obvious reason why someone like Loux should be appointed to the MassDOT board. Instead, they assumed that she’s there to do the Carmen’s Union bidding, even though she has no connection to the Carmen’s Union. At best, it’s sloppy and narrow-minded.
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p>Not so. It is entirely bizarre, not least because the Globe makes claim that Loux represents “the same old way of doing business” without making mention of the other MBTA, Mass Highway and MTA holdovers… They further make pointed mention of Louxs’ noted animus to Dan Grabauskas, without similarly making mention of the release of todays MBTA review, which makes such animus look rather justified. They then latch on to a rather tenuous “union connection” without ever saying what’s problematic about it.
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p>Yes. By definition, the sensible is in constant disagreement with the bizarre.
It’s often noted here that there’s a structural difference in collective bargaining between the public and private sectors. In essence, public sector “management” has no incentive to act like management (in the private sector sense of the term) because 1) they have no personal pecuinary incentive to save the organization money and 2) the employees can exercise political power over the elected officials who supervise “management.” That’s not to say that there’s not bargaining in the public sector (or that there’s not some corporatism / less-than-arms-length bargaining in the private sector); but it’s pretty much undeniable that the bargaining dynamic is different for the management side.
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p>It’s clear from the D’Alessandro report (and, before that, the Transportation Finance Commission reports; and, before that…….) that excessive labor costs constitute a pretty sizable chunk of the structural deficit facing the T. The T is not going to be able to close the gap just by making cuts, but everyone knows there’s a fair amount of low-hanging fruit still out there. So yeah, I think it’s legitimate to question whether Loux — both with her background in organized labor AND as a MBTA board member who has approved some pretty indefensive labor contracts — was a good choice for the appoinment. Will she really bring the perspective of “management acting like management” to this job?
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p>I am pretty dissappointed all around with the board. It’s a lot of retreads, not just Loux.
is a fair one — three of the five board members (including Loux) are former members of either the T or the Turnpike board. So it’s certainly reasonable to ask whether a board controlled by folks who by definition are tied to the old ways is going to bring the sweeping change that is desperately needed in our transportation system.
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p>Which only strengthens my point that the Globe’s single-minded focus on Loux is bizarre and indefensible.
The Carmen are proven to be intransigent assholes about reforming even the most absurd labor practices. You can say it’s their job to protect their members interests. Fine. But I want someone sitting across from them who is a tough bastard of equal measure. Someone dedicated to getting rid of featherbedding, rigid and outdated job classifications, a culture of overtime, etc. Maybe Loux is that person; I don’t know her. But I do know that she was a member of the old board who approved this crap for years. And I think it’s fair to say her background in organized labor could be another data point that she might not take on the job of battling the Carmen with the requisite gusto.
In case it’s not clear from my post, I’m not saying that labor unions are the problem. I’m saying that this labor union is the problem.
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p>And it’s not just Loux that I have an issue with. 3/5 members are board retreads. The fourth, Liz Levin, has a background in consulting. If the Carmen are the #1 problem at the MBTA, all the consultants feeding at the trough is #2. Again, I dont know her. Maybe she can’t wait to cut off all these contracts with her friends. But I’m skeptical, for the same reason I’m skeptical about Loux.
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p>The only board member I’m excited about is Whittle. He is a structural engineer, which will be good for all the infrastructure investments we need to make. But we don’t have a systems engineer. And we still dont have anyone who I would see as a rider / taxpayer advocate type. Do any of these people even ride the T everyday? I think that should be a prerequsite.
Converting the orange line would save… $3.3M a year. The red? The article doesn’t say, but let’s guess that it’s about the same. The green? Sure, the savings would be huge, but how are you going to collect fares in the second car? What about the fact that most green line stations are above ground, with narrow platforms, and often on turns? Then there’s the green E Line, which runs on the road and has even more dangerous stops.
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p>So go ahead, can the second operator on orange and red, and save $6.5M a year. That’s not so bad. Debt service is on the order of $360M though, and needs to be cut roughly in half to make the MBTA sustainable. So, in looking for $180M a year in savings, we just found $6.5M.
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p>While we’re at it, let’s go ahead and reform the pension plans so that Carmen have to put in a few (!?) more years before their pension bennies kick in.
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p>You’re still nowhere near close. I agree that the fruit is low-hanging, but it’s also not anywhere near “a fair amount,” relative to the debt services which are in fact destroying the MBTA budget… and a big chunk of which are courtesy not of MBTA management decisions, but decisions of the Big Dig, the Lege, the courts, and a number of other agencies, departments, divisions, and government bodies.
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Convert the orange to one MBTA employee per set like the blue line instead of the current two used on orange, red, and green.
One approach would be to use an honor system with random checks by undercover officers and harsh penalties for cheating. That’s how it works in many European cities. However, I am not sure Bostonians are law abiding enough to go for that. đŸ˜‰
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She and her predecessor as Hotel Workers President were originally brought on board by Weld (the union endorsed Weld in 1990), and kept on through Cellucci, Swift and Romney.
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p>Her position notwithstanding, it doesn’t necessarily follow that Loux is an ally of the Carmen’s Union.