Hm, some difficult questions for the Baker commision’s T report. Among the fairly explosive allegations were that the T was sitting on billions of unused funds, and that absenteeism was rampant.
Well gosh, are those things actually true?
McGee, for example, wanted to know more about the $2.2 billion in capital funds that the report said the T failed to spend over the last five years. McGee remarked that there’s an image out there of “$2 billion sitting around in a drawer unspent.” According to a report in theGlobe, “no one answered that question clearly.”
via Pushing back on Baker’s T reform – CommonWealth Magazine.
And again from Commonwealth, Steve Koczela pushes back on the absenteeism numbers, leaked to the press devoid of context or methodology for weeks:
The T panel’s report said the average absence rate at the transit agency is 11 to 12 percent, meaning roughly a tenth of the workers fail to show up on any given day. In calculating that percentage, the panel divided the average number of unscheduled days away from work (22.5) by the average number of days T workers actually do show up at work (204). The calculation is puzzling. Absenteeism is normally calculated by dividing the average number of days workers are absent by the total number of work days in a year. The T’s “employee availability reports” list 261 work days in a year, meaning the calculation would be 22.5 divided by 261, or 8.67 percent. One could debate whether holidays and other types of scheduled days off should be removed from the 261 work day total, but it is clear that removing the unscheduled days off from the work day total is misleading and inflates the absenteeism rate.
… The T panel’s approach makes impossible any comparison to absenteeism figures outside of the MBTA. The T panel report compared the 11-12 percent MBTA absenteeism rate to rates of 5-6 percent at unspecified peer agencies and 3 percent for the transportation industry as a whole. Neither comparison is accurate.
Look, I’m 100% for reform as necessary. What I can’t get with is crappy methodology leading to a politically corrosive media strategy — seemingly intended to foist undeserved blame on employees of a major public asset.
The Baker administration is not playing it straight. That’s a damn shame.
goldsteingonewild says
1. i was curious about that too. i just googled “absentee rate calculation.”
my reading is that the first 5 hits seem to take a middle ground. it’s the one that mr. kozela refers to as “One could debate whether holidays and other types of scheduled days off should be removed from the 261 work day total.”
i’m not sure why the reporter would not have chosen this method. presumably he got the same hits too. that yields 22.5/(261-34.5) = 10% absenteeism.
2. charley, anyway, what’s your big picture take?
let’s stipulate the 10% number or the 8.6% number or whatever.
to what extent does that fit into your vision of “reform as necessary?”
merrimackguy says
Including the linked article on the hearing, which just sucks in a few quotes and even has a paragraph on what the Herald thinks (?).
I think everyone here as raised questions about that absenteeism calculation. The use of sick time and FMLA time before and after a holiday seems to have some validity, as the head of the Carmen’s Union acknowledged
On the $2.2 billion governmental accounting is not as straightforward as regular accounting (where it’s easy to see “we have this, we owe this, etc), so I can see why people are confused so far.
More to report obviously.
Trickle up says
because, apparently, some people want people to be confused.
SomervilleTom says
This isn’t innocent “confusion”, it’s self-serving lies. The absenteeism calculation is particularly egregious.
SomervilleTom says
I think it’s time for Bob DeLeo or perhaps even Maura Healey to have some hearings about this
pack of liesreport.The board has been replaced. Another round of “reform” has been promised. This bears all the hallmarks of just another round of Beacon Hill Bullshit.
Have they no shame?
Mark L. Bail says
DeLeo sucks.
Maura Healey should stick to crime. She doesn’t need to get involved in investigating regular politics, there isn’t enough time in the day.
farnkoff says
Doesn’t even sound all that high to me, if you count vacation, jury duty, small necessities, etc. Kids sick? Somebody has to call in, right?
What’s the private sector “absentee rate” anyway?
thebaker says
And yes if 1 person was out every single day we would have major problems. 10% 8% 6% … can’t have it. At least where I work.
Mark L. Bail says
16 is less than one employee.
thebaker says
N/T
petr says
…A high rate of absentee-ism is merely a symptom of bad management: either the hiring process fails to screen for potential bad actors or the absence of a hiring policy (patronage?) biases toward the acquisition of bad actors; or management is insufficiently able to alter behavior. Either way, it’s a problem of management and not of the individual employees.
The real problem with absentee-ism, especially in a job that has specific requirements for presence, is overtime. An absent employee means overtime pay for another employee. Comparisons to the private sector fail here: generally when a private sector employee is out one day or two days, the rest of us pick up the slack. However, one person can’t drive two busses simultaneously and with respect to the commuter rail there are requirements of X conductors per Y train cars (with a minimum of 2 per entire train, I believe — but am not certain).
nopolitician says
The reporter didn’t go quite far enough. Although he was absolutely correct to remove vacation days, training days (!), and holidays from the “absent” column, he should have dug deeper to find the people who are out long-term.
He refers to the first group as “scheduled” absences, but he then jumps to the conclusion that the other group is “unscheduled” when that group may include someone who is out on long-term sick leave because they are being treated for cancer, or even some kind of maternity leave. Although something like that isn’t an absence that is sanctioned like a training class, it is something that would be known in advance and could be scheduled around.
The main point of the article, however, is that it was a deliberate strategy of the Baker administration to paint things in the worst possible light, even via manipulation of data, so that he could then have carte blanche to do what he wants (which seems to be union-busting and privatization).
petr says
… with the report is that is merely a collection of (horribly written) powerpoint slides. It’s not — at all — a well written report. It’s more like a collection of soiled handkerchiefs, the merest understanding of the color red and thermometer readings that purports to both diagnose a cold and map out a cure. I’m tempted to blame the short amount of time for the study and the generation of the report for the sheer awfulness of the report, but I’ll resist because it’s really just a matter of mastery of the English language missing and, no matter the length of time given to generate the report, it’s clear that those people who wrote this ‘report’ don’t have that mastery.
For example, the report does not say that “the T was sitting on billions of unused funds,” though Charley (and others) can be forgiven for reading it that way as the report doesn’t actually say anything definitive. One has to read carefully to realize that report says that the T planned in the capital budget to spend X but only spent Y on capital expenditures.. It says that some non-specific amount of the X – Y was diverted to the operations budget and some other amount was spent on salaries, which is not usually a component of capital budgeting. There is nothing to indicate that these funds make up the entirety of the shortfall, other than the recommendation the salaries be moved to the operating budget and a firewall be erected between the capital budget and the operating budget. If the money shifted to operations plus the salaries doesn’t equal the difference in X and Y, then there is a pile of unexplained cash somewhere.
Rather than paint this as a failure of budgeting for operations, which is what it is, and pointing out that the T operating budget has been woefully inadequate for pretty much the last few decades, the writers of the report chose to see this as “Chronic Capital Underinvestment” which doesn’t even describe accurately what they are attempting to understand. “Chronic Capital Underinvestment” is a capital budget that is too small. What we have here, apparently, is chronic poaching from the capital budget to prop up the operating budget…
nopolitician says
I think that this wasn’t just a sloppy report. I think that they wrote the report in such a way to lead a lazy press to report it the way they wanted it reported, that the MBTA is a horrible cesspool of slackers, mismanagers who can’t even figure out how to spend the money they have.
Look at the article that was published following the report:
It turned the debate away from “there isn’t enough money” to “you’re just mismanaging what you have”. Mission accomplished, I guess.
Al says
it makes you wonder how much is due to errors and how much is due to ideology trying to portray a different picture. In either case, it’s unacceptable.
Christopher says
…it’s still not their fault that the system can’t handle a New England winter.