SAN FRANCISCO — A strike by employees of the San Francisco Bay Area’s main commuter railroad was averted at the last minute early Monday after Gov. Jerry Brown intervened in the stalled negotiations, guaranteeing service for seven days. But the negotiations, described by experts as unusually acrimonious, seemed likely to remain focused on two familiar issues: pensions and health benefits.þþThe two unions representing the 2,400 employees of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, known as BART, are fighting to preserve their members’ comparatively generous public pensions and health coverage.þþBART’s management, leveraging the role played by public pensions in the fiscal calamities afflicting bankrupt cities like Detroit, Stockton, Calif., and Vallejo, Calif., are pushing workers to shoulder a bigger share.þþManagement’s argument over benefits has resonated even here in the Bay Area, a region traditionally supportive of labor. Tellingly, few politicians, even those with close ties to labor, have come out in public support of the two unions in recent weeks.þþBoth sides have adopted hard lines on these two issues, even as some progress was being made on other sensitive topics, like wages.þþ“We often talk about the third rail of negotiations — that’s appropriate, particularly for BART,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “But there’s a fourth and fifth rail, and that’s pensions and health care.”þþThe two unions, whose members include train operators, station agents, maintenance workers and others, staged a four-day strike in early July after their four-year contract expired. Under pressure from state mediators and with negotiations deadlocked, the management and the two unions, the Service Employees International Union and the Amalgamated Transit Union, agreed to a 30-day cooling-off period that restored service. That extension ended Sunday night.þþLittle progress in the negotiations was made in recent weeks, and both sides remained so far apart on key issues that union officials issued a three-day notice of a possible strike on Thursday. Commuters had been bracing for another stoppage at BART, which is used by 400,000 riders a day, when Mr. Brown intervened at the request of the railroad’s management under a state law that allows him to step in — but only once — if a strike would cause significant disruption to public transportation or endanger public health.þþEvan Westrup, the governor’s spokesman, said in an e-mail, “We wanted to exhaust all other options before pursuing this course of action.”þþArguing that the benefits of BART workers are more generous than those of other public workers in the Bay Area, management officials have pressed workers to start making contributions to their state pension plans and to increase their health insurance payments from the current level of $92 a month.þþIn the past, most people felt that they would benefit from labor’s victories, but that is no longer the case, Professor Shaiken of Berkeley said.þþ“The unions say if they lose, the public will have to accept greater concessions, but that’s not what is instinctively resonating right now,” he said. “If BART workers pay less for pensions than other workers, the attitude of many commuters is, ‘Wait a minute — why should they have it?’ It’s a central challenge for unions that goes beyond Vallejo, Stockton and Detroit.”þþUnion officials have argued that members deserve higher wages and have rebuffed efforts to reduce benefits because they accepted a wage freeze and other concessions in contract negotiations during the economic crisis in 2009.þþ“They’re saying that because everybody’s jumping off the pier, we should, too,” Antonette Bryant, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, said of the management’s demands on pensions. “There should be some substance to their reasoning.”þþJosie Mooney, a negotiator for the Service Employees International Union, said that the union’s internal surveys, which have not been made public, show popular support for the unions’ position on pensions and health coverage.þþ“We’re not going to be in a race to the bottom,” Ms. Mooney said. “We believe everybody in this country deserves to have access to quality health care and deserves to retire with dignity.”þþAccording to BART, train operators and station agents on average earn more than $70,000 a year in salary and overtime. BART has said that it needs to redirect revenue to upgrade the 40-year-old system, whose ridership is expected to grow to 750,000 to 2030.þþThe last time a governor took similar action was in 2001, when Gov. Gray Davis intervened to head off a potential BART strike.þþ“This action is not unusual, said William B. Gould IV, an emeritus professor of law and a labor expert at Stanford University. “The statute provides for this mechanism, and the governor quite rightly saw this as a threat to the health and safety of the Bay Area.”þþBut Mr. Gould said that the impact of the panel that will now investigate the negotiations could be limited, because it cannot issue recommendations.þþIf an agreement is not reached within seven days, Mr. Brown will decide on management’s request for a 60-day cooling-off period, during which negotiations and train service would continue.
Source: NY Times
