Members of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 998 held a no confidence vote Monday and Tuesday on Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele’s leadership. According to the preliminary results collected as the Shepherd goes to press, 545 members cast no confidence votes with only six members supporting him, according to the union, showing near-unanimous opposition to the county executive. The final results will be announced at a Thursday rally.
The transit workers’ union, which represents about 900 drivers and mechanics, still hasn’t resolved its contract dispute with Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS), although a federal mediator is attempting to craft a solution. MCTS is scheduled to provide a written proposal to ATU on Friday, Sept. 25.
MCTS is now fully run by Milwaukee County, although Abele had tried to privatize it by offering a management contract to Texas-based MV Transportation in 2013 and scuttling the county’s longtime contract with nonprofit Milwaukee Transport Services (MTS). After a county panel found in early 2014 that the Abele administration’s bidding process was flawed, MV lost its proposed contract. As part of the 2014 budget, supervisors voted to take management of MTS fully in-house by 2015.
That’s been a rocky transition. ATU’s members held a three-day work stoppage in July to put pressure on the county to agree to a fair contract, the first transit strike in decades.
ATU President James Macon said his members wanted a four-year contract, not a two-year deal, as MCTS has offered.
“I don’t want to come back a year and a half or two years from now and argue about the same situation,” Macon told the Shepherd. “Get it done and move on.”
Asked if union members would hold another strike if a deal doesn’t get done, Macon said, “I’m not going to say no. We’ve got a lot of issues out there that we’ve been trying to address.”
Part-Timers a Sticking Point
In addition to the length of the contract, Macon said some of the biggest sticking points involve the use of part-time employees, cost-of-living increases and insurance premiums. According to its June offer, MCTS wants to hire more part-time employees, up to 15% of its workforce; keep a 2% cap on cost of living increases; and raise employees’ insurance premiums from $95 monthly to $120 a month in 2017 for an individual and $246 monthly to $313 monthly for a family in 2017. In August MCTS offered a two-year contract extension and on Sept. 3 the two sides met with a federal mediator but nothing was resolved.
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Macon charged that Abele is getting his game plan from a consultant’s report on how to insource the system, which Macon says is really setting the system up to be privatized.
Last April, the county’s Transportation Secretary Brian Dranzik hired Chicago-based Huron Consulting Group to study the system. Huron was launched in 2002 by former Arthur Andersen partners and employees. Arthur Andersen was found guilty of obstructing justice in the case against Enron, but in 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision.
According to Huron’s proposal, its team leader on the MCTS project was former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who the Wall Street Journal called “a pioneering privatizer of city services.”
The Huron Group’s report from November 2014 looks at typical ways to make MCTS more efficient, from operations to scheduling buses to improving inventory management. But at least one recommendation showed up in MCTS’ contract negotiations with ATU. Huron suggested increasing the percentage of part-time employees to up to 7% of MCTS’ workforce, or 64 employees. But MCTS’ June offer raised that to 15% of the workforce and later reduced it to 10%. Both of Abele’s part-time plans exceeded Huron’s recommendations.
MCTS spokesman Brendan Conway denied that MCTS is using the Huron report as a roadmap for negotiations.
“The main driving guidance is the goal of continuing to provide service to the tens of thousands of people a day who rely on MCTS to get to work, school and the doctors,” Conway emailed. “The best way to do that is to have a sustainable system that doesn’t raise fares or cut routes.”
