Even in California, the buck stops occasionally.
The final outcome is not yet clear, but even a four-day strike against BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, the rail system that serves San Francisco and the surrounding area) in July and the threat of a longer one haven’t won transit-union workers in the Bay Area the concessions they want.
According to BART, the workers, who are represented by Service Employees International Union Local 1021 and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, are demanding a 15 percent raise over the next three years.
Make no mistake: We’re not in Oliver Twist territory here. According to BART, the employees — who do blue-collar work such as manning the stations and operating the trains — make an average of $71,000 a year plus $11,000 in overtime. The median household income — household, mind you — in San Francisco County is $73,000. BART employees may not have the lifestyle of Mark Zuckerberg, but they are not anywhere close to poverty.
BART has already made some concessions, including allowing employees to continue paying a mere $92 a month for their health insurance, even if they have dependents. (They will have to pay higher premiums, however, if they choose one of the more expansive plans.) Originally, BART wanted to offer a 4 percent raise over the next four years; now it is proposing a 9 percent raise over the next four years.
Another sticking point is BART’s insistence that employees start contributing to their own pensions. And these pensions are much more generous than the ones many California workers receive. According to CalWatchDog, a site operated by the Pacific Research Institute, a conservative think tank, “60 percent of final pay is just the start for a veteran BART worker who retires.” Asking the workers to make a 5 percent contribution to the pension fund, as BART has done, is hardly the work of a Scrooge.
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