Rewarding Failure

"I think," said Brown, "that people are going to have to accept that service has improved, and they ought to acknowledge it and admit it."

Public records contradict the mayor's contention. Since Brown assumed office, several recent audits say, on-time buses and trains have remained relative rarities, and Muni's fleet has spent more time in the shop than ever.

In that same interview, Mayor Brown claimed to have made major improvements in Muni's absenteeism problem. "We've knocked out this business of you being able not to show up to work if you chose to do so 15 or 16 times. That's all gone, that's all gone."

Whether Brown knows it or not, however, all the significant absenteeism provisions of the drivers' collecting bargaining agreement with Muni remain in effect. Those provisions allow the rampant absenteeism that is the primary reason Muni runs late, or not at all. That is definitely not all gone.

Under the current agreement between Muni and the transport workers union, drivers are allowed 10 unscheduled absences, or "miss-outs," a year. That is, for the equivalent of two full work weeks, drivers can show up late, or skip work completely, without notifying their employer ahead of time -- and suffer no permanent consequences.

Each of the drivers also receives 13 days of sick leave a year, plus 12 paid holidays and up to four weeks' vacation. Meanwhile, huge numbers of Muni workers are, at any given time, on disability leave.

And, last but not least, about 650 Muni drivers -- almost 30 percent of the operator force -- are guaranteed weekends off.

The all-but-inevitable result of Muni's one-sided union agreements is clear. That result is daily chaos.

On any given day, 33 percent of the workers employed by Muni are not at work. One-quarter of those scheduled to drive or repair Muni's trains and buses are absent -- and one out of three of these absences is "unscheduled." Drivers and mechanics rotate out on workers' compensation, or suddenly call in sick, or take a vacation day on a whim, or simply do not bother to call in or show up.

It is an astonishing fact that because of driver and mechanic no-shows, more than 4 percent of all trains and buses never pull out of the storage yard on any given day. In other words, on a good Muni day, 60 runs just never happen. (A run is all the daily trips on one route; there are 1,401 runs per day.) On a bad day, another 60 runs might bite the dust. Every run that doesn't happen makes riders wait and wait.

And then there are the bus and streetcar runs that do start -- but late. Because of absenteeism, every day an estimated 600 runs start, or end up, late, by a few minutes or many hours. Government statistics say that, last year, 45 percent of all Muni trips were not on-time. Other records suggest that Muni's on-time performance has not improved substantially since.

In a recent interview, Muni General Manager Emilio Cruz remarked that the most recent Muni attendance and on-time-performance statistics "should be updated, because we are hiring more drivers." (Those statistics, included in a report released this summer, relate to a time period ending in June of 1997.) To combat absenteeism, Cruz said his new budget includes funding for "one or two inspectors to go undercover and conduct surveillance on workers out on disability to make sure that they really can't work."

Any increase in attention to Muni absenteeism would seem to be warranted. But most of Muni's absenteeism problem is caused by a collective bargaining agreement not scheduled for change until the year 2000.

And Muni's otherworldly union agreements do something besides allow high levels of absenteeism that cause bad service. They also generate about $25 million a year in overtime -- or 40 percent of the city's entire overtime budget -- that is paid to union members who fill in, at time-and-a-half or better wages, for co-workers out sick, on vacation, on disability leave, or simply taking a miss-out.

Deep in the bowels of Muni's Presidio Avenue headquarters is a squalid little room labeled "Muni Planning." Stuffed into a darkened corner of the room is the Muni Library. Eighty years of consulting reports -- hundreds of them -- are stacked helter-skelter on the floor, uncataloged, gathering dust.

According to a book co-authored by Muni's manager of service planning, Peter Straus, and three others, public disgust with Muni is hardly new. The book, The People's Railway, recounts numerous post-World War II studies showing that buses and trains failed to run on schedule; that vehicles arrived in bunches or not at all; that drivers were often accused of being nasty; and that the driver work force was "shy several hundred operators."

The volcanic public hatred for Muni that erupted in the early 1970s resulted not in an improved Muni, but in a "Transit First" policy promoted by Chamber of Commerce types and a Board of Supervisors eager to look like they were doing something about Muni. That city planning policy, which puts mass transit before cars as a planning priority, has done almost nothing to fix Muni's central problems.