Rewarding Failure

In mass transit, beauty is being on-time, and being on-time is beauty. And that is all you need to know to understand why San Franciscans hate the Municipal Railway. Hating Muni has become a chronic condition in San Francisco because Muni is chronically late.

Every few years, something really bad happens, Muni-wise, and the chronic Muni disease becomes a full-blown Muni crisis. This summer it was the Muni Metro meltdown, when subway service under Market Street went to gridlock, and riders forced rail car doors open in midtunnel to flee. And when the riders start rebelling in such dramatic fashion, public officials start concocting fantastic reasons for Muni's ineptitude. Often, these explanations -- right now, they center on old streetcars and new computer software -- contain some truth, but they usually dance around the transit agency's core problems. The solutions that are offered by Muni and its supporters always come down to two: more money and more drivers.

Yet, there is a relatively simple reason why Muni doesn't operate according to its published schedules, and it has relatively little to do with funding: The trains and buses do not run on time in San Francisco because failure to perform is designed into the Muni system.

On a day-to-day basis, Muni's inability to deliver on-time service is largely the result of the great political power wielded by San Francisco's union-dominated transit work force. Because of their effectiveness and ubiquity on the local political front, Muni's unions have been able to negotiate agreements for drivers, mechanics, and other workers that are out-and-out blueprints for bad service.

For example, the union agreement with the Muni drivers union, Transport Workers Union Local 250A, guarantees that Muni will employ the second-highest-paid drivers in the country -- even though the drivers have, according to federal authorities, one of the country's lowest worker productivity ratings. And the Local 250A agreement allows drivers to refuse to drive routes not normally assigned to them -- no matter how necessary management feels a change might be to service.

But the agreement's provisions on attendance are the disease-ridden heart of Muni's systemic failure. Because of those provisions, roughly one-third of Muni's drivers, mechanics, and other workers don't show up on any given weekday. This astonishing number of no-shows causes chaos, late buses and streetcars, and, paradoxically, huge amounts of overtime pay for union workers.

The awful truth, according to a long stream of authoritative government audits, is that Muni drivers and mechanics not only deliver bad service; they profit from it.

The recurring horror of Muni is not the result of a grand conspiracy. It has been caused by decades of politics as usual that have produced completely politicized management that is all but indistinguishable in attitude from the work force it supposedly manages. The incremental nature of the Muni disaster is illustrated by the agency's internal belief system. According to the general Muni wisdom, the agency's problems are the natural order of the universe, immune to anything but glacial change.

Some of Muni's problems are indeed structural, and could well require years to address.

In alignment with its four modes of public transit -- diesel bus, electric trolley bus, light rail streetcar, and cable car -- Muni has divided itself into four separate fiefdoms. Muni administrators do not create regular reports on operations, and Muni has no internal method of assessing the overall performance of its system -- or placing blame when timetables are not met.

Also, during the recession of the early 1990s, Muni chose to economize by laying off middle managers, instead of line workers. The first to go were a few score of transit inspectors. These were the folks who randomly visited bus stops, schedule in hand, clocking the drivers. Without the inspectors, Muni has not been able even to pretend to keep accurate records on, or to hold drivers responsible for, individual performance.

And clearly, by any measure, Muni management has done a terrible job of purchasing and installing long-term capital improvements, most notably those meant to improve the agency's abysmal streetcar service. (Muni's long-term management problems will be addressed in the second segment of this series.)

As he heads into serious re-election campaigning, Mayor Willie Brown is addressing his Muni problem by focusing on its long-term dimensions -- and striking injured poses. While claiming he is being unfairly blamed for intractable, decades-long difficulties, the mayor also loudly complains that San Francisco news organizations are not giving him credit for the improvements he and his Muni general manager, Emilio Cruz, have wrought at the troubled agency.

Brown is correct when he says that Muni has been badly run for many years, and justified in saying some improvements -- such as a dramatic reduction in the backlog of Muni accident complaints awaiting adjudication -- have been made.

But the most important of the mayor's recent statements about Muni appear to be simply incorrect. In a recently televised interview, Brown was asked whether voters would see an improvement in Muni service between now and the November 1999 mayoral election.

"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.

For decades, as reflected in the Muni Library, Muni consultants, civil grand juries, and platoons of private and government auditors have reported -- time and time again -- that the heart of Muni's problem is absenteeism. The problem is -- demonstrably -- systemic, and it has been going on for so long nobody can remember when it started. To reverse an ancient saying: Muni management is in bed with labor.

Muni responded to August's Muni Metro meltdown by blaming the creakiness of the system's older Boeing cars and software glitches in the new train control system. By implication, Muni's failures could be blamed on technology and lack of staff, and fixed by enough money to repair or replace technology and hire more employees.

But money and employees are hardly in short supply. Funded Muni positions have been growing by 4.5 percent a year over the last few years. The agency's finance and administration staff has grown by more than 200 percent since 1993. And in the last two years, Mayor Willie Brown and the Board of Supervisors have thrown an additional $44 million into the Muni budget. Brown has pushed for, and Muni is in the process of, hiring 400 new drivers.

Yet, Muni service does not improve, and Muni managers go out of their way to hide the fact that union rules constitute a major cause of Muni dysfunction.

For to point at unions would be to point at their political allies. And their allies just happen to control City Hall.

Listening to Mayor Brown or Emilio Cruz, one might almost believe that Muni is grossly underfunded. In his recent State of the City speech, Brown apologized for not fixing Muni in 100 days and blamed lack of money. "Muni is starved," said Brown.

Public budget documents belie any such starvation. But there are reasons why Brown, who has long supported and been supported by organized labor, might focus on money, rather than union contracts, as the primary reason for Muni's continuing failures. For one thing, to focus on Muni's lenient union work rules would almost certainly anger labor leaders, including the political boss of the drivers union, Larry Martin. Martin, who pulls down $107,000 a year as vice president of the Transport Workers Union International, is also a city planning commissioner and longtime associate of Mayor Willie Brown.

Such a focus might also bring to the foreground Brown's role in renegotiating the Transport Workers Union Local 250A contract in 1996. The new agreement left intact almost all the special work rules -- including miss-outs -- that legions of auditors have identified as detrimental to Muni's performance.

Large subsequent budget increases for Muni -- increases meant to supply the "no excuses" budget that, supposedly, was to fund a Muni that works -- went largely to increased worker salaries and overtime. The union, meanwhile, has remained a bedrock supporter of Mayor Brown and his sometimes controversial political agendas, including public funding for privately owned football stadiums. The Local is also a major player in the San Francisco Labor Council, the umbrella union organization whose endorsement can make or break city political campaigns. The council endorsed Brown for re-election recently, more than a year before the election itself.

A mayor willing to address Muni's absenteeism problem would have to be willing to forego union endorsement and campaign support (which might well flow to his next opponent) and be willing to risk a mass transit strike that could all but paralyze the city.

Thus is the paradox of Muni perpetuated. The agency claims to be underfunded, but has plenty of money. And when public hatred of Muni explodes, politicians throw money at the agency, when what's needed is political will.

If Mayor Brown has avoided saying much that would anger Muni's unions, a dozen recent audits are more direct. They say Muni does not need more money, and, in fact, has more drivers than it can gainfully use behind the wheel of a bus or the controls of a streetcar.

In July 1996, city Budget Analyst Harvey Rose released a 200-page audit of Muni. In that document, Rose made nearly a hundred specific recommendations based upon his "limited scope" investigation of Muni operations. Two-and-one-half years later, only a few of those recommendations have been followed. Due to public outrage, Muni has stopped wasting thousands of gallons of diesel fuel -- and polluting the air -- by warming up buses hours early. But Muni has not made any headway toward improving service by requiring its employees to show up for scheduled shifts.

In looking at Muni's operations, Rose's auditors quickly ran head on into an odd fact: After nearly nine decades of operation, Muni management still had not figured out how to find its employees, much less make them work.

Yes, the San Francisco Municipal Railway could not tell the city budget analyst how many employees were on its regular payroll. A nightmare of crisscrossing civil service job classifications confused even Rose, a combat-hardened veteran of bureaucratic doublethink. Rose's dogged accountants persevered and eventually reported that Muni apparently was paying a full-time and part-time driver force of 2,240 to operate the agency's 1,401 daily runs.

Even so, the audit determined, the single most significant cause of Muni's inability to keep to schedules was an incredibly high rate of daily absenteeism that corresponded with and caused excessive overtime payments to drivers and mechanics.

How can Muni not have enough drivers to staff its runs, when it appears to have more than enough -- even too many -- drivers? And how do drivers who miss work add to Muni's astonishing overtime bill?

The answers are as simple as addition. The contract with the transport workers binds Muni to employ 1,780 full-time drivers to cover normal operations and contingencies. The union added 53 "light duty" drivers to this, for a total of 1,833. The contract also covers 220 part-time drivers and 187 drivers out on long-term disability or technically unauthorized to be on the payroll, but still paid. (The city appropriated about $100 million to pay the salaries of these drivers.)

But nearly one-quarter of the 1,401 drivers scheduled each weekday do not show up, for some reason. Combined with the misuse of part-time drivers, this absentee rate causes a driver "shortage" most days -- and, therefore, the need to pay overtime to drivers who will come to work to fill out the runs.

After Muni and Mayor Brown conspicuously ignored the meat of his audit, Rose analyzed the new agreement between the city and transport workers and suggested San Francisco change a long list of union work rules. Specifically, Rose asked that the use of part-time drivers be increased, and that 650 operators no longer be guaranteed the weekend off. (The weekends-off guarantee, Rose says, increases overtime payments to fill weekend shifts.)

Rose also castigated Muni's wasteful practice of assigning drivers to "split shifts." To cover both morning and evening rush hours, most full-time drivers work five hours, have time off work, and then work another five hours. This regime guarantees drivers an hour-and-a-half of overtime pay every shift, because they work more than eight hours (plus a half-hour for lunch) in a day.

On the other hand, part-timers are not allowed, by union rules, to work more than five hours per day. If part-timers were allowed to work more hours on a given day, millions in split-shift overtime would be saved, said Rose. Plus, Muni's typically stressed-out drivers would not be so overworked and tired.

Rose's suggestions were scoffingly rejected by Muni management because they might be "a blow to employee morale."

Muni does, however, have a plan to reduce absenteeism.
"Reduction of conflict through public relations improves the working conditions of all operators and, hence, decreases absenteeism and attrition. ... Operations is setting up a computer-aided sensitivity training facility for operators to experience simulated public relations situations by computer interaction. In addition, Muni also needs the cooperation of the press, public, and City officials to improve the social condition in each bus load of passengers."

In other words, computer simulations, positive media coverage, and better passengers are what is needed to encourage Muni drivers to come to work and do their jobs.

Peter Ehrlich loves mass transit. As a boy, he rode the New York subways for fun; in the 1960s, he went west and ended up in San Francisco as sole proprietor of a music store specializing in woodwinds. He lost the store due to hard economic times in the '70s, but he was able to fulfill a boyhood dream: In 1979, he became a Muni operator.

Today, Ehrlich drives streetcars and thinks that "miss-outs stink." Ehrlich says that many drivers feel rotten when service is bad and believe miss-outs should be reduced or eliminated. Every miss-out means that passengers suffer, says Ehrlich.

Clearly, though, not all Muni employees are so customer-oriented.
Over time, Muni employees and their unions have refined the art of the miss-out. There are, for example, "working" and "non-working" miss-outs. A working miss-out occurs when a driver reports to work some time after he or she was scheduled to begin, but before his or her scheduled 10-hour shift would have expired. This working miss-out driver is assigned to an alternate run, with no questions asked.

A non-working miss-out simply means that the driver does not show up to work at all, and does not bother to call in to inform management that he or she won't be there.

Between sick leave and miss-outs, 120 Muni drivers a day take unscheduled absences. Another 210 drivers enjoy scheduled absences (i.e., vacation). This means that Muni needs about 330 drivers a day to fill out its schedules -- and many of those drivers get paid at overtime rates. The Muni mechanics rack up overtime at an even greater rate. (Even Muni subway station agents are afflicted with a 12 percent unscheduled absentee rate; overall, 27 percent don't show up on any given day.)

In addition to the other forms of absenteeism, an average of 350 Muni drivers, mechanics, and maintenance workers are on long-term disability leave at any time, producing a yearly disability bill of $17 million. (Muni's auditors have been livid about the abuse of workers' compensation and disability pay for years, complaining about an abnormally high reported rate of injury and an abnormal laxity in oversight of those benefits.)

The transport workers contract allows a driver to show up to work before the end of his shift -- without calling in late -- 10 times a year, or four times every five months. The other kind of miss-out -- the no-show and no-call miss-out -- is allowed four times every eight months, or seven times a year. If a driver scores more miss-outs than allowed in a rolling five- or eight-month period, he or she can, technically, be fired. And people are sometimes fired for excessive miss-outs. But Muni does almost nothing else to discourage regular absenteeism by the mechanics, maintenance workers, and drivers who, collectively, compose 90 percent of the work force.

Lax absenteeism standards are by no means a response to low wages. By contract, Muni drivers are guaranteed the second-highest transit driver wage in the country before their millions in overtime are distributed. (Transport union base wages here are set as the average of the two highest driver wage scales in the United States, currently Santa Clara County and Boston, Mass.)

So each Muni driver pulls down an average of $41,000 in straight pay ($50,440 for mechanics) plus $8,000 a year in overtime. Some drivers make $20,000 a year in overtime. Mechanics do even better. Last year, a track maintenance supervisor pulled down $45,000 in overtime, in addition to his $57,000 base salary.

Sick streetcars and buses are tended by about 1,000 Muni mechanics and maintenance workers. A dozen unions work the maintenance yards scattered throughout the city. There are unions for bus-washers, electricians, and mechanics; the attendance practices of these unions tend to follow the lead of the Transport Workers Union. Indeed, the mechanics have an even higher rate of unscheduled absenteeism than the drivers. And the effects on service are plain to see.

Muni equipment has a terrible record of miles traveled between breakdowns. New electric buses, for instance, break down every 444 miles, according to a database maintained by federal transportation authorities. The national average: every 2,000 miles.

When a mechanic doesn't show up for work, a vehicle languishes in disrepair and riders languish in despair. Government audits reveal that San Francisco's mass transit fleet, overall, breaks down twice as often as similar equipment operated by Boston, Seattle, and New York. Muni's new Breda streetcars, specifically, break down four times more often than the national average.

Because so many Muni drivers and mechanics are so regularly missing in action, 45 percent of Muni's daily trips are aborted or late, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, a body responsible for coordinating transportation policy in the Bay Area. This is not to mention such common practices, as reported in Harvey Rose's performance audit, as drivers cutting their runs short in order to leave work early, or calling in breakdowns when there are no breakdowns.

Two weeks ago Muni General Manager Emilio Cruz asked the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a supplemental appropriation that would cover about $10 million in Muni budget overruns. According to Muni's records, those overruns came mostly in the overtime and workers' compensation areas. The sudden deficit was made worse by an unexpected reduction in passenger fare revenue.

There was less revenue, because there were fewer riders. Muni riders are taking about 100 million, or some 33 percent, fewer trips this year than they took in 1984. Yet, the bus schedules have not changed for many years. The same number of runs are scheduled to serve many, many less passengers, who still wait and wait, because 45 percent or so of those runs are late or simply not coming -- ever.

With a tough election coming up, Mayor Brown has the choice of alienating transit unions or the populace with his Muni policies. Asking the voters to "accept that service has improved" would certainly not rile Muni's unions. Whether the public will be in an accepting mood is another question entirely.

If the mayor decides to tackle Muni's absenteeism problem head on, though, he might want to make a trip to the Muni Library. There, buried deep in the stacks, is a file labeled "Labor." Inside the file is a single document. It is a 1982 study on controlling absenteeism. It suggests firing workers who are chronically late.