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Showing posts with label BART. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BART. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

BART strike could have long-term impact on unions

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.sfgate.com

A few days before it all went down the tubes, Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, had this to say on the organization's website:
"Whether BART closes down this week will come down to one issue and one issue only: whether the BART Board of Directors shows leadership or continues to act to hold Bay Area transit riders hostage by using the same playbook a small minority of elected officials in Washington, DC have used to close down our federal government."
BART riders and other denizens of the Bay Area so far haven't seen it that way. Quite the reverse: The unions are the hostage takers - a furious public has said so in overwhelming numbers. The unions are the ones who have closed down BART.
And, like the Republican Party in Washington, the unions appear to have suffered some serious damage. "The danger to labor is if the strike goes on for a while, then the unthinkable begins to be discussed - like banning all mass transit strikes," said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at UC Berkeley.
That discussion has already begun, in letters from California lawmakers to Gov. Jerry Brown, from state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, who said he "looking into legislation that could prevent future strikes," a petition drive by a Democratic Assembly candidate in the East Bay seeking the same, and a piece by editorial page editor John Diazin Sunday's Chronicle supporting a Republican proposal that BART unions be made to honor the no-strike clause in...
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Saturday, October 19, 2013

On Strike: BART train kills 2 workers near San Francisco

Safety is a concern even if a labor dispute leads to a strike. Workers' Compensation covers all work connected events if the arise out of the employment. This post is shared from CNN.org 
An out-of-service Bay Area Rapid Transit train struck and killed two workers on a section of track northeast of San Francisco on Saturday afternoon, the transit authority said. 
The employees were making track inspections near the Walnut Creek station, BART said in a statement. One was an employee and the other was a contractor. 
The train was on a routine maintenance run with an experienced operator at the controls, but at the time of the incident, it was being run in automatic mode under computer control, BART said. 
The victims had extensive experience working around moving trains, the transit authority said. The procedures involved in track maintenance require one employee to inspect the track and the other employee to act as a lookout for any oncoming traffic, it said. 
BART's union workers are currently on strike over a variety of issues, including wages.
Following Saturday's deaths, one of the unions, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, said it would not picket Sunday out of respect for the victims' families.

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