Talks resume with transit union as budget gap looming
Contract negotiations between the union that represents Milwaukee County bus drivers and mechanics and the Milwaukee County Transit System resumed Wednesday, more than 90 days after they last met with a mediator.
MCTS officials said the company would agree to the union’s demand to drop a request that employees pay health care co-insurance in hopes that would move the 16-month negotiations toward a conclusion. The co-insurance request has been a point of contention.
James Macon, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998 president, said he had told MCTS from the beginning that the union wouldn’t agree to co-insurance, a feature of most private plans that requires the insured to pay a percentage of costs for medical services.
“What (Milwaukee County Executive) Chris Abele wants us to do, he wants us to be equivalent to the county employees,” he said after the July 10 meeting of the Milwaukee County Board’s Transportation, Public Works and Transit Committee. “The county employees don’t have a right to negotiate, and if they had a right to negotiate, they wouldn’t take this insurance.”
The MCTS employees are not publicsector employees but rather are employed by Milwaukee Transport Services, the quasi-governmental entity that runs MCTS.
Transit system representatives said they were trying to find a balance between paying drivers competitively and limiting the impact on bus routes as they face down a 2020 budget gap that could be as large as $8 million.
Cuts to service, and potentially full routes, will be determined in the county budget process.
“We can’t afford to do everything that we would prefer to do, and so we’re in a position where the budget forces us to decide between stuff like health care benefits and the number of routes that we’re going to keep open,” said Nate Holton, the MCTS director of diversity and inclusion. “We have a finite number of dollars, and that’s just all there is to it.”
The union has expressed concerns about cuts in transit eliminating access to good-paying jobs outside the county for Milwaukee residents who need access to them.
“You can’t keep cutting us into the inner city,” Macon said.
The transit system is not getting enough money from the state, its largest source of funding, Holton said. He also said MCTS is rare in that it doesn’t have a dedicated funding source, which means every year the transit system has to compete with all other county services for funding.
That results in budget challenges. Given that, he said, the company tried to negotiate on health care because MCTS’s health care is richer than Milwaukee County’s, the city’s, Milwaukee Public Schools’ and competing transit systems.
He said the health care package being offered does right by operators but also passengers by freeing up more than $1 million per year toward bus routes.
The union has questioned the system’s budget numbers and the tradeoff between health care and routes.
In the lead-up to the negotiations, the union held “vigils” focused on safety and security and delivered a petition to Abele calling on him to “stop stalling and bargain a fair contract without cuts to our healthcare.”
Bus driver Joseph Abujana spoke to a group at one of the vigils last week about being stabbed on his bus in May.
“Each time I think about it, I will get triggered up when I see a bus,” he said. “It just refreshes it in me, like, I could have been dead.”
Holton said the issue of safety wasn’t part of negotiations until the media attention on Abujana’s stabbing, and he pointed to MCTS figures showing assaults against bus drivers have been decreasing.