RTD, workers agree on deal

Higher pay, bathroom breaks among guarantees for drivers, operators

Labor negotiations that just last month carried the specter of a mass walkout by RTD employees headed toward resolution Tuesday night, as a new 3-year contract that would boost pay and improve working conditions for hundreds of bus drivers and train operators was approved by a key agency committee.

The full Regional Transportation District board of directors is expected to finalize the agreement at its regularly scheduled meeting at the end of the month.

The contract, which was ratified by the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1001 over the weekend, would raise hourly wages for new bus drivers and train operators from $17.49 to $19.40, starting this month. That wage would jump another 3 percent in each of the next two years — to $19.98 an hour next year and to $20.58 in 2020.

The collective bargaining agreement also calls for RTD to give drivers guaranteed bathroom breaks and put $6.2 million a year for the next three years into the employee pension fund. Drivers also would be compensated extra for working split shifts, and RTD would have to give three days’ notice if it wants employees to work on a day off.

“We spent a lot of time discussing working conditions,” RTD CFO Heather McKillop said at Tuesday’s meeting.

Around 2,000 of RTD’s 2,800 employees are covered by the agreement. They have been working under a 5-year contract that expired at the end of February.

“Let’s hope it moves us forward in hiring drivers,” RTD director Kate Williams said prior to the 11-2 vote by the agency’s Financial Administration & Audit Committee.

RTD has been dealing with a driver shortage for the last few years — it has 139 bus driver vacancies and 59 train operator vacancies. But with the metro area’s historically low unemployment rate continuing unabated, the agency has struggled to find drivers and hang on to them.

That market reality prompted director Ernest Archuleta to ask whether the new pay scale would be enough of an incentive to address RTD’s driver shortage.

“In Denver, the economy is up,” he said. “There’s too much competition out there.”

But McKillop said RTD analyzed transit pay in similar-size cities and tried to match those as best it could. Union members ratified the agreement Saturday by a nearly 9-1 margin.

“This was a very long but wellplanned process on the union side,” said Bill Jones, in-house counsel for Amalgamated Transit

Union Local 1001. “It will make a big difference in employee morale and in hiring and retention.”

Even though negotiations between RTD and the union began back in October, they hit an impasse last month when the union filed a Notice of Intent to Strike. An official with the Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics ruled that union workers would not be allowed to walk off the job, saying such an action “would interfere with the preservation of the public peace, health and safety.”

Jones said quality-of-life issues, like guaranteed bathroom breaks for drivers, were paramount in negotiations.

“Now you are guaranteed for each direction of travel a 5-minute break,” he said.

RTD also agreed to pump $3.6 million into the employee health care plan over the next three years, Jones said.

Jones said wage increases won’t just be enjoyed by rookie drivers and operators — veteran employees should see hourly pay jump from a top rate of $22.75 today to $26.07 by 2020.

“It was a long struggle, but to a large degree, it was communicating to RTD what needed to change and why,” Jones said.