Milwaukee has quality bus system
If there is a crisis at the Milwaukee County Transit System, it is the challenge of hiring and retaining quality personnel (“MCTS, union still far apart,” July 25).
A pay reduction, the handcuffing of veteran employees to the steering wheel and asking everyone to both provide and sharpen the ax they get cut with should seem a counterproductive path toward excellence in hiring and retention anywhere.
I had been a professional driver for many years previous to driving a bus for Milwaukee County. I will not be retiring with a pension at 47, not by a long shot. I am currently single, have no children, drive used cars and my housing costs are actually lower now than they’ve been for a long time. I can live on very little. Most folks just can’t do this.
I have room on my back to carry an increasingly dysfunctional heath care system, fear-mongering regarding a solid private pension system and below-average pay for the position. Most folks just can’t do this, either. I basically like Milwaukee, and I’ve found that I like it even more from the perspective of a bus driver.
For me, the core of the conflict surrounding our contract challenges is the question of whether our transit system should be a longterm career or a short-term “gig.” I've worked plenty of transportation “gigs” in the past, and they have a number of things in common. The first few are easy to grasp — high employee turnover, higher training costs, attendance problems and more accidents. Things that are harder to put numbers on are the reduced “institutional memory,” reduced workforce cooperation and a reduced ability to embrace new challenges. “Gig” employers accept these shortcomings believing that they are creating or maintaining a sense of control, and flexibility. What “gig” employers get is a plunge to the bottom fighting spiraling costs, and dousing fires that never should have happened. Questions about whether it was worth sacrificing service delivery come later, after the return path has been lost.
Our transit system is worth way more than the sum of its parts. Our transit system has been nation-leading in a number of performance metrics, low costs being the title for most of them. I’ve seen some of the reports, studies and presentations about how and why MCTS should be managed differently. None of them speculate as to how much more it would cost Milwaukee County if MCTS were to perform merely “average” among its peers.
Robert Digate
Milwaukee