The future of Capital Metro‘s labor force may be dramatically altered next week. On Monday, March 19, City Council Member Lee Leffingwell, who is also a Cap Metro board member, plans to present a resolution that could ultimately result in meet-and-confer negotiations for the bus company’s employees and end the outsourcing of Cap Metro jobs. In exchange, Cap Metro’s biggest union would have to abandon its right to strike.
Labor relations at the transit authority have a long, tortured history. Amalgamated Transit Union 1091 was in place prior to Cap Metro’s creation in 1985, representing bus drivers, mechanics, and service technicians. State law prohibiting government agencies from bargaining with unions then collided with federal law preserving ATU’s right to negotiations. To resolve the impasse, Cap Metro created StarTran, a company in name only, answering to and staffed exclusively by employees of Cap Metro. The months-long standoff in contract negotiations between ATU and StarTran last year, including a brief strike, was exacerbated by the strange setup, with the union levying charges that Cap Metro management was interfering in StarTran negotiations – illegal but, under the arrangement in place, practically unavoidable. The heat between management and staff has barely cooled since. On Cap Metro’s new commuter-rail project, the agency sought to outsource rail operations to a contractor other than StarTran, and the union fought them every step of the way. The acrimony also bodes poorly for the next round of general-contract negotiations – coming soon, as the current contract is up in July of this year.
Leffingwell, a member of the Air Line Pilots union back in his high-flying days, has drafted a resolution meeting both groups halfway. Seeking “a more direct and unified process in dealing with personnel providing services to Cap Metro,” the resolution seeks to make the contract employees work directly under the agency – and abolish StarTran. It would stop the outsourcing of rail jobs after a two-year “transition allowed for training,” and enter into a Memorandum of Understanding with ATU 1091. (The legal particulars of the arrangement would be hammered out by an outside labor expert.) But the MOU also requires that the union abandon its right to strike.
The measure faces an uphill climb. It was vetted for three hours in private at the board’s last meeting, with “the consensus being that there was no consensus,” according to Leffingwell. Despite fellow Council Member Brewster McCracken‘s support on the Cap Met board, the resolution needs six votes to pass; with Cap Metro President Fred Gilliam and Chairman Lee Walker bloodied in the battle with the union and county commissioners like Margaret Gómez historically squeamish on labor, a supermajority is less than certain. Bruised from negotiations, the union is also proceeding cautiously. But with “heat and mistrust” between labor and management, Leffingwell hopes the resolution can help both parties start talks in good faith.
This article appears in March 16 • 2007.