MCTS Bus Drivers Authorize A Strike

Contract negotiations between the union representing transit workers and the Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) are stuck, and now members have voted to give union leaders the authority to call a strike.

Leadership of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 998 (ATU) told Urban Milwaukee that negotiations over a new three-year contract recently reached an impasse over wages and health care. But union leaders explained that what they’re holding out for in the contract is important to addressing the ongoing problem MCTS has with employee retention.

Negotiations on this contract began in April this year, and Donnell Shorter, 998’s president, said they had been moving along relatively smoothly. The last time MCTS and ATU approved a labor agreement negotiations lasted nearly two years. During that time, the union also voted to give leadership the authority to call a strike. In 2015, the union actually followed through and held a three-day strike, its first since 1978.

MCTS has struggled to retain workers for years, but this problem became even more acute in recent years as festival and Freeway Flyer service was eliminated because there weren’t enough workers to staff them. In 2021, MCTS missed 7,487.2 planned service hours, or 0.56% of budgeted service, because it didn’t have enough operators run the service it was budgeted for.

In this sense, Shorter said, the contract is really about asking MCTS and county leaders, “Do we want to shrink the system? Or do we want to try and maintain what we have.”

The transit system has invested in employment marketing, hiring bonuses ($1,000 for new operators) and added training classes. But it loses workers just as fast as it hires them. In 2021, the transit system hired more than 130 operators, but by the beginning of this year, it had roughly the same number of operators as it did early in 2021. “Our issue isn’t hiring workers… we’ve hired hundreds of workers,” Shorter said.

Shorter and vice president Michael Brown told Urban Milwaukee that investing more in wages and lowering the proposed deductible for the health care plan are the two major provisions of the contract the union is holding out for. “We feel we’re behind on wages,” Shorter said, compared to peer transit systems. The union is asking for an 8% wage increase in the first year of the contract, and 4% each year in the next two years of the contract.

“That wage isn’t saying that we’re greedy,” Shorter said. “That wage is saying that we need someone else to join our team and take the pressure off of us.”

Shorter said short staffing is making a difficult job more stressful. “It’s a really tough job, you know, if this job wasn’t tough we wouldn’t have a problem retaining workers,” Shorter said.

With fewer workers, and increasingly fewer buses in the fleet, Shorter said run times are getting faster in order to maintain service frequency within a system that is shrinking. There were 400 buses in the fleet in 2018. By 2023, it’s budgeted to have 314. “So you’re asking more out of us than any other transit system,” he said. “And we really feel that that’s how they balanced the budget for many years — off the backs of the operators.”

MCTS recently redesigned the entire route network, balancing it toward a system with more high-frequency routes. This was a cost-neutral redesign moving service around, and in some cases eliminating routes, to increase bus frequency.

Another major issue, Shorter said, is the fact that operators are not paid for the time between when their shift ends and when they get back to a station. Shorter offered the example of a driver getting off the bus on a zero-degree day in the winter and having to spend 30 minutes taking another bus back to the station. “There’s no wages for that,” he said. “Meantime, we’re not even considered a worker, so if a car jumps a curb and we’re injured it’s not even workers comp.”

There have been, however, some concessions by the company on an issue that affects bus operators’ work-life balance: split shifts. A split shift separates a single workday into two separate work periods. Under the current contract, MCTS can hold an operator on a split shift for up to 18 hours in a single day. The union and MCTs have agreed on a reduction to 14 hours. “We’ve tackled stuff in this contract we haven’t tackled in 30 years,” he said.

Shorter said the union and MCTS have already begun scheduling dates to resume negotiations. But he said the strike vote taken by the workers is serious — 93% of the union voted in favor of authorizing a strike. “Employees are burned out, tired — that percentage shows that,” Shorter said.

In a statement, a spokesperson for MCTS said: “We are proud of our employees and the work that they do. Every three years, we enter into contract negotiations with ATU Local 998, these negotiations began earlier this year. MCTS has made what we believe to be a fair offer that includes minimal healthcare changes and up to a 9 percent wage increase over the three-year period. We also have worked hard to improve the work life balance and safety of our employees. The local ATU took a yes/no vote on the offer on Friday. They voted no. Negotiations will continue in November.”