[PRCo] Re: How we feel about Numero Uno

[Herb Brannon]

It appears as though the 'extra list' was a place, in 1930, where you got paid if you worked and did not get any pay if you didn't catch a piece of work. I prefer the 'extra list' of today where an operator is guaranteed eight hours per day even if just on a 'station report'.
   
  The actual operation of vehicles, however, has become more, shall we say, intense, since Ronald Regan and Elizabeth Dole started public transit on its downward spiral. For instance, there is no longer the 'recovery time' at outer terminals as there was before and running times have been tightened to the point that other than at night or during periods of light traffic (almost a non-existent thing these days) it is impossible to keep the schedule. This is nationwide, not just a local problem. The real problem comes with 'safety'. Public transit operations today are not, in my opinion and the opinions of many others, not as safe as they were in the 1970s and 1980s. Overworked, stressed operators trying to keep an impossible schedule are becoming involved in more accidents today than two or three decades ago.
   
  Today's transit managers think (more so they don't think) this is a very 'businesslike' way to run a tax supported transit authority. They also use buzzwords such as 'stakeholders' and 'partners' and never do they mention employees or passengers. They forget the key words here are TAX SUPPORTED. Today's transit managers continue to act as though a tax supported transit authority should be making a profit. They probably don't even realize that the reason for creation of transit authorities was to provide a necessary service to any given area without having to worry about the bottom line. If these modern day so called managers would allow all the tax money to go to running service and not to their highly inflated salaries, bonuses, golf outings at public expense, and high priced lunches they might not have to worry about funding so much. I have always thought the management should fire all the operators and mechanics (the two groups they despise the most) and see how long
 they have something to manage. I use the word manage very, very loosely.
   
  Hopefully better days will be coming after November, 2008. They can only mess with the working class so long until something has to give.
Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
  Electric Railway Journal, volume 74, Number 9, August 1930: 
"Pittsburgh Railways trainmen defeated a proposal that they work on a 
6-day instead of a 7-day schedule to save jobs of 300 now or soon to 
be placed on the extra list."

Two things strike me as being interesting. First off, when you have 
3000 or so trainmen, it isn't hard to find enough high seniority men 
who don't care about youngsters. Second, they worked long days and 
long weeks to earn a living but it was still heaven compared to being 
on the wrong end of a coal scoop on a steam locomotive or suffering 
in a steel mill. 





Herb Brannon
   
  TODAY'S "THOUGHT FOR THE DAY"
   
  Happy BOXING DAY to all.