BART Strike’s Twin Issues

BART STRIKE FINANCE AND MORALITY ISSUES

Bernard Choden

 

The two foremost issues concerning the BART strike are finance and morality.

 

Finance:  A central issue is re-capitalization of the BART system. Management and most of the media argue that long-term employee benefits should be reduced and those obligations should be shifted to capital maintenance and improvements. But capital costs require guaranteed, long-term, yearly investments that normally are provided by:

1. An invested “trust fund“:  Current experience indicates dangerous mismanagement, political, criminal or exogenous economic events make this an improvident choice.

2. Insurance:   A “Performance Bond” to be paid off as needs arise would be costly and unwieldy.

3. Taxes:  A broad, regionally based tax to underwrite a public revenue bond would be the most prudent and least costly way to re-capitalize BART. However, this method would raise opposition on the current political scene and would require regional governance. This tax would also affect other regional capital needs such as waste management, disaster prevention-assurance and insurance, and environmental protection and enhancement.

 

Diverting the money paid to employee benefits to underpin capital needs make little sense except as media spin.

 

Morality: Some in the media say that inbad times, workers must sacrifice some of their benefits. If that were the case, then workers everywhere should be required by government to contribute to unemployment relief and job creation.  A few decades ago, Swiss workers agreed to a four day work week to enable the spread of employment opportunity.  Another example is the German government employment “trust fund” that now subsidizes private enterprise which employs under employed workers so that that nation’s unemployment rate remains a bearable 5.5%.

 

What is unsupportable, even immoral, is to target government’s responsibilities to workers in order to protect regional social inequities.

 

Instead of getting this straight, some in the media seem to find that their influence on public opinion is the most important aspect of strike settlement.