"Everything that this company has done has been nothing but a bait and switch," he says angrily.
I started talking to the union last summer, seven months before light rail opened. At that point, union members were concerned because contract negotiations had stalled and ACI was making no attempt to return to the table.
Victor J. Palagano III
Jim McCubbin (left) and Bob Bean, both officers with the local union representing rail operators, say they have serious concerns.
Related Content
More About
Under federal transit rules, the trains literally could not start running without the union being involved. That may sound surprising to people accustomed to Arizona's "right to work" policies, but as I learned, federal law is in play here. In any city starting a new rail line, the union representing city bus drivers has first dibs on representing rail workers.
Thanks in part to my column, ACI finally seemed to realize the drill: It had no choice but to deal with the Amalgamated Transit Union. The union tells me that, at that point, everyone worked hard to hammer out a tentative agreement.
After the two parties shook on the deal, the Boston guys were supposed to send the Phoenix union a copy of the agreement to present to their membership. "We'd thought everything was fine, that we'd have to schedule a vote and that was it," recalls Jim McCubbin, the union's vice president.
But ACI suddenly balked. It told the union that it didn't actually have a tentative agreement — never mind that handshake in December.
On February 26, the union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging bad-faith bargaining. The feds gave ACI a deadline of April 15 to acknowledge the tentative agreement.
When I visited the union offices on April 16, the place buzzed with excitement: ACI had promised to send over a copy of the agreement within the hour.
Naturally, the copy never showed up.
McKay, of ACI, says the contract is now in the union's hands. If that's really the case, I have no doubt the union is going to move quickly.
Indeed, as the operators explained to me, driving buses wasn't glamorous, and it wasn't always safe. But driving the bus was a good job, a dependable job, a job where they knew what to expect and how they'd be treated.
Not so with rail. Not under ACI.
"This is 100 percent more stressful than the bus," says one longtime operator. "And there's no rhyme or reason to anything with this job. I don't know what the rules are. The rules are whatever they make up that day."
"We didn't want anything more than what we had at the bus," says another. "We were strongly led to believe we'd get better conditions. That wasn't true. We only want what we used to have."
It's been four long months, but I'm hopeful that ACI finally gets it. Now if they could just get cracking on that "caution" tape . . .
