Jerry Brown Does The BART, Man

In California, Dem Gov. Jerry Brown stepped in late Sunday night to call time out on the threatened Bay Area Rapid Transit strike in San Francisco.

Hundreds of thousands of San Francisco Bay area commuters got at least a temporary reprieve from a massive transit strike when Gov. Jerry Brown ordered an inquiry into a labor contract dispute.

Sunday night’s eleventh hour order averted the walkout and left the morning commute to proceed normally, without the widespread travel congestion that a strike involving Bay Area Rapid Transit, the nation’s fifth largest rail line, would have created.

In the order, Brown named a board of investigators for a seven-day inquiry into the contract dispute that had labor unions poised to walk off the job at midnight Sunday.

The order Brown issued came under a law that allows the state’s intervention if a strike will significantly disrupt public transportation services and endanger public health.

“For the sake of the people of the Bay Area, I urge — in the strongest terms possible — the parties to meet quickly and as long as necessary to get this dispute resolved,” Brown said in the order.

So Jerry bought the Bay a week or so, but odds are real good we'll be back here next Monday talking about a major public transit strike, and with good reason.  A previous strike last month tied up traffic for four days, and all that did was get BART management to the table.  They haven't done squat since.  The real issue, as always, is pay and pensions.

Despite a state-brokered 30-day contract extension that ended the July walkout, the points of contention are largely unchanged from last month.

BART is offering smaller raises than the unions are seeking, and the transit agency wants workers to begin paying into their pension fund and contribute more toward health costs. Union leaders say the result for many workers would be a net pay cut after years without raises.

BART complains that workers have the best pubic transit worker package in the country.  Workers know that management's game is to change that, and stick them with thousands in health care and pension costs yearly.  We'll see where this goes, but if the workers and unions lose here, there's bascially nowhere left in America where they can win anymore.

That should worry all of us.