Dare we hope?

Ottawa council willing to budge on transit scheduling

Maybe, just maybe, we are beginning to see the end of this stupid standoff. Seeing union members "storming out" of the last meeting certainly wasn't encouraging. Supposedly it will take a couple more weeks now while an independent fact-finder objectively clarifies the scheduling issue and dispels any misconceptions either side may have.

Seems to me that no matter how you slice it, you can pretty much bank on the fact that we will be continuing to limp along through the worst of this winter with no resolution. Even if this fact-finder did his/her job properly, gave them all the facts in a timely manner, and they all magically came to agreement that same day, we're still talking 2 more weeks minimum without public transit.

I'll give them this much... in a way it's a good thing because frankly, nobody seems to have a really clear picture on what exactly the sticking points are in this scheduling issue, since the ATU has insisted it's not about the money and all manner of claims are being made on both sides. At least one side is lying, if not both of them.

I've "heard" (as in online, using my eyes not my ears) accusations that senior drivers schedule themselves such that they will only have to drive 6 hours, but still get paid for 8 due to an 8-hour minimum daily pay requirement. I've not heard any ATU members or leadership deny this.

I've also heard claims that drivers will have 13½-hour shifts. But I understand this isn't really true because most of them are working split shifts since most of the demand for transit is when people are trying to get to/from work. I don't know how long the break is in between... 3 hours? 5 hours? But even if your first shift ends on the other side of town from your home and you have to wait around, it's not like you're working that whole time. And if you have to travel across town from one shift to get to the next, surely it doesn't take 3-5 hours to do so. You should be paid for any necessary transit time, but you can't count that gap in between as working hours. I once had a job as one of a team of several people, and we were frequently sent to remote locations for a week at a time. You had to stay in a hotel and work 8 hours a day until the project was complete. You only got paid for the 8 hours each day you were working; the time you spent getting to the job site and back counted as working hours; but you didn't get compensated for the other 16 hours a day you spent away from home during the week. Of course I missed my loved ones back home. But hey, I knew what I was getting into when I took the job. And before you say, "Now see, that's a situation where having a union could have helped," guess what? That was a union job! The terms: an hour's work for an hour's pay!

ATU members have said that the change in scheduling would make it difficult for them to plan their personal lives. But honestly now, when you decided to be a bus driver, you can't tell me you didn't know ahead of time the hours that most people would need transit, and what that would require of you. If working funky split shifts presents a problem for you, why would you consider such a job in the first place? Something here doesn't smell quite right.

All that said, I've also heard from drivers that the City makes outrageous demands, such as scheduling shifts back to back without proper time allocated in between for a driver to get from the end point of the first shift to the starting point of the second shift. Thus, there is no way for a driver to start the second shift on time. I don't know if this is really true in their case but I can say I've seen that type of thing before, when companies with a ridiculously single-minded focus on their bottom line make you crazy by allotting 15 minutes for a 1-hour job and the like, blatantly ignoring customer satisfaction and/or safety rules in the interest of saving a buck. In all fairness, I consider this issue to be a distinct possibility, and I've not heard the City deny this accusation.

Somewhere under all this posturing is the truth, and I'm not convinced I've heard it yet.