Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

A bill that would have banned strikes by public transit employees, such as BART workers who walked off the job twice last year, has been killed by a state Senate committee.

The Senate Public Employees and Retirement Committee rejected the bill by Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, in a party line vote on Monday, with

the three Democrats on the committee voting against it and the two Republicans on the panel voting for it.

Two Bay Area Democrats were among those who voted against the bill: Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco and Sen. Jim Beall of San Jose.

Huff said he introduced the bill in the wake of the short strikes by BART workers in July and October, which caused traffic jams for Bay Area

commuters.

Huff said in a statement, “Last year, Californians witnessed the Bay Area come to a screeching halt not once, but twice, as leaders of the

BART employee union called strikes and BART trains went dark.”

He said, “Hundreds of thousands of Bay Area residents could not get to work, go to school, see the doctor, or visit with family and friends and it cost the region $73 million each day.”

Huff said, “As a legislature, we have failed to make public transit reliable. That’s a major failure. Californians deserve a government that works for everyone but they were let down.”

However, Beall said Huff’s bill “was not solution-oriented.”

Beall said, “It offered nothing to resolve the underlying bargaining issues that separate employees and management or to keep both sides at the table, such as binding arbitration.”

Yee couldn’t be reached for comment.

Huff’s spokesman, Bill Bird, said the bill’s fate may have been sealed when the Senate’s Rules Committee, which is controlled by Democrats who have a strong majority in the Senate, assigned it to the Public Employees and Retirement Committee instead of the Transportation Committee.

Huff believed his bill should have been heard by the Senate Transportation Committee because it involves a transportation issue, Bird said.

Huff knew his bill faced tough odds in the Senate but he introduced it because he thought “it was the right thing to do,” Bird said.

The committee’s vote means that Huff’s bill is “dead” but Huff or another senator could still re-introduce similar legislation before the late

February deadline for introducing new bills, Bird said.

By

By

Join the Conversation

11 Comments

  1. “…the bill’s fate may have been sealed when the Senate’s Rules Committee, which is controlled by Democrats who have a strong majority in the Senate, assigned it to the Public Employees and Retirement Committee instead of the Transportation Committee.”

    Next time Bart employees go on strike and bring gridlock to the entire area, remember that you voted for the people who allowed it to happen. Bart employees are some of the most overpaid and over compensated workers in the state. As long as Californians keep voting for Democrats who are in the pockets of the various public employee labor unions, this will continue.

  2. May I politely recommend that disgruntled Plutonians consider taking a BART ride! It’s quick, efficient, and relaxing! Enjoy an afternoon shopping in San Francisco, a tasty seafood lunch, and MORE shopping!

    Shopper’s galore luv luv luv to drop their change in SF! Cool or what?

    yup…shopping is good for the soul and you can bet it will be a safe return to Plutonia! that’s what i’m talking about! HOORAY!!!

    NOW GET YOUR FAT BUTTS OFF THE SOFA AND VISIT SF! YOU CAN COUNT ON BART AND IT’S UNION EMPLOYEES TO GET YOU THERE AND BACK HOME IN A FLASH! VIVA BART!

    Thanks UNION workers for a safe ride to and fro!

  3. The only way progress will be happen on anti-BART strike legislation is if it comes about through the initiative process. People who want to see anti BART legislation pass must organize and enlist the support of those relatively few legislators and public officials who have not been bought and paid for by the powerful public employee unions.

  4. Sadly Californians have a SUPER-Majority in our Ca Legislature. That means we have more than a DEM majority in BOTH the state Senate and Legislature, along with this Governor. All three chambers are owned by the PUBLIC unions that Gov Brown created back when he was gov moonbeam 35 years ago. Californians are doomed to being held hostage, paying obscene ransom demands because we can’t stop the super-majority as long as Californians keep voting to keep the Dem the union bought legislators to sit in Sacto cranking out whatever the unions want them to.

  5. Unions are really bad. Boy are they bad. We have had the largest spike in corporate profits ever over the past couple of years, though you’d never know it by looking at employment growth, but it’s the unions that are amassing their wealth, as the BART workers are sending their kids to Harvard and corporate execs’ kids are forced to go to junior colleges, if their grades are okay and their the right color. If our president, Dear Leader, broke up the unions instead of yapping about race and playing the race card all the time, especially on MLK day, we’d all be better off.

  6. I should say too that the reason corporations with record profits aren’t hiring is because the union workers cost too much. There needs to be a law so our corporations can function like they do in China. China workers, toxic waste cleaner-uppers, and gas mask sellers have never had it so good. We could use some of that good stuff in Bay Area, but the corrupt and rich BART workers won’t let us.

  7. You might consider forming the Union of Disgruntled Plutonians!

    In the meantime, I’m considering riding BART to San Francisco and visiting Chinatown. I’m looking for some special tea…I can hardly wait.

  8. to Tired and never been a conservative.!!! I have a more appropriate name for you. Your sarcasm is insulting to readers. You use ‘corporations’ as a profanity. Your lack of logical confuses corporation/stockholders with company ‘workers’. In the majority of ”comparable” positions, public workers far exceed company workers in pay, retirements, time off, and a long list of benefits. At the TOP of the list is ‘keeping’ the jobs even when the employer CANNOT afford, aka ‘JOB SECURITY”!!
    It is nauseating and tiresome reading the ungrateful trash talk from the greedy PUBLIC unions workers who do not appreciate, or even understand the ‘VALUE’ of ‘JOB SECURITY’ and what that allows you to do in living life today and planning your future. Benefits unknown to private company workers. IF you understood economics, and applied a bit of honesty, you would compare similar positions 50 yr old to 50 yr old, with similar education. Union mouthpieces always compare themselves to the top execs. A modicum of honesty would call for comparing yourselves to equally educated lower and mid-level equivalents in the private sector. Your big bad ‘corporation’ word is what union bosses use to brainwash their gullible union underlings with talking points for websites!!!

  10. I think Bonnie has captured how I feel on this issue. The unions are doing their job in seeking to maximize salary and benefits for their members. One can clearly see, however, that what union employees receive is wildly generous relative to the service they produce. These are, on the whole, low-level blue collar jobs being paid over-the-top salaries and benefits.

    Unions are inappropriate in the public sector. It is the responsibility of political leaders and the public to address this problem. Given that the democrats have a super-majority in Sacramento and are beholding to the unions and other special action groups, it is no surprise that they won’t act responsibly. To the voters who put them in there, you have little reason to complain.

  11. Face it Plutonians…your deepy deepy downy downy secret concerns are more related to your bitterness related to people of color and class.

    I challenge you to share you fears about the people of color earning soooooooooooooooo much $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Maybe you’re right in hurting so much that during negotiations that ya’ll got outslicked by working class BART employees!

    tee hee…B U S T E D!

  12. I agree that public employee unions should have never been allowed. They ended up getting more power than the people who pay the taxes.

    Unions in the private sector can work because there is some reality there with competition and fear of loss of jobs and even loss of an employer.

    Since government is a service for the people, it should be managed, including costs of employees, by the elected officials that are supposed to represent us. If the elected officials set the wage/benefits too low, good people would quit and/or service levels would go down so they have the responsibility to set wages/benefits to the appropriate level.

    Having an employee union for a service that has no competition, and where it is almost impossible for the employer to go out of business, does not work. It would be like the government also setting the price on everything I purchase: groceries, hair cut, etc. If there was no ability for competition, the price would be outrageous for necessary items, or they would lower the quality to keep the price the same. This is what has happened in government because of public employee unions.

    If public employee unions really cared about ‘bringing the workers pay to where it should be’, they should be first working on this for the average, non-government worker first and then they can follow. However, we all know that the public employee workers/unions really do not care for anybody except for public employee workers. Anything else they say is just rhetoric.

  13. http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/working-for-the-few-economic-inequality

    Yes, absolutely. We must compare wealth and income deservedness based upon level of education. So, those 85 people who have more wealth than the entire 1/2 the world’s population? It’s because those 85 people attained very, very, very high educational degrees. Like Donald Trump? He’s got 414 Ph.D.’s and 1678 Masters. That why he deserves his wealth.

    Now, about California’s struggling working classes? If they only had a Masters Degree, they’d surely each have a $100 million yacht; and if they had acquired the required number of Ph.D.s they’d surely own 1/170th of the entire world’s wealth and could use that wealth to move its capitalist, corporate enterprises out of California to China.

    So, yes, because BART workers don’t have multiple hundreds of Ph.D.’s like the super wealthy do, they obviously do NOT deserve to earn a living wage. Unions are a blight on this earth. They are bad. Really bad.

  15. to blow hard who knows NOT how to think, education is ONLY ONE measurement for SOME jobs. Higher positions usually require higher education. However, there are Billionaires like Branson who were school dropouts. MID-management company positions usually require and government positions at Liv Lab for example, require a degree…just because!! ask them why skills aren’t enough. Today because degrees are becoming the norm, you don’t GET interviewed in most MID-level openings in the FIRST place!!!! Except today, even in many engineering type jobs you don’t ‘have’ a position like mechanical engineer IN a company. IF a company need manpower for a new product/contract order, the company simply says to the engineer, come in and work, turn in your hours, and we can probably use you something like 4-6 months on our latest missile or camera contract. When you’re done, you’re gone. NO Christmas Day pay, company was locked. Need 3 hrs for medical procedure, those 3 hours are missing on hours worked on project that week time. That’s today’s world of degreed 50yr old, educated workers….workers, NOT employEEs. But that worker still has to pay outrageous taxes for the political whxxxx who have sold out taxpayers who are then held hostage for feeding the greedy PUBLIC unions.
    Now, if you’re angry at ‘wealthy’ people, you have that right for your feelings and opinions, be they right or wrong. But, don’t confuse EDUCATED middle-class workers who have twice the skills of your positions, but earn less, and have NO JOB-SECURITY. Why? Because as at the top of this topic above, UNION workers are the single HIGHEST political contributors in all CA elections to elect people who will perpetuate union excesses. Uneducated PUBLIC workers, living off educated middle-class who suffer…That’s real Inequality!!!
    Today’s Inequality is REAL for the Middle-class. Today’s focus, yet abuse of inequality is NOT understanding MIDDLE-income inequality.
    You think you understand tiny bits of the situation. True, the rich do just fine no matter what. The poor get by under dozens of programs PER family, i.e. free-luch prm which opens to door to goodies forever, free higher education, subsidized housing, medi-cal medicine, special pg&e rates, food stamps, etc, too long to list, but netting out almost as well, as TODAY’S NEW Middle-class Educated worker. That Middle-income worker who will work until he can no longer work, no matter the age without retirement, to pay unrealistic, and unjustified union demands. Yes, the bought-off politicians are serving unions/you well…screw the middle-income taxpayers.
    Yes, as the title above says, Legislators KILL the strike BAN proposal. Predictable. The unfunded assult continues. Unfair to expect the abused middle-income company-to-company worker to foot the bill, and unfair for our kids too. The assult of excesses must end.

  16. Sounds like “Tried” is jealous of people making more than him and want to extract money out of people like us who are not rich.

    Don’t think people here are saying that all those making the top 1% are not being overpaid. But the unions are taking it out on the average person, like me. I am not making millions of dollars, do not have a yacht, and I work 60 hours a week. The unions want me to pay because they are upset with the rich.

    Some of those making the millions of dollars might be worth it. They might have started a company and worked for years without receiving a single paycheck. They hired others out of their own pocket and gave many people good paying jobs while they took a risk in starting a company. Now the company is successful, they are making a lot of money but if you average out all their years of work, it is not outrageous. As a business owner, I can relate to this (although I am not making millions of dollars).

    It seems that most public employees are now considered millionaires because of their retirement benefits. They might be retiring at age 60 with $80K/year retirements plus cost of living adjustments for life and free health care for life. If they live to age 85, that would be 2.9 million dollars ($2,916,741) in retirement pay (assuming a 3% cost of living adjustment each year) and probably another $700,000 in health insurance assuming a 5% increase in premiums each year (which is a very low estimate). Neither of which did these employees pay for. Retirement benefits of over $3,600,000. Public Employees have been receiving a pension without them contributing a dime to it and the same with post-retirement health care.

  17. Too bad the richies don’t pay boot-licker Anti-Union and corporate lapdog “me-me-me” as much as they think the deserve. Too lazy and/or gutless to organize a union, they stew in their own jealousy and self-loathing while condemning public workers who make a better wage (and, truth be told, are probably very much more qualified than Anti-Union and me-me-me).

    But you know what? That’s life. Maybe things would be better for both these self-loathing deflectors if they plied their own obsolete, not-very-valuable skills over in China. Until they try this, they can continue their bootlicking and kissing-up to corporate power and wealth. They deserve it, after all, and both anti-union and me-me-me must have something about their personalities that draws them to their groveling behaviors.

  18. can we all get along?

    money money money…i never imagined that there are so many disgruntled Plutonians…goodness me…i do my best to get along with others and even go out of my way to be fair and reasonable…yup!

    but the Plutonian jealous bugs are outrageous…this business of degrees is like waaaaaaaaay waaaaaay tickle tickle tee hee hee…over the top!

    please mes petites…do you best to grow up and be reasonable…

    i rest my case…lets all do our best to leave race/class stuff out of this…

  19. Cholo, (or should we call you Sybil): first you posted : Face it Plutonians…your deepy deepy downy downy secret concerns are more related to your bitterness related to people of color and class.

    I challenge you to share you fears about the people of color earning soooooooooooooooo much $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Maybe you’re right in hurting so much that during negotiations that ya’ll got outslicked by working class BART employees!

    tee hee…B U S T E D!

    Now, you claim: let’s level race/class out of this. Which is it? Are you incensed because public unions are being outed as bleeding the taxpayers dry, or because this is a new form of welfare disguised as public sector ‘work’?
    Is it any wonder that union apologists are never taken seriously?

  20. Cholo,

    Anti-Union and me-me-me didn’t work for him, so now he’s changed his name to “Right.” All posts by the same insecure, racist simpleton who gets wrapped up in paroxysms of woe and despair because people of color in public service jobs — who his wife’s taxes help pay for — have a job and know how to organize, which are two things absent from his own sorry state.

    Even as a Tried and True Conservative I’m terribly embarrassed by this simpleton’s daily, repetitive rants against people of color who, face it, are superior to himself in so many respects, perhaps first of which being the ability to work with others, something that has eluded “Right” all his life.

  21. Tried and used troll, I never brought race into the discussion, you and your cholo did, but you hypocrites always contradict yourselves. It’s entertaining, if not pathetic, but totally expected from your GED union level of knowledge.
    I don’t care a wit about your faux concern for people of color….in fact, if you held your breath for an hour and turned blue or purple, I’d still think you were an idiot. Either color works for me…..
    Now, go get a real job and quit sucking at the public teat.

  22. oh my…many years ago i saw a cooooool movie: TITTY TITTY BANG BANG!

    was it coooooooool or what? yup…

    TITTY TITTY BANG BANG GOT SHAFTED AND NEVER RECEIVED AN ACADEMY AWARD!

    VERY VERY SAD SAND INDEED…after all these years i still be heartbroken!!!

Leave a comment