BART trains came to a halt Friday after a deadline to resolve contract negotiations expired without a deal and union workers walked off the job. As a result, hundreds of thousands of frustrated commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area were stymied on Friday and now face a weekend without BART service.
"Our negotiator has been in contact with the mediator and BART stands ready to resume negotiations at any time," said BART general manager Grace Crunican during a press conference Friday afternoon according to the AP.
Later on Friday afternoon, union president Roxanne Sanchez spoke at a conference on the "possibility of the end of a strike," igniting hope. The union announced workers could get trains running again soon; however, that will happen only if management would agree to a new "Rider First Plan" -- a proposal similar to the union offer that BART rejected before the strike.
Tension between BART and the two large unions lies within two points of contention. First, management is offering a 12 percent raise over four years, while unions are seeking a 15.9 percent pay increase. BART's average union worker currently makes $76,500 in gross salary.
Second, unions are looking to hold onto longtime "work rules" that have helped employees earn large overtime checks and keep control over their job hours. Management says the 470-page work rule book is full of freebies that cost BART a large amount of money, such as allowing train operators to run just two roundtrips during a daylong shift.
One work rule change is BART's proposal to use technology to replace some administrative human jobs -- such as eliminating paper paycheck stubs -- but unions say it's a bigger issue.
"If it was about faxes and emails, we could resolve this in about 10 minutes," Chris Finn, a train operator and recording secretary for local Amalgamated Transit Union, said at a Friday rally in Oakland. "They want to implement whatever changes to our working conditions that they want at will."