Guess I Just Bend Over Again

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Dear Brothers and Sisters,

CC: Sam

I’m going someplace different this time. At another work week end, I’m more exhausted than ever before. Let’s explore the why.

It’s demeaning to say I told ya so, but here we are as promised. After battling through countless historic events with management cheerleading/waterboarding us along, I knew it would turn its back on the Operations team upon whose efforts it rode its self congratulatory wave.

Yeah upper management, you’re easily predictable and just proved what I mean by “you suck”. Only difference between you an

d a downtown meth whore is your teeth: yours can still tear a sizable chunk off our ass and have flossable neighbors.

We did not expect our outgoing union president to authorize contract negotiations with management. She was retiring when her term ended. It would be responsible to step back and allow her successors go toe-to-toe with management on a new contract.

Perhaps she believed it possible to step down with a lasting and positive legacy to follow her into a well deserved retirement. However, bless her for trying, she ended up disappointing us instead. I say this without any trace of malice. We all need to believe our instincts and motives are correct. Yet I, as a single dues paying member, believe she failed to hear our pleas of extraordinary sacrifice and fight for our hard-fought due. 

We heard our leadership was in negotiations with management months before our union election, but it was logical to assume they were preliminary. As the saying goes, it made an ass outta ALL of us. Our collective complacency rendered us dumbfounded when a week before our new officers were to be sworn in, our president announced the contract vote. One day only, in person, at a location far removed from the vicinity of many members during Portlandia’s busiest road construction season. With no allowance for those who were out of town or otherwise unable to physically cast their vote.

Many of us were furious at how this happened. Not only did we not have time to study the details of the proposed contract before voting, but the term was for FOUR YEARS! TriMeth’s proposal was a pittance of what was expected after it trumpeted our “value” throughout a pandemic through which it worked from home as we bravely exposed ourselves to a deadly virus.

Then the “Bored” of Directors awarded the General Manager a 15fucking% raise to his nearly half a million buck salary while adding extra vacation time to his contract as he grinned his way through what he knew to be a fatal blow to our collective hope his reign would be different from his predecessors. 

Operators in our fury voted NO. How dare you fling shit at us after what we have been through, as we suffer daily at the hands of a horrifyingly incompetent management whose tactics you condone? Any GM with the most basic respect for his team could not honestly accept such generous terms personally while offering a pittance to those whose work is much more important than his own.

Evidently my initial NO vote was unacceptable. Since the rejection of the agreement pointed us towards a dubious arbitration in a state where transit workers are prohibited from striking, Operators were asked to “re-vote”. How devastating. We expected, and were ready to endure, a hard fought battle. Instead, we were encouraged to accept the table scraps like the mongrels we supposedly are. On second thought, the contract passed.

This mess coulda/shoulda been avoided. All this has produced is a union even further divided. Classic move, thousands of years in the making. Divide and conquer. Split the agreement three ways and find a way to screw one of the other two groups. The two will turn upon the one and employ every possible tactic to make it come into alignment.

Management keeps finding ways to move the most talented and experienced people out while bribing the masses to sign on for a bonus which is taxed at 40% and doled out over three years. The newest employee gets the biggest raise, the veteran suffers. And our former union president allowed it. Our new president is bound by the rules to not argue against it.

Nicely played, Oregon. By not allowing us to strike, which is an American standard, you allow the workers to get screwed. In a state which supposedly “champions” the middle class. It’s not a logical position to support.

But hey, what do I know? I’m just a stupid fucking bus operator.