I just got an e-mail from an anonymous Muni operator on an interesting fact about their pay (edited to protect privacy):
Akit,
Did you know that MUNI pays its drivers 10 minutes of time to turn in their transfer books? [Personal information omitted], one of the little things I learned:
When a driver finishes his run and returns his/her bus to the yard, MUNI pays each driver 10 minutes of worktime to turn the transfer book to the manager inside. The old policy was that the driver simply handed over unused books to the yardmaster as he entered the yard. And MTA wonders why it can't pay its bills!
The veteran operator who explained this to me laughed about it as he explained how stupid it was to pay drivers to prevent transfer theft as though there's an epidemic of drivers selling unused transfers.
Multiply ten minutes of work time at a minimum of approx $28 dollars per hour, by all the drivers in the system, every single day, and it must add up to a pretty penny.
Akit's Opinion
Wow, kinda freaky. They get paid just to turn-in their transfer books? So if they just take a minute to drop it off with the yard supervisor, they get paid 10 minutes worth of time? If you crunched in the numbers, it would be $4.67 for 10 minutes (at $28/hour), times say 300 operators, that's $1,400 a day or $511,000 in a year!
I could understand the idea to prevent selling the books to citizens so they can sell transfers for a buck, but I'm just amused this is another oddball policy in the Muni operators' contract.
The long term solution planned by the MTC that might kill the 10 minute pay rule is if transfers are only issued on Clipper cards; if that happens, let's see if the operators union will be protesting that it's unfair.
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