[crdoconnor]

>Costs are the fundamental problem with the MTA (and D.C.'s WMATA), and those are union problems, not management problems.

Managerial corruption causing cost overruns like this does not even tangentially involve unions:

"The New York City subway system has continued to deteriorate, rankled by massive delays, misspent funds, and widespread claims of corruption. On Friday, the feds confirmed the corruption part by securing a 46 month sentence for a former employee who promised subway contractors future work in return for bribes."

https://jalopnik.com/ill-be-damned-feds-indict-new-york-city...

[rayiner]

What is the acale of that in comparison to paying more worksrs than you need more money than you need to? Most of MTA’s expenses are labor costs. Contracting corruption is bad and illegal, but is not what’s driving the costs.

[crdoconnor]

That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times.

[chimeracoder]

> That's certainly MTA management's narrative when asked by, say, the New York Times.

If you're saying that the MTA is trying to misrepresent their role in their own dysfunction when speaking to the news in order to generate coverage that makes them look more favorable, then the MTA should fire their whole PR team, because they're clearly incompetent.

It's pretty clear to anybody who's following the issue that the MTA and TWU have an unethically incestuous relationship, in which the TWU and MTA essentially collude to extract as much money from the state as they can while literally not even doing the bare minimum to keep things running.

[crdoconnor]

The relationship between the MTA management and TWU is fractious at best.

The relationship between MTA management and the scores of construction companies that curiously increased their costs 50% in recent years is curiously pretty good, but I'm sure that had nothing to do with the increased costs.

Of course tried to spin a corruption problem as a union problem. Are they really going to blame themselves?

[rayiner]

As the NYT article explains, the companies’ construction costs are driven by labor costs. The construction companies negotiate with the unions, and pass the higher labor costs onto the MTA, which does not negotiate directly with the unions.

Construction is a labor-intensive industry, and labor costs dominate. If you look up the public companies that do civil construction work, you’ll see that the profit margins are razor thin (2-5%). These are not companies like Facebook making 20-30% profit margins.

This is not a moral issue. It's not about evil construction company CEOs. Reducing executive pay at these companies wouldn't amount to a drop in the bucket for these multi-billion projects. Nor is it about evil union workers. We're just talking about hard-working folks who are getting paid a rather more comfortable wage than their counterparts in Europe. Which is good for them, but wrecks the economics of the MTA, an entity where payroll, health, and pension make up more than half of expenditures.

[mseebach]

Both of those things can be true simultaneously. Anyone insisting on a single, isolated cause of badness in such a complex system is pushing an agenda.