No BART strike Tuesday: Talks to continue
on October 15, 2013
Transit officials and labor unions failed to reach a decision by midnight Monday, but federal mediator George H. Cohen said an hour after the midnight deadline that negotiations would continue.
BART will run Tuesday morning as usual.
“Bargaining has produced some constructive and productive progress,” Cohen said.
Cohen, director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, a federal agency based in Washington, D.C., said he would not take questions and said nothing regarding the development of negotiations or another strike deadline.
Union representatives also remained silent on the issue, despite threats of a strike if a deal was not reached by midnight.
BART negotiator Thomas Hock received flak Monday for being absent from the bargaining table.
To make commute options even more complicated, workers with the East Bay bus service AC Transit filed a 72-hour notice to strike on Thursday due to an impasse in their own contract negotiations.
Joyce Willis, financial secretary-treasurer for Amalgamated Transit Union local 192, told community news website Richmond Confidential that the two strikes were “unrelated.” Oakland North and Richmond Confidential are both affiliated with the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley.
The drama mounted Sunday night when union representatives insisted in a press conference that BART management had laid out a regressive offer that was “reprehensible,” according to Antonette Bryant, ATU president for Local 1555.
However, BART General Manager Grace Crunican said the new offer was $7 million higher than the offer that management made Friday.
With contributing reports by Jennifer Chaussee and Yolanda Martinez.
2 Comments
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I am pleased with the job Thomas Hock is doing. The Bart Unions are simply not capable of handling negotiations from persons outside the dysfunctional Bart Family. It was reported by local news media that one union negotiating team had forty-nine members on its team..
Get Smart Bart Unions before you lose your shirt. You have repeatedly wronged the public. You have repeated annoyed the Bear.
I am pleased with the job Thomas Hock is doing. The Bart Unions are simply not capable of handling negotiations from persons outside the dysfunctional Bart Family. It was reported by local news media that one union negotiating team had forty-nine members on its team..
Get Smart Bart Unions before you lose your shirt. You have repeatedly wronged the public. You have repeated annoyed the Bear.