I would never condemn Andy to religious idolatry.
LOL
I am well aware of his shortcomings; I would still rank him as the best to sit in that chair since David Gunn.
Fair enough...."saint" is not the most apt description.
But there certainly seems to be a certain amount of longing for him from people not within the TTC. Perhaps a bit of "absence makes the heart grow fonder"?
They had a lot to apologize for; if you actually meet the expectations of the ridership, you get to start taking credit instead of giving apologies.
Agreed.
But when demands were made to those below to follow along with that routine, regardless of the situation or position of the staffer? At what point does one draw the line?
Ideally, apologies are a tool of shaming those who under perform into performing better.
They can certainly be used that way, sure.
They can also be taken by those not directly affected as "they don't have my back". And a LOT of the staff feel/have felt that way.
I expect a degree of service reliability in line w/the best large systems in the world. I expect stations to be immaculately clean. I expect staff to be unfailing polite, customer-centred and proactive.
You'll get no arguments from me.
The TTC hasn't shown that for a number of years, Byford made some small but real differences in that regard. Something as simple as announcing the brief delay at Coxwell for a crew change, and thanking riders for their patience.
He did improve communications in an absolutely enormous manner, I will agree. And that has been left to slide back since his departure.
That said, routine gratitude for riders is in short supply, and organization during service interruptions is near non-existent. If that was on Andy, Rick has had several years to fix it.
Let it be clear that I'm not suggesting for a second that Leary is better at ANYTHING than Byford.
But a lot of that "gratitude" was pretty hollow under Byford, and a lot of staff did it because they were made to feel that they were obligated to - regardless of whether it was their place to or not.
I'm not a huge outsourcing fan, but the one I'm familiar with at TTC was vehicle cleaning. To my understanding, cleaners were quite well paid at the time for the job (I'm fine w/that) but also under performing.
That was the story given at the time, and was not completely true.
It was done to drive a wedge within the Union, to try and potentially get some more concessions at contract time and to reduce the Union's headcount, and potentially seen as a means to outsourcing more of the operations of the system if it worked out well. Of course, it hasn't, but who's to let the truth get in the way of a good tale....
(Maintenance and operating staff are under the same Union, although they frequently have vastly different demands when it comes to contact time. As operations are a larger portion of the Union, they are the ones who's demands win out at award time, much to the chagrin of the maintenance staff.)
I was given to understand that following a pilot that outsourced work for some of the buses, that the union was given a choice to improve productivity and to accept lower pay for new hires or have the work contracted out.
It was obviously more complicated than that, but that works as a summary of the situation.
The pilot was expanded before the Union was given a chance to reply to the demands - by the time the contract negotiations had rolled around, IIRC 3 of the garages had been outsourced with a further 2 being slated to change over shortly after the end of the contract. The Union obviously was not happy, but they were given a couple of concessions to make up for it.
And of course those concessions were primarily aimed at the operating staff - much the annoyance of the maintenance staff. Further dividing them.
The Union opted not to accept those terms.
Again, somewhat more complicated.
I'll be fair and say, I think the contracted out cleaners make too little by a noticeable amount.
No argument from me.
I would have preferred the service remain in house, and perhaps the compensation offer could have been better. Still, I know too much about how the TTC operates and its union operates from operators themselves. I sympathize w/both sides on that one.
I think that the ideal situation would be a splitting of the maintenance and operating sides of the Union, with separate negotiations. Of course, that's a discussion for another time....
Was Rick really his choice?
Perhaps not his first, but considering that he was hired to be the Chief Service Officer for the TTC - meaning that he oversaw virtually all revenue service operations - and was positioned just under Byford.....
Dan
