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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
We’re on the bus
together, but drivers payA strike by Honolulu bus drivers looms over the city like a huge looming strike thing. I hate it when strikes loom. Why can't they just sort of hang out, have a smoke and be cool?
There's been a lot of chitchat about why the strike has entered the looming mode, instead of being where it was just a few months ago, in a theoretical state. The reason is that nobody was taking the bus drivers seriously. It was like, dude, you folks wouldn't actually go on strike, would you? That would be so unfriendly and people wouldn't like you. A lot.
So now that there's an actual strike deadline -- next week -- everyone considers the strike as serious as cancer. City Council members are harrumphing in very serious fashion and setting hearing dates to discuss serious bus-related stuff, although they've cleverly set the hearings for AFTER the strike deadline, which seems silly. The mayor's office is warning people to be ready to carpool, bike, trike, skateboard, rollerblade, Segway, jog and hop their way to work and school during the strike.
THE MOST FREQUENT answers to the question of why there's going to be a strike are: 1) Bus drivers are greedy buggers more interested in making a buck than providing an essential community service, or 2) City officials are tightwads just trying to keep the boot heel of financial tyranny on the throat of the working man and woman.
Here's the real reason for the bus crisis: Honolulu can't afford a top-flight bus system paid for by bus fares. It simply costs too much to keep a fleet of modern buses on the roads. And it's interesting that when something overseen by government becomes too expensive to work, it's never the people who created the problem who have to suffer, it's innocent employees.
In this case, government bureaucrats think the way to solve the bus finance problem is to lay off 40 bus drivers. They think of the crisis as a "bus problem" and not what it really is, which is a "city problem." That's why it's easy for them to suggest laying off 40 bus drivers instead of 40 members of the mayor's and City Council's staff. If we laid off 40 high-paid bureaucrats, that money could go to keep 40 buses on the road.
TheBus is a quasi-governmental enterprise, meaning we taxpayers finance part of its budget. As such, we should have a say as to who gets laid off. I say lay off a bunch of paper-pushers instead of people who actually work for a living. Or at least spread the hurt around. Lay off a couple of bus drivers, a couple of City Council members, the mayor, a couple of those crabby guys in building permits, a couple golf-course greens keepers ... you get the idea. It's not the bus drivers' fault that the city is cash poor; they shouldn't have to bear all the pain.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
