New MBTA personnel policies baked into the latest labor deal with its biggest union appear to be yielding early results, though the agency still has a long way to go to hit workforce targets essential to improving service.
The T has received a flood of applications for bus operator positions in the two months since officials ratified a collective bargaining agreement that increases pay to $30 per hour, and about four in five workers eligible for retirement have expressed interest in remaining on board in exchange for a bonus, agency data presented Thursday show.
On Aug. 2, the MBTA and Boston Carmen’s Union ATU Local 589 announced a four-year, $55 million collective bargaining agreement, which features 18 percent pay increase over its life, $7,500 sign-on bonuses for drivers, paid commercial driver’s license training and retention incentives.
Between Aug. 8 and Oct. 9, the MBTA received 1,809 new applications from people wanting to become bus drivers, according to a presentation MBTA Chief Workforce Officer Ahmad Barnes gave at a subcommittee meeting.
That represents an average of about 226 applications per week, more than four times as many as the 48 applications received during the week of July 31 and the 34 applications received during the week of July 24.
More than 290 people have applied for track laborer positions as well, Barnes said. Officials want to add 40 to 50 full-time equivalent track laborer positions by the end of 2023, he said, to “really concentrate and support reduction of the slow zones” that have plagued riders with sluggish travel since the spring.
Another focus in the new CBA is keeping more veteran employees on board. The agreement includes a 10 percent bonus, which would count toward pension purposes, for retirement-eligible employees who remain on the workforce until at least Nov. 1, 2024, according to MBTA documents.
Barnes said Thursday that 237 out of 296 “frontline Local 589 members” currently eligible to retire have applied for the deferral bonus since Sept. 15, hitting the agency’s goal of getting 80 percent interest from that group of seasoned workers.
In addition to encouraging more people to stay, Barnes said the application process also gives MBTA officials a clearer sense of how many veterans are not interested in remaining and therefore an estimate of how many frontline positions will soon need to be filled.
“This is an incredibly huge step for the MBTA. We’ve never actually been able to identify how many employees are anticipating leaving the authority, which kind of put our staffing team as well as our operations team in a bind,” Barnes said. “So using this information in a positive (way) is going to be a huge step for us.”
Workforce challenges are at the root of many of the MBTA’s most persistent problems, including both safety lapses and unreliable service. During its sweeping investigation last year, the Federal Transit Administration concluded the MBTA might need as many as 2,000 more workers than it had employed at the time to safely run existing service levels.
Barnes said the MBTA has 295 bus driver vacancies, and officials are aiming to onboard a new “class” of 66 drivers at a time.
Since the start of the year, the MBTA has hired 1,029 new workers from outside the agency and promoted 345 existing employees to new positions, according to data Barnes presented Thursday. Another 591 workers left in that span, trimming the year-to-date net headcount increase to 438.
In all of 2022, the MBTA added a net 166 new employees, and in 2021, it lost 112 positions on a net basis.
MBTA General Manager Phil Eng last month described the more than 1,000 external hires so far this year as a “record for us,” though he made no mention in that public presentation of the nearly 600 previous MBTA employees who have left the agency -- or were hired but never actually started a job -- in the same span.
One pain point federal investigators identified last year is the dispatcher workforce in the T’s operations control center, which is responsible for overseeing train movements in the core subway system.
In June 2022, days after the FTA said the operations control center was understaffed and overworked, the MBTA slashed weekday train trip frequency on the Red, Orange and Blue subway lines. Officials said at the time the cuts were temporary and would be reversed “as soon as sufficient dispatch capacity exists,” but months later, they changed the goal and said service cannot be fully restored until the agency hires more drivers and makes more trains available.
Barnes’s presentation said the MBTA needs four more full-time dispatchers and five “spare” dispatchers to fully staff the operations control center. That’s an increase from August, when he set a target of two more full-time dispatchers plus five spares.
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