Why is NZ Bus being so stupid?

Firstly, let’s start with a few definitions:

Work-to-rule is an industrial action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of a workplace, and follow safety or other regulations to the letter in order to cause a slowdown rather than to serve their purpose.

Strike: to declare or engage in a suspension of (work) until an employer grants certain demands, such as pay increases, an improved pension plan, etc.

Lockout: the temporary closing of a business or the refusal by an employer to allow employees to come to work until they accept the employer’s terms.

So, clearly the current situation in Auckland is absolutely not a strike, it’s a lockout in response to ‘work-to-rule’. Work to rule may be considered industrial action, but in the end it is only doing your job as you are required to do it. Someone ‘working to rule’ could not be fired, could not be disciplined and so forth.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s have a look at the developments today in the ongoing bus lockout in Auckland. Today was day five of the lockout, and potentially the most disruptive yet as schools were back from their holidays – which was the saving grace for the last couple of days of last week.  ARTA advised their replacement services offered last week would run again, NZ Bus told blatant lies about the lockout being “strike action” (which it is clearly not), and Mike Lee came out swinging against NZ Bus, threatening to cancel their bus contract if they didn’t sort things out.

I admire Mike Lee’s actions here, as this is now turning into a farce desperately requiring someone to step in and take control. Here’s what he says in full:

ARC Chairman Mike Lee has delivered a simple and blunt message to NZ Bus, on day five of the NZ Bus lock-out of drivers.

“We have had enough. Auckland will not be held to ransom. If you can’t deliver the services that the people of Auckland rely on, then we will have to find someone else who can,” he said.

Today the industrial dispute again disrupted the travel plans of tens of thousands of Auckland commuters. The disruption was even worse with the start of the school term.

Despite meetings over the weekend and facilitation today, it appears that the company and the union have made no meaningful progress on settling the dispute.

“The Auckland travelling public have run out of any patience or sympathy for this on-going nonsense,” said Mr Lee.

NZ Bus operates public transport services under contract to the Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA). NZ Bus is currently in breach of those contracts – it is not delivering the services. Like any commercial contract, NZ Bus contracts can be terminated for non-performance.

‘If this dispute is not settled, I will be calling on ARTA to start the process of terminating the existing contracts and finding someone else who will deliver the services that Auckland expects and pays for.

“Terminating NZ Bus contracts would be a drastic step. However, it is clear that the company is not responding to other normal commercial pressure, nor in my view does it take seriously its service obligations to the public.

“Perhaps the threat of NZ Bus’s entire Auckland business being terminated will sharpen the minds of the negotiators and deliver the break through that is required.”

I think that he’s right here, that the bus company is absolutely not being forced to not run its services (as the workers are only threatening ‘work to rule’) and therefore by not running their services they would be in breach of their contract. If there are any lawyers reading this post, then I would be interested to hear if you have the same reading of the matter as me.

Now there is only one flaw in what Mike Lee is saying here, and that is the fact that there’s nobody else running around Auckland with 800 or so buses to take up the slack. But I guess if they did lose the contract then they wouldn’t have much use owning all the buses and would sell them to whatever company did win the contract instead. While such an outcome is pretty extreme, and I wonder how long everything would be in “limbo” while it all happened, I honestly think that Auckland would be far better off giving NZ Bus the boot – as clearly they don’t give a crap about actually providing a decent bus service in Auckland.

Industrial action is always about who wins the public relations battle, and I honestly cannot believe how badly NZ Bus has stuffed up. If I were NZ Bus in this debate then I would have done my best to portray the drivers as the bad guys, to focus on how it was their work that was causing the disruptions – and I would absolutely not have suspended the services. It would have been so much smarter from their perspective to have let the drivers work to rule, and to have blamed them for any disruptions. This would have turned the public against the drivers, and they could have asked the Regional Council to pressure the drivers to withdraw their action to ensure everything could have run as per usual, and so on. After all, in terms of the actual pay disagreement I think that NZ Bus would probably have the public’s sympathy – as a 10% pay rise for the drivers over the course of three years doesn’t sound particularly ungenerous. So they’ve really shot themselves in the foot with their strategy.

As well as losing the public relations battle at the moment, I think that NZ Bus have also stuffed up in terms of their long-term future in Auckland. Clearly, Mike Lee’s words today shows that the Regional Council is seriously thinking they’d be better off with someone other than NZ Bus operating the bus services in Auckland. I’m sure that won’t be forgotten when ARTA gets around to updating the bus contracts over the next couple of years.

Furthermore, at the moment Infratil (NZ Bus’s owners) are basically begging for a second chance at the integrated ticketing contract for Auckland. Something tells me that ARTA and NZTA might be slightly more reluctant to make a change after the last week. Brian Rudman makes the connection in an excellent column in today’s Herald. Part of the article is included below, although I strongly encourage everyone to read the whole thing:

With their National Government mates promising to look after them where Auckland public transport is concerned, the pin-striped merchant bankers of Infratil would have been smart to have kept their heads down.

But they couldn’t help themselves, arrogantly locking their uppity Auckland bus drivers out of work for the crime of asking for a living wage.

One of the locked-out drivers summed up the issue on television on Friday evening when he put the simple question, if rubbish truck drivers are worth $20 an hour, then why are bus drivers paid only $14 to $17.

Only a few days ago, my bus had to take an unscheduled stop outside the public toilets in Victoria Park. The driver locked his money box then made the long and very public march to spend a proverbial penny. Chances are, he was on a 12-hour plus day as well, having to work a split shift, hanging around in the middle of the day for up to four hours unpaid.

Hard as it might be for the bankers to fathom, the 80,000 passengers inconvenienced by the lockout are sympathetic to the drivers, not to those trying to label them troublemakers.

It’s as though with National in power, Infratil and its NZ Bus subsidiary feel they can drop any pretence about which side they’re on.

Already, after furious lobbying and legal stalling tactics, the bankers have forced the postponement of any decision on the development of Auckland’s long-planned integrated ticketing system, which will enable people to travel the region using various transport modes, on one ticket.

Wellington-based Infratil bid for the job against international competition and lost. Ever since it has been trying every trick in the book to try to reverse that decision.

Infratil also seems to have persuaded the new Government to repeal parts of the landmark Public Transport Management Act. From the end of this year, as old contracts expire, the act will, among other things, force bus operators to open their books to the ratepayers of Auckland to justify the $94 million in annual passenger transport subsidies.

Given the attitude towards Auckland’s public transport users over the past week, I think that the decision to not choose Infratil to deliver the integrated ticketing system was an incredibly smart one. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot again Infratil. Seriously, their public relations person must either be completely stupid, or they are trying to ruin this part of their business.

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