Executives with well-run enterprises plan ahead for contingencies, which is why operational excesses often are a sign of poor management. So it’s highly likely that the excessive overtime paid by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority to certain unnamed Metro employees is not only a major budget-buster, but symptomatic of deeper systemic problems as well. As The Examiner’s Kytja Weir reported Monday, Metro has blown its entire year’s $48 million overtime budget in just seven months. After putting in regular eight-hour shifts, some Metro employees are working another eight hours of overtime, for which they are paid as much as $58 per hour. Metro admits that even construction inspectors, mechanics and track supervisors have been working the equivalent of 16-hour days with no weekends or holidays off.
It’s easy to see why Metro employees would willingly sign up for such a grueling schedule. The extra hours and extra pay more than double their current paychecks and will dramatically increase their retirement pay later on. But such excessive overtime is no bargain for Metro riders. It is physically impossible for workers doing double duty to maintain the same level of focus on critical safety responsibilities as their well-rested counterparts. After racking up more than 500 hours of overtime during a two-month period, fatigued workers simply cannot perform their safety-related duties at the highest level of concentration and efficiency. From both a cost and a safety perspective, Metro riders lose.
The fact that WMATA won’t release the names of its top overtime earners is problematic, a refusal that began after The Examiner first exposed Metro overtime abuses and the names of individual employee compensation levels in 2007. Metro also refuses to disclose whether there is any limit to the number of overtime hours each employee is allowed to work each month.
If there isn’t a limit now, there clearly should be one. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Tri-State Oversight Committee both agree that workers need adequate time off between shifts to rest. But because Metro allows some employees to log more than 40 hours per week in overtime, riders and taxpayers are being billed at time-and-a-half rates for seriously diminished capability that not only dramatically increases costs, but imperils public safety.
This isn’t the first time that recommendations made by the two independent bodies that oversee safety issues on Washington’s transit system have been ignored, but Metro should have learned its lesson by now.
