Project Description

UTRC was asked by the New York Transit Authority to serve as "Independent Expert" for an innovative labor-management agreement concerning bus maintenance hours for core tasks. The Center Director, based upon his experience as Executive Director of the Chicago Transit Authority, served as the Expert and formed a s consisting of UTRC member Rutgers Professor Mohsen Jafari and two industrial engineering students. They devised a quantitative work analysis process that was accepted by both labor and management as the proper tool for coming to agreement on very difficult time assignments. This process was so successful, it was also used for other bus maintenance studies. The team has since followed up with new studies on maintenance productivity. The work was important for two significant reasons: (1) It served as a means of building trust beween groups, ordinarily adversarial, and added significant respect and understanding to a negotiation process. (2) The resulting productivity saves the TA in the tens of millions of dollars every year.