"Management of the Budapest Transport Company (BKV) and the strike committee representing the unions were unable to come to an agreement about employee demands, so the 24-hour strike called for this Friday seems inevitable.Talks on the four demands of the unions ended in a matter of minutes today and the parties could not agree even on the “skeleton services" to be provided on Friday.
Gábor Nemes, one of the spokespersons of the strike committee said negotiations should stop by midnight on Wednesday, as the all-day strike on Friday requires serious preparations and the unions need to focus all their attention on that on Thursday.
“A gridlock situation emerged during the talks, also because the Budapest Municipality announced on Monday that it intended to use coaches of Volán to replace BKV buses during the strike on 18 April," Nemes said.
The unions claim the town hall and BKV's management do not even want to reach an agreement and to address the real problems of BKV. Instead they are both trying to turn the public against the unions, they said.
The unions demand the following: to revoke plans for massive reductions in services (the combining, streamlining and scrapping of several routes), to create a new plan for reduced services with the involvement of the unions, to drop plans for mass layoffs, to improve working conditions. They also want management to involve unions into pre-decision discussions.
Notes on the margin of a strike
Last Thursday, BKV's Supervisory Board voted 5 to 4 against the new “parameter book" - a proposed new timetable for the city's entire public transport network - conceived by Miklós Hagyó, essentially deeming the plans inadequate for further talks. They said the parameter book lacked credible and acceptable professional arguments for the likely savings of around HUF 2 bn.
From historical evidence, BKV drew the conclusion that there was hardly any chance for the social and political acceptance of the reduced services. Therefore, they started to shift focus from scrapping routes to cutting the frequency of bus, tram, trolley and suburban railway services, essentially “spreading" the average 5% cost cutting onto the entire city.
The timetable of 196 routes out of the current 260 would be streamlined - particularly in off-peak hours and on weekends - and some routes would be partly or entirely cancelled.
If the changes are implemented in several stages by August, BKV hopes to achieve savings of HUF 700 m this year and HUF 2.1 billion in the whole of 2009.
On the other hand, the savings in 2008 would be almost entirely wiped out by the upgrades BKV would need to carry out, as the implementation of the new parameter book would require new bus stops (cc. HUF 250 m), new announcement services and the training of drivers, controllers and switchboard operators (several hundreds of millions).
The expected HUF 2.1 bn savings is hardly 20% of BKV's operating loss projected for this year and less than 2% of the company's HUF 82 bn debt.
The annual budget of the Budapest Municipality is HUF 500 bn, so the expected savings would be “peanuts", but it seems the town folks do not like peanuts.
Experts say the financial woes of BKV are to be blamed on the municipality. While the common goal in European cities is that the town hall, the government and the passengers should bear the costs of public transport equally, the Budapest Municipality seems less than keen on pitching in.
The City has been contributing only about HUF 10 bn to BKV's cc. HUF 100 bn annual budget for years and even this money is granted exclusively on developments and not to cover operating costs. It is only the icing on the cake that, for this reason or that, the municipality keeps picking away even at this HUF 10 bn every year. They skimmed off HUF 3 bn only last year.
What the experts of the sector do agree on is that the parameter book is obsolete and must be renewed."
Source: Portfolio Online Financial Journal
16.04.2008