MBTA tackles rampant absences

MBTA officials say rampant absenteeism is hurting bus and subway service, discouraging riders, and eating away at the agency's finances by forcing it to pay overtime.

Despite a drop in absences in the last two years, about 35 percent of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's roughly 6,000 employees were absent for 11 or more days in 2004, and 16 percent were absent 26 or more days.

The T counts employees as absent if they call in sick after using up their annual allotment of 10 sick days, if they are more than two hours late, give less than one hour's notice when calling in sick, or if they have other unexcused absences.

''If a bunch of people chronically drop out . . . the quality of service is diminished," said Daniel A. Grabauskas, the T's general manager. He said that excessive absenteeism, which the T classifies as 11 or more days a year, also leads to overworked drivers and safety concerns.

T officials acknowledge that absenteeism often went undetected because of the agency's antiquated system of tracking attendance, in which supervisors filled out handwritten note cards, known as ''blue cards" because of their color. T employee unions often cited illegible handwriting on the cards to challenge discipline for being absent.

Last week, the T started a new policy that targets employees who are chronically absent and that tracks workers' attendance more closely. The T is entering attendance into its computerized payroll system, which will alert supervisors and managers to excessive absences. The penalties are largely unchanged.

While T union officials dispute the past absenteeism statistics, they say they are on board with the new policy, which wiped the attendance slate clean for some 1,000 employees who had been disciplined under a prior policy that was instituted in April and was about to go to arbitration.

Stephan G. MacDougall, president of the Boston Carmen's Union, said the new policy is fairer than the previous one, which targeted large numbers of employees to root out abuse.

For instance, the new policy gives some leeway to veteran employees with good attendance records who have rare unexcused absences.

Grabauskas said the new attendance policy will focus more on employees who are chronically absent and less on employees with good attendance records who were swept up and ''unfairly disciplined" in past crackdowns.

Dropped trips -- trains or trolleys that do not make scheduled runs because of absenteeism -- cost ''us the good will of our customers who rely on our published service schedules, which in turn costs us lost revenue at a time when we can least afford it," Grabauskas wrote in a Jan. 9 memo to T employees explaining the new policy.

Ridership on the T hit its lowest level in a decade during the first half of last year, with average weekday boardings of 1.12 million, down 8 percent from a high point in 2000.

Khalida Smalls, coordinator for the watchdog group called the T Riders Union, said yesterday that excessive absenteeism directly affects passengers.

''People stand at their bus stop at 4:45 waiting for a bus that doesn't show up," she said. ''After a while, they completely dismiss the schedule. It no longer becomes a convenience . . . And they're stuck . . . waiting around twice as long for another bus that is likely to be full of riders because the previous bus didn't show.

''Those dropped buses are little plugs in the system, and we need all of them there to make the system run as smoothly as it can," she said.

Absenteeism has long been a problem at the T, and the problem is worst among bus and subway employees, who represent 70 percent of the T's workforce and accounted for 76 percent of days absent last year.

Absenteeism hit an eight-year high in 2003, when employees averaged 21.6 days absent. That figure dropped to 17.3 days in 2004 and to 15.8 days last year, according to T figures.

T officials attribute the drop in absences to several changes, including introducing time clocks that scan employees' hands, a high-tech means of stopping workers from clocking in absent co-workers.

Comparable absentee numbers from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are unavailable.

Spokesmen from both agencies declined to discuss absenteeism while in contract negotiations with local unions.

Grabauskas, who took over the T in May, estimated that if the agency reduced the average number of days absent from 16 to 10 a year per employee, it would be the equivalent of having roughly 150 more workers.

The T paid $50.8 million in overtime in the fiscal year that ended June 30. T officials said they did not know how much of that was necessary to cover shifts created by absent employees, although Grabauskas estimated it was in the millions.

The MBTA Advisory Board, made up of representatives from the towns and cities served by the T, has said for the past year that reducing absenteeism should be one of the T's top priorities.

Mac Daniel can be reached at mdaniel@globe.com.