San Francisco received a temporary reprieve from the threatened strike by the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) employees, as Governor Jerry Brown ordered an inquiry into a labor contract dispute, according to NBC News.
The transit strike was scheduled to begin on Monday without the eleventh hour order that Brown called for on Sunday night. In the order, Brown named a board of investigators for a seven-day inquiry into the contract dispute that had labor unions prepared to walk off the job at midnight Sunday.
Brown used a law that allows the state to intervene if a strike will significantly impact public transportation services and endanger public health to issue the order.
"For the sake of the people of the Bay Area, I urge - in the strongest terms possible - the parties to meet quickly and as long as necessary to get this dispute resolved," Brown said in the order.
The transit authority's board president, Tom Radulovich, sent a letter to the governor to request his intervention, as well as a cooling off period of 60 days, according to a statement from BART spokesman Rick Rice. The governor issued the order with a time period of a week.
"The formal, impartial, fact-finding that accompanies the cooling-off period will help clarify the points of difference between the proposals," the statement said.
The union leaders issued a statement after the order was issued, accusing the BART management negotiators of stalling until only hours were left to provide counter proposals on core pay and benefits.
"Our hope is that the Governor's Board of Investigation will reveal how little time BART management has spent at the bargaining table in the past 30 days, compared with how much time they've spent posturing to the media," Roxanne Sanchez, the SEIU 1021 president, said.
Both sides of the negotiating table left frustrated. Big differences were left on key issues, including wages, pensions, worker safety and health care costs, though they had still hoped to avert a strike at that point.
"There was definitely movement from both sides," Thomas Hock, the BART chief negotiator, said. "Hopefully, if we keep moving, we will get to a proposal that both sides can agree to."
The governor's order aims to avert the strike altogether.
"BART really is the backbone of the transit network," John Goodwin, the spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, said. "No other transit agency has the ability to absorb BART's capacity if there's a disruption."
BART workers went on strike earlier in the summer, causing major traffic problems.
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