You Don’t Need Fuzzy Math to Make the T Look Bad
Have you ever seen an NBA player on a fast break, with a clear lane to the basket and nobody there to defend him, go for the highlight dunk and wind up clanging it off the rim?
Behold, from December of 2013, the King himself: LeBron.
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Here’s something that’s kind of similar: When a panel meant to study a wildly underperforming transit agency the public’s expectations fuzzies the math to oversell the problem—and then gets called out on it.
CommonWealth magazine on Thursday picked apart the absenteeism data presented in a report from a panel convened by Gov. Charlie Baker earlier this year. The report included a notable statistic: the average MBTA employee takes 57 days off per year. That number isn’t really in dispute, but the figure includes scheduled days off, like vacation days. CommonWealth suggests use of this number—as opposed to the average number of unscheduled days off (22.5)—overstates the issue.
Another big number in the report, though, is more flummoxing. That’s the employee absentee rate, measuring how much non-planned time off was taken by T employees. The report found the system-wide rate was 11 to 12 percent. But CommonWealth found that the numbers used to arrive at that figure don’t make much sense, because the panel subtracted the number of days off from the number of total days worked.
That means it was not a measure of how many days employees took off compared to the total number of workdays on the calendar; rather, it’s a ratio of the number of unscheduled days off compared to the number of days they actually worked…which is a weird way to measure absenteeism rates. The actual number should be lower, by a few percentage points.
Even then, it’s still a bad number. It doesn’t reflect well on the T or its employees. The T’s union leader said as much to The Boston Globe in a recent interview. “Do we agree some people abuse it? Yes. Shame on those employees,’’ said Carmen’s Union head James O’Brien, speaking about the Family Medical Leave Act that some T employees have been accused of taking advantage of.
CommonWealth drives that point home.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the actual absenteeism data does appear alarming. Employees on average miss 22.5 days of work per year due to unscheduled absences. Use of the Family Medical Leave Act varies widely by employee category, suggesting that there may be some instances where it is being abused. These are areas where MBTA management could and should do more, regardless of the outcome of the governor’s reform legislation. The CTA was able to curtail absenteeism through better management, and the same could perhaps be done at the MBTA.
In other words, criticizing the MBTA for absenteeism was an easy layup. Using math to try and make it look all the worse is a dunk gone clang.
But that also means the fuzzy math may not matter all that much. After all, it’s just one play. The results of that panel’s much broader findings are at the heart of Baker’s proposed legislation to address the T’s issues. And LeBron and the Heat still beat the Bobcats that December night.
Read CommonWealth’s full analysis here.
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