AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

Mass Transit Workers and Neoliberal Time Discipline

in San Francisco
Mark D. Fleming

ABSTRACT San Francisco’s public transportation system is the slowest major urban transit system in the United
States and has one of the worst on-time performance rates. In this article, I examine how these problems with
time—slowness and lateness—are blamed on “unproductive” workers and mobilized as part of neoliberal restruc-
turing strategies in San Francisco. Demands for faster-moving and more timely transit lead to the implementation
and enforcement of impossible-to-meet schedules, putting transit drivers in the position of chronic lateness. City
officials and civic organizations mobilize chronic lateness to represent the transit system’s public sector workers
as fundamentally inefficient and in need of labor reform. I here suggest that the enforcement of impossible time
demands represents a new use of time discipline. While time discipline has traditionally been theorized as a central
technique in the production of the social relations of waged labor, neoliberal time discipline works to delegitimize the
wage labor contract itself and to fracture the social arrangements of long-term, waged employment. [neoliberalism,
labor, urban transportation, time discipline, United States]

RESUMEN El sistema de transporte público de San Francisco es el sistema urbano principal más lento en los
Estados Unidos y tiene uno de los peores ı́ndices de desempeño en puntualidad. En este artı́culo, examino cómo
estos problemas con relación al tiempo—lentitud e impuntualidad—son atribuidos a trabajadores “improductivos”
y movilizados como parte de las estrategias neoliberales de reestructuración en San Francisco. Las demandas por
un tránsito más rápido y más puntual llevan a la implementación y aplicación de horarios imposibles de cumplir,
colocando los conductores del tránsito en la posición de impuntualidad crónica. Los funcionarios de la ciudad y las
organizaciones cı́vicas movilizan la impuntualidad crónica para representar los trabajadores del sector público del
sistema de tránsito como fundamentalmente ineficientes y en necesidad de una reforma laboral. Sugiero aquı́ que
la aplicación de imposibles demandas de tiempo representa un nuevo uso de la disciplina del tiempo. Mientras la
disciplina del tiempo ha tradicionalmente sido teorizada como una técnica central en la producción de las relaciones
sociales de trabajo asalariado, la disciplina neoliberal del tiempo trabaja para deslegitimizar el contrato de trabajo
asalariado en sı́ mismo y para fracturar los arreglos sociales del empleo asalariado de largo plazo. [neoliberalismo,
trabajo, transporte urbano, disciplina del tiempo, Estados Unidos]

D uring an evening rush hour in San Francisco, a crowded

bus pulled up to the intersection of Mission and 24th
Streets, where a line of people had gathered at the bus stop.
After a few people had boarded the nearly full bus, a white
woman wearing a blazer and khaki pants stepped into the bus
and, blocking the line of passengers, leaned in close to the
bus driver and said angrily, “I want to speak to your manager.
I’ve been waiting for over an hour. This is ridiculous and

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 118, No. 4, pp. 784–795, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. ⃝
C 2016 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12683


I want to speak to your manager.” The African American
driver looked forward and said nothing. The woman stood
staring at the driver. When another rider intervened, saying,
“Come on. It’s not his fault,” the woman turned and lunged
as though she was going to hit the other rider with her
pocketbook, and several people standing nearby gasped. The
woman then pushed through the crowded bus and stood,
fuming.
Such scenes of public anger are common in the transit
system. The San Francisco Municipal Railway, known as
Muni, is often slow and late, and riders frequently direct
their frustrations at the drivers. Muni is, in fact, the slowest
major urban transit system in the country and has one of the
worst on-time performance rates (that is, arriving on time
to planned stops; City and County of San Francisco 2014).
In recent years, vehicles have been on time only between
50 and 60 percent of the time (SFMTA 2014). The system
averages about eight miles per hour, a low point after a
continual, three-decade decrease in speed (SFMTA 2006).
Muni’s slowness and lateness cause long wait and overall trip
times for passengers.
During peak commute hours, a fleet of nearly 800
vehicles—buses, light rail, and streetcars—streams into the
streets and contends with heavy traffic congestion, double-
parked cars, construction, and passenger overcrowding.
Most Muni transit lines operate in mixed traffic, sharing lanes
with cars, delivery trucks, and bicycles. Lack of transit-only
lanes is one of the largest sources of the system’s problems
with time. Furthermore, a shortage of working vehicles,
an aging fleet, and continual maintenance problems create
frequent delays and deepen Muni’s service difficulties. Ini-
tiatives to increase the speed and on-time performance have
faced funding shortages. In short, Muni’s problems with
time are structural. They are an effect of political stalemate
and persistent, nation-wide disinvestment in public services.
Nevertheless, San Francisco transit riders, media, and city of-
ficials often single out the transit drivers and their labor union
as the cause of Muni’s poor performance. Muni’s problems
with time—its lateness and slowness—are framed as stem-
ming from the work practices, pay and benefits, and union
protections of the transit system’s largely African American
workforce.
Transit planners and managers subject Muni drivers to
impossible-to-meet transit schedules, which do not reflect
the reality of dense traffic and crowded vehicles that the
drivers face. The design and enforcement of impossible-to-
meet schedules situate the drivers in a position of chronic
lateness. The impossible time demands create difficult work-
ing conditions for drivers, wherein they are under intensive
pressure to rush and continually miss their scheduled breaks.
The chronic lateness also generates a high degree of public
disapproval of the transit system and its workers, which
many drivers believe is compounded by race-based percep-
tions of African American public sector workers as lazy and
overpaid. City officials and civic organizations reinforce and
mobilize the public discontent about slow and late transit in
Fleming • Mass Transit Workers in San Francisco 785
ongoing political campaigns to weaken the drivers’ public
sector labor union.
I use the term neoliberal time discipline to refer to the use
of impossible time demands within strategies of labor dis-
cipline intended to dismantle secure, long-term labor con-
tracts and introduce flexible labor arrangements. The state
and employers deploy neoliberal time discipline when they
create impossible time demands and represent the continual
failure to meet the demands as a problem of unproductive
workers that must remedied through labor reform. Classic
formulations of time discipline under conditions of indus-
trial production have understood it as a tactic of continually
extracting more value from labor through the tight coordi-
nation of work activities and the extension of the working
day (Harvey 1990; Thompson 1967). Industrial time dis-
cipline has been a key technique for socializing people as
waged workers and establishing the social relations of waged
employment (Marx 1992; Taussig 1980; Thompson 1967).
By contrast, neoliberal time discipline is a tactic that uses
impossible time demands to discredit existing wage labor
contracts and devalue the social arrangements that authorize
secure, long-term employment.
While San Francisco has long been a stronghold for or-
ganized labor and progressive governance, the city is also
an intensely capitalistic hub for the finance and technology
industries. In line with a well-documented neoliberal trend
(Brown 2015; Harvey 2005; Ong 2006), public officials and
civic organizations in San Francisco address the city’s spaces,
infrastructures, and publics as sites of potential productiv-
ity for capital (Henderson 2013; McNeill 2016) and orient
policy and management toward the expansion of markets
at the expense of other notions of the public good. The
city government continues to promote an urban “livability”
policy agenda with strong support for public transportation
and walkability. However, the Muni public transit system
and its contribution to livable urban spaces are increasingly
governed through a neoliberal vision in which, as Jason
Henderson writes, “transit must be recaptured from pro-
gressive policies that envision the system as a social service
and instead optimized for the function of the private market
and to enhance the value of private property” (Henderson
2013:191). The push for neoliberal reform of transit mobi-
lizes impossible time demands to define the current system
as wasteful and unproductive. The transit schedules ensure
that the drivers are always late and generate public anger and
disapproval of the public infrastructure. City officials and
civic organizations in San Francisco deploy time discipline’s
moral requirement that workers use their time efficiently
to focus public attention on the drivers who operate the
transit system and represent them as the cause of chronic
lateness. Rather than maximizing productivity within a wage
labor contract, time discipline in this context serves to de-
fine the labor system itself as inefficient. This involves the
public circulation of racialized conceptions of public sector
workers as lazy, overpaid, and dependent on state salaries
and subsidized benefits, which has animated the attack on
786 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
public sector unions throughout the United States (Collins
2012).
Transit planners and managers design and enforce im-
possible schedules primarily as the result of budget con-
straints, outdated planning policies, and entrenched antag-
onisms between labor and management. Veteran transit
drivers reported that the inaccurate and unfeasible sched-
ules have been in place for decades, but the demand that
they be met is more recent. In 1999, as the result of new
legal mandates, the city government began measuring and
publicizing transit system timeliness, and Muni’s poor rates
of “on-time performance” became a regular part of media and
political discourse. The public circulation of on-time metrics
produces chronic lateness in the transit system as a political
problem and enrolls San Francisco’s transit-riding public as
advocates for the implementation of time discipline. Pub-
lic perceptions of lateness and blame directed toward the
drivers for the late vehicles bolster support for the introduc-
tion of flexible labor regimes and the state withdrawal from
public sector labor contracts.
I draw on eight months of fieldwork conducted periodi-
cally between 2010 and 2013, during which I rode the transit
lines and interviewed drivers, managers, union officials, and
city planners. I also analyzed relevant media and publically
available reports and attended public meetings related to
transit and city governance.
This article has five main sections. First, I situate the
concept of neoliberal time discipline within the anthropol-
ogy of temporality and neoliberalism. Second, I investigate
how chronic lateness operates in political discourse such
that transit workers and their labor contracts are portrayed
as fundamentally inefficient. I then describe the condition of
chronic lateness from the perspective of transit drivers and
show how this temporal condition leads to an antagonistic re-
lationship between drivers and public transit riders. Fourth,
I describe the construction of chronic lateness through tran-
sit planners’ scheduling practices and through the public
circulation of metrics and reports that represent the system
as chronically late. Finally, I describe how the mobilization
of public anger about late transit has worked to weaken the
drivers’ public sector labor union.
TIME DISCIPLINE AS NEOLIBERAL STRATEGY
The abstract time of the clock is a defining feature of capital-
ist social orders, enabling the commodification and exchange
of labor time (Marx 1992; Munn 1992; Postone 1993) and
giving substance to a work ethic in which time can be spent,
saved, or wasted (Thompson 1967; Weber 2009). Indus-
trial wage labor regimes require workers to comply with
the temporal logics of clock time in order to coordinate
work activities, demarcate the bounds of the working day,
and maximize production and exploitation (Marx 1992).
E. P. Thompson (1967:82) argues in his classic account of
the emergence of time-disciplined labor in 18th-century
England that “the familiar landscape of disciplined in-
dustrial capitalism, with the time-sheet, the time-keeper,
the informers and the fines” displaced previous modes of
task-oriented work driven by specific needs and “natural”
rhythms.
Anthropological studies of the spread of capitalist pro-
duction have understood time discipline as a key technique
for securing wage labor (Ong 1987; Taussig 1980). Work-
ers newly subjected to capitalist social orders have often
been indifferent or hostile to the incentives of the wage la-
bor system (Taussig 1980), requiring capitalists and colonial
administrators (Cooper 1992) to inculcate time discipline
and “time thrift” (Thompson 1967) as incitements to pro-
ductive labor. Anthropologists have focused on resistance to
time discipline (Comaroff 1991; Ong 1987) and the ways
in which wage workers maintain forms of task-oriented ac-
tivity within capitalism’s temporal regimes (Ingold 1995;
Pickering 2004). With the continual resistance to time dis-
cipline and the varied local implementations of wage labor
systems (Ortiz 2002), capitalist modes of regulating work
activity through time discipline are always multiple and in-
complete (Glennie and Thrift 1996). Despite attention to the
variability in how capitalist time discipline is applied and re-
sisted, there remains a relatively uniform concept of the role
of time discipline within strategies of capital and the state: to
maximize exploitation within a wage labor contract by co-
ordinating work activities, minimizing nonproductive time,
and extending the working day. I contend that neoliberal
transformations of work and governance entail a new use of
time discipline that is no longer tied to the aim of establishing
regimes of waged employment and maximizing productivity
within the wage contract. Neoliberal governance repurposes
time discipline in order to undermine existing wage labor
systems in the name of flexibility and efficiency.
Neoliberalism is the extension of a market logic to
the governance of ever more spheres of activity (Brown
2015; Foucault 2008; Ong 2006) and the implementation
of market-oriented policies seeking to enhance competition
and flexibility by dismantling labor unions, welfare pro-
grams, and Keynesian financial regulations and by privatizing
public infrastructures and enterprises (Harvey 2005; Peck
and Tickell 2002). The literature on neoliberalism’s distinc-
tive temporalities emphasizes foreshortened time horizons,
anticipatory orientations toward the future, and the ever-
increasing speed of capital circulation (Adams et al. 2009;
Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Guyer 2007; Harvey 1990).
With the dismantling of secure, long-term employment and
the introduction of flexible labor arrangements, workers’
futures become increasingly uncertain and precarious (Beck
1999; Harvey 2005), generating anticipatory and calcula-
tive orientations toward the future (Adams et al. 2009;
Miyazaki 2003; Molé 2010). While neoliberal temporalities
give rise to uncertain futures, the horizons of the future
have narrowed to immediate situations (Guyer 2007) or
have undergone a time–space compression (Harvey 1990)
brought about by financial capital’s demand for faster rates
of production, circulation of commodities, and capital re-
turn (Castells 1996; Guyer 2007; Sharma 2014).1 Transit

workers provide the labor enabling the increasing pace of
movement for people and commodities (Sharma 2014)
and have sometimes modulated time–space compression
through intentional slowdowns or stoppages as a means of
political protest (Sopranzetti 2014).
Neoliberal time discipline draws attention to how time
is regulated or “reckoned” (Gell 1992; Munn 1992) through
clocks, schedules, timekeepers, and financial accountings
in ways that support neoliberalism’s normative and political
commitments. The San Francisco city government measures
and manages time in the transit system through metrics cal-
ibrated to market-based growth and efficiency, which have
become indicators of good governance under neoliberalism
(Brown 2015; Foucault 2008). The enforcement of impossi-
ble schedules for San Francisco’s transit workers corresponds
to the sense that the everyday demands have become unten-
able for waged workers in neoliberal economies (Berlant
2011; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). As expectations for
market growth surpass productive capacities (Harvey 2005;
Ho 2009), workers are required to embody modes of self-
sufficiency and degrees of productivity that structural condi-
tions make impossible (Holmes 2013). Impossible demands
on workers lead to ever more frequent crises and emergen-
cies (Millar 2014; Povinelli 2011), as is reflected in the Muni
drivers’ continual subjection to public eruptions of anger,
blame, and violence. Neoliberal time discipline makes use
of such politically produced impossibility, inefficiency, and
public disapproval to discipline workers who refuse to adapt
to the flexible labor arrangements.
NEOLIBERAL GOVERNANCE AND THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF TIME
In San Francisco, an increasingly predominant neoliberal
vision of transit is promoted by a coalition of downtown
businesses, real estate interests, and professional workers
who make demands for more limited access to faster and
more timely transportation through privatization or the cre-
ation of premium rapid networks (Henderson 2013). This
vision emphasizes a monetized conception of time, wherein
city officials evaluate and manage transit speed and time-
liness through metrics of economic efficiency and growth.
Time and speed in the transit system are brought into a field
of economic calculation where they are made comparable
and interchangeable with the cost of transit drivers’ wages.
Through this logic, those demanding faster and more on-
time transit in San Francisco are able to identify the transit
system’s public sector workers and their labor union as fun-
damental causes of inefficiency and as sites of disinvestment.
Muni was founded at the end of 1912, after voters
approved public funding for the agency in response to the
private monopoly ownership of transit lines. The drivers’
Transport Workers Union Local 250-A (TWU 250-A) is
a historically African American labor union. Since the late
1960s, employment at Muni and membership in the TWU
250-A has been a “path to the middle class” for African
Americans in the Bay Area (Cothran 1995). The first African
Fleming • Mass Transit Workers in San Francisco 787
American city employee in San Francisco, Audley Cole, was
hired by Muni in 1941 (Broussard 1993). By the 1970s,
the TWU was associated with historically African American
neighborhoods in San Francisco, such as Bayview–Hunters
Point, and the labor union gained political power through
coalitions with African American community organizations
(interview with former TWU 250A president, February 13,
2013). One Muni employee told me:
Thirty years ago, the buses were basically [operated by] all African
American drivers. They all came from the same neighborhood
and it was a family thing. It was like your whole family would be
. . . bus driver[s] . . . Their families have been here for quite a
few generations and have been in the union for more than one
generation. The first to get a job at Muni is usually the first to be
in the middle class. It was a very active choice to work at Muni
and it was something that they aspired to do. [Conversation with
author, January 30, 2013]
In recent years, the demographics of the workers in
the system have gradually shifted, as the agency hired more
Asian American and Latino workers. The occupation re-
mains racialized as nonwhite, with whites making less than
six percent and African Americans about half of the work-
force (City and County of San Francisco 2015), even while
the African American population in San Francisco has de-
creased to six percent of the city’s total population (US
Census Bureau 2014). As part of the legacy of powerful la-
bor organizations in San Francisco, the TWU has had strong
labor contracts and protections since the 1960s, and employ-
ees remain some of the highest paid transit workers in the
United States. However, with rapidly rising housing prices
in San Francisco since the late 1990s, many workers were
forced to move to neighboring cities, weakening the union’s
political influence and community ties.
San Francisco has one of the highest rates of transit rid-
ership in the United States. There are about 850,000 people
living in San Francisco (US Census Bureau 2014), and the
Muni transit system sees approximately 700,000 boardings
per day. Compared to other transit systems, Muni has one of
the highest proportions of middle- and upper-income riders
(SFMTA 2006). The split between lower-income, transit-
dependent residents and professional commuters coincides
with competing conceptions of how the public system should
be governed and who it is meant to serve.
Progressive coalitions view public transit as a social good
and a mechanism for increasing access to resources and op-
portunities for low-income residents, people of color, dis-
abled people, youth, and seniors. They have been successful
in expanding access, resulting in Muni being one of the dens-
est transit networks in the nation, with stops located within
two blocks of nearly every resident in the city. Moreover,
Muni was one of the first transit agencies in the country to
build a lift-equipped bus fleet and provide a range of services
for people with disabilities.2 The vision of Muni as a social
good advances collective solutions to its time problem in-
cluding democratic planning, reduced investment in private
788 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
automobile travel, and higher taxation on capital (POWER
2012).
While San Francisco has long been seen as the leading
edge of progressive politics, the city has also been the epicen-
ter of new capitalist forms including the technology indus-
try and information economy (Castells 1996), the “sharing”
economy (e.g., Uber and Airbnb; see Hill 2015), and the
venture capital–driven start-up economy (McNeil 2016).
Along with the development of the tech-based economy, an
influx of tech workers into the city has resulted in skyrocket-
ing real estate prices and a wave of displacements. Residents
have often fought displacement by opposing the expansion
of private, tech-worker transit networks, epitomized by
the “Google Bus” (Solnit 2013). Professional workers in San
Francisco typically support progressive social ideals, but they
largely join neoliberals in the perspective that labor unions
obstruct innovation and efficiency (Henderson 2013).
With the rise of neoliberal city governance, economic
productivity becomes a central lens and metric through
which movement in the urban public sphere is assessed and
contested. Muni’s speed and timeliness are central factors
determining the system’s productivity for the economy. City
officials and transit planners often claim that Muni’s produc-
tivity needs to increase as a solution to the web of entangled
problems that has been known as “Muni’s downward spi-
ral.” At a May 2013 city hall meeting, an elected official
summarized the downward spiral as follows:
When service is unreliable, people are delayed and frustrated
in getting where they are going. Leading to negative economic
impacts and reduced quality of life . . . When Muni struggles,
it is at risk of going in a downward spiral. Ridership will suffer,
resulting in lower fare collection, and public confidence in the
system goes down, making it harder to convince our city to invest
in the system. More people drive, which results in increased
congestion and slower Muni travel times.
The feared result of this vicious cycle is a transit system that
is slow, crowded, and only used by those who rely on public
transit the most—youth, senior, disabled, and low-income
city residents—while business commuters drive and use
other forms of private transport. Faster operating speeds and
better on-time performance are thought to be the solution:
decreasing costs per trip, attracting riders away from their
cars, and reducing traffic.
In 2005, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research
Association (SPUR), an influential urban planning and trans-
portation policy organization aligned with downtown busi-
ness associations and real estate interests, released a report
entitled “Reversing Muni’s Downward Spiral” (2005) that
outlines a full range of structural problems with Muni gov-
ernance, financing, and planning.3 The report’s conclusion
is encompassed in the heading: “THE SOLUTION: 25 PERCENT
FASTER MUNI.” Under it, the authors wrote, “To reduce costs,
Muni must become more efficient. Doing more with less (or
much more with the same number of drivers) is simple—
Muni must move faster. A fast transit system costs less to
operate because it has higher productivity—measured by
the number of people a bus or streetcar carries for each hour
it operates.”
Through the metric of economic productivity, speed and
cost stand in for each other. The cost of paying the drivers is
equated with a loss in system speed and performance. The
report states that “in the past, Muni was able to provide much
more service because the cost of each employee was so much
lower. But now employees are expensive.” Labor reforms
are proposed as a solution to the problem of expensive
employees: “Though certain changes may run counter to the
unions’ short-term interests, it is in everyone’s long-term
interest to reduce unnecessary costs and improve transit
service quality enough to boost productivity.” The report
advocates labor reforms alongside suggestions to improve
traffic lights, relocate transit stops, reduce double parking,
and address other structural issues with the transit system.
Although a range of problems and solutions was identified,
by 2010, the director of SPUR narrowed the focus, stating
publicly, “The first and foremost concern for Muni should
be labor reform” (Reisman 2010). SPUR’s specific proposals
for labor reforms were taken up by politicians and put on
the ballot for public vote.
An array of community organizations and politicians has
argued that an emphasis on transit speed and productivity
has elided the social service mission of the transit system.
Progressive community-based organizations explicitly link
the productivity metric to the erosion of equity among the
urban public. For example, in debates about how to best
run Muni, members of an active San Francisco community
organization claim that “equity gets pitted against efficiency, and
the interests of working-class communities who depend on
public transit are pitted against those of professional and
managerial commuters and ‘choice riders’” (POWER 2012,
emphasis added).
The ambition to tether Muni’s temporal performance
to San Francisco’s economic productivity was made explicit
at a recent city hall meeting. Elected officials had requested
that the city economist produce a report quantifying the
economic impacts of Muni delays. Until this point, in May
2013, there had not been analyses linking Muni’s problem
with time with impacts on the productivity of the city’s
economy. During a public meeting on May 28, 2013, an
elected city supervisor explained the motivation for the study
by stating, “When there is a problem in the system and there
are delays, people think, ‘God, this is having, you know,
an economic productivity impact,’ and so this is as far as
I know the first time that we have done this analysis and
I think that it is a good start.” The analysis was limited to
the impact of delays caused only by vehicle breakdowns
during peak, weekday hours. The economist calculated that
Muni delays caused downtown businesses to lose 86,000
“customer hours” during the previous month of April, which
he translated into a $4.2 million economic loss for the month
and a $50 million impact for the year. The officials repeated
several times that this estimate was “conservative” because it
only took account of delays caused by maintenance problems

during rush hour. The accuracy of the number ($50 million)
does not matter so much as the symbolic transformation of
the experience of time delay on Muni into a loss of economic
productivity.
The economic analysis and its interpretation represent
public transit riders as consumers traveling to the city’s
shopping districts. The form of reasoning defines the pub-
lic’s (nonworking) time as an element of economic pro-
ductivity and views economic productivity as a key public
good offered by the transit system. Before the presentation
of the economic analysis, the officials asked the director of
Muni, John Haley, to present a “report card,” which showed
that Muni’s on-time performance was 58 percent for the
year, and the director said, “Clearly, this is one that needs
improvement.” At the end of the hearing, the director of
Transportation for San Francisco, Ed Reiskin, brought to-
gether the economic and temporal accountings by stating,
“I think that making the connection between the transporta-
tion system and the economy is a good way . . . to think
about how investments that we can make can improve the
performance of the system that in turn can enhance the
economy and improve the quality of life for the people in
the city.”
The release of the report reinvigorated public discussion
on Muni’s time problems. While city officials initially framed
the report as evidence of the need to invest public money
to fix the neglected mechanical problems causing the delays,
public and online discussions quickly turned toward drivers
and their work practices and salaries. This turn toward the
drivers was reflected at the end of the City Hall meeting
where the report was presented. The first person to make a
public comment was an elderly man. He stood at the podium
and spoke slowly: “I am a senior. I would say that the drivers
need to be trained afresh, so that when they have to deal
with the traveling public, especially seniors, that they would
be more respectful . . . I have seen time and time again
that seniors trying to get to the bus and the bus driver is so
inconsiderate, to not even take a few extra moments to wait
for that senior.”
When “moments are the elements of profit” (Harvey and
Marx 2010:142), and these “extra moments” are increasingly
quantified as losses for the San Francisco economy, the so-
cial service function of the transit system is excluded from
political calculation. At the same time, this rider’s accusa-
tion that the drivers are at fault for his difficulty accessing
the transit vehicles reveals the power of neoliberal time
discipline to continually reorient public attention from col-
lective and structural circumstances to the work practices of
the drivers, who are held responsible for the chronic lateness
in the transit system.
THE CONDITION OF CHRONIC LATENESS
Transit workers in San Francisco describe their work as in-
volving a constant, grinding pressure to meet a schedule
that cannot be met. Ethnographic studies of transit work-
ers (Davenport 2004) and an extensive occupational health
Fleming • Mass Transit Workers in San Francisco 789
literature (Belkić and Savić 2013; Evans and Johansson 1998;
Tse et al. 2006) have noted that the close management of
time is a defining feature of driving for a living. Urban tran-
sit workers are studied frequently within the field of work
stress research, as transit workers are known to have higher
rates of stress-related disorders than most other occupations
(Belkić and Savić 2013; Tse et al. 2006). These studies iden-
tify the task of adhering to tight schedules as a key stressor
for workers. However, in San Francisco, Muni drivers did
not complain so much about the stress of sticking to the
schedule but instead described the consequences of a con-
tinual demand to meet a schedule that they experienced as
impossible, along with the bodily exhaustion and sicken-
ing caused by the pressure to meet unfeasible expectations.
While the on-time metrics show that drivers are able to meet
the schedule for at least half of the transit stops, the drivers
nonetheless reported that the schedules are “impossible,” as
they almost always find themselves to be chronically late
by the end of the workday. I leave aside an analysis of the
drivers’ tactics of living within the condition of enforced
lateness in order to examine how this temporal condition is
mobilized within the logics of neoliberal governance in San
Francisco.
City planners and transit managers design and publicly
circulate transit schedules with specific time points for every
transit stop. The transit schedules orient the public’s tempo-
ral expectations. As one driver put it, “Whoever makes the
schedules, they’ve never been out there” (conversation with
author, March 10, 2011). The schedules are often described
as being “not realistic.” Another driver I interviewed said,
“They make the schedule based on someone zipping around
as fast as they can” (conversation with author, January 21,
2011).
I met a union shop steward named John who explained
that drivers frequently rush to meet the schedule, only to
fail.4 John said, “It’s like people are brainwashed. They think
that they have to rush and rush in order to stay on time. But
it’s impossible. I tell the operators, they are on time if they
show up to the barn on time and sign in on time. What
happens out there [pointing to the street], they can’t do
anything about” (conversation with author, December 20,
2010). John urges drivers not to rush, but they rarely follow
his advice in their attempts to get a bathroom break or to
avoid being cited by the often-punitive managers.
Drivers expressed frustration and perplexity at the tran-
sit system’s scheduling practices. On a Thursday afternoon,
I was riding on the 38-Geary bus with an African American
driver named Clifford. The 38-Geary is one of the busiest
lines in the city, with over 50,000 boardings per day. As he
drove the bus out to the VA Hospital by Ocean Beach, where
his shift starts, Clifford told me that, during the most recent
round of scheduling, management shaved off a few minutes
from the scheduled trip back into town. Now he has 54 min-
utes to get back to the Transbay Terminal on the other side
of the city. Clifford said, “You probably can’t even do that in
a car in this traffic. Someone should look if these schedules
790 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
are illegal. They expect you to drive so fast that it must
be illegal” (conversation with author, January 14, 2011).
The only way that Clifford is ever able to approximate the
schedule is by speeding and skipping breaks, practices that
he believes are illegal yet encouraged by the management. I
rode along with drivers on most of the system’s major lines
and observed that vehicles were delayed most frequently by
overcrowding, heavy traffic, double-parked delivery vehi-
cles, construction delays, and vehicle maintenance issues.
Drivers’ difficulties meeting the planned transit sched-
ules lead to frequent negative interactions with the public.
When vehicles are late and crowded, riders are more likely
to be hostile or violent toward the driver or other passen-
gers. A 43-year-old Asian American driver said, “The people
are very rude! They are definitely the hardest part of the job”
(conversation with author, March 10, 2011). Some drivers
described how an offensive or disrespectful passenger can
ruin their day. An African American driver with 17 years of
experience said, “My normal character is to be outgoing and
friendly, but I can’t be that way here. You can be having a
good day and then someone will just take that right away
from you” (conversation with author, January 24, 2011).
This driver believes that conditions have worsened in recent
years. “It’s the construction and the traffic. And then buses
are always crowded and the people are mad. It didn’t used
to be so bad.”
Verbal and physical assaults on Muni drivers are a com-
mon occurrence. Assaults are a leading cause of injury and
death for urban transit workers in major cities including
San Francisco (Markowitz et al. 2005; Ragland et al. 1998).
Drivers told me about being involved in fistfights, stabbings,
and shootings on the bus. Verbal assaults are a near-daily ex-
perience, and such incidents often remain unreported. Spit-
ting incidents are especially salient at Muni. I interviewed a
psychologist who works for the city and sees employees after
assaults. He estimated that a third of assaults involve drivers
being spat on, which mirrors statistics released by New York
City’s transit system, where spitting incidents have received
more public attention (Grynbaum 2010). The psychologist
believes that the repeated spitting incidents reflect a deep
“disrespect” on the part of the San Francisco public toward
drivers.
Drivers I spoke with believed that assaults are instigated
by the crowded conditions and late service, along with the
negative representations of drivers circulating in the pub-
lic sphere. A recent article reported that assaults on Muni
drivers have increased to an average of one assault every three
and a half days. In the article, a union official attributed the
rise in violence to public representations of drivers. The of-
ficial said, “There has been a lot of negative information put
out there about us by the media and management and we’re
starting to notice a real hostile reaction against our workers”
(Reisman 2011).
Significantly, many drivers also report that the riders are
the best part of the job. Clifford especially likes helping, as he
said, “old people and families with kids” (conversation with
author, January 14, 2011). Drivers spoke of regular riders
who greet them and compliment their driving. An African
American driver told me, “I am a civil servant. I do this job
to help the people, to give them the service. The people
come first. Their safety is always on my mind” (conversation
with author, November 6, 2012). When drivers reported
having good experiences on the job, in the majority of cases,
they described helping riders. A 22-year veteran African
American driver said, “I’m happy at the end of the day if I
did a good job making sure that the elderly with bags got on
and off the bus safely” (conversation with author, February
7, 2011). When the vehicles are late and slow, the drivers
are less often able to engage in a relationship of service and
recognition.
PRODUCING CHRONIC LATENESS
One afternoon before the start of the evening commute, I
sat at a table inside a Muni bus division with a driver on the
14-Mission line named Ramon. Ramon is a Latino man who
has lived in San Francisco his entire life. I held a copy of the
14-Mission schedule that the dispatcher had given me, and
Ramon asked me why I had it. When I told Ramon that I
was learning about transit scheduling, Ramon pointed at the
schedule in my hand and said angrily, “That is management
trying to do us wrong” (conversation with author, February
18, 2011).
In interviews with transit planners and managers,
they explained the practice of designing and circulating
impossible-to-meet schedules in terms of budgetary con-
straints, planning and labor policies, and unmanageable traf-
fic conditions. A central reason that transit planners continue
to design such tight schedules is to save money. On paper,
the system’s costs go down when the schedules are made
tighter. If the planners designed schedules that accounted
for the realities of dense traffic, double-parked vehicles,
passenger crowding, and mechanical problems with Muni
vehicles, the managers would have difficulty allocating the
required amount of service within their budget. A transit
planner named Martin told me, “So there is always this ten-
sion between trying to run the buses as fast as you can,
because it saves a lot of money, and the drivers . . . When
your running time [the amount of time in the schedule] in-
creases, it makes it easier for the driver to make the schedule,
but the costs go way up. So you are always trying to push
the schedule as tight as you can” (conversation with author,
March 15, 2012). He continued, “So we need operators who
can drive the bus as safely but as aggressively as possible.”
Planners were less likely than drivers to describe the
schedules as “impossible,” but they did recognize that
their scheduling practices create difficult conditions for the
drivers. Another transit planner said, “Basically we say,
here’s the schedule. Here’s what you got to do, and if you
don’t do it, we’re going to beat up on you. Because, ok,
well what if some idiot decided to try to turn in front of a
bus and you’re stuck there for three minutes? Why is that
your fault?” (conversation with author, March 6, 2012).

While acknowledging that the planning practices are
hard on the drivers, a transit planner named Bill portrayed
himself as having no choice over the matter. He described the
process of actually making the schedule as “rational and just
purely technocratic” (conversation with author, February 3,
2012) and represented schedulers as unconcerned with the
politics behind the complex work rules and planning poli-
cies. Bill said, “The scheduler doesn’t care about the policies.
They just need to know them so they can program them in.”
While Bill understands the scheduling process as a purely
technical task, it is nonetheless shaped by labor union rules.
He said, “They [planners] really like the computer system to
be free of all constraints so that it can be the most efficient
thing possible.” Work rules regarding shift length, overtime,
seniority, and part-time hiring are sources of constraint for
their modeling systems. As Bill went on to say, “The more
constraints you have, the more narrow your solution space
is.” A computer system free of constraints assumes a com-
pletely flexible workforce willing to work a wide variety of
shift lengths. Another planner with whom I spoke said, “The
more you can break shifts up overall, the greater the effi-
ciency of the schedule.” In this view, the union’s work rules
requiring eight-hour work shifts and the union’s unwilling-
ness to introduce flexible employment arrangements result
in an inefficient schedule. Transit planners attribute their
inability to design more realistic schedules to the limitations
imposed by the drivers’ labor union. Bill acknowledged a
tendency to blame the drivers and their union for the sys-
tem’s chronic lateness, stating, “Whenever you’re criticized
for not meeting the performance measures, blame the work
rules. But I guess it’s kind of like playing labor and the public
off of each other.”
The metrics and standards (the performance measures)
that define the transit system as chronically late were writ-
ten into the San Francisco municipal code in 1999 through
a voter-initiated ballot proposition. The ballot proposition,
known as Prop E, was designed by SPUR, the San Francisco
policy organization, and was meant to hold the system ac-
countable for its increasingly poor service by creating a set of
metrics and rules for assessing and publicizing the transit sys-
tem’s performance.5 The proposition passed with more than
60 percent of the vote and included an official definition of
an on-time Muni vehicle. The municipal code now defines
Muni vehicles as “on-time” when they arrive at particular
transit stops within a five-minute window: no more than
one minute early or four minutes late. Prop E also included
an on-time standard for the entire system, stating, “At least
85 percent of vehicles must run on-time . . . as measured
against a published schedule that includes time points.”
These new definitions and standards provide the met-
rics through which the system is constructed as chronically
late. The 85 percent on-time standard for the system has
never once been met. While the proposition does not im-
pose penalties for falling below the 85 percent standard, it
does require the transit system to regularly publicize the
on-time performance of the system and specifically states
Fleming • Mass Transit Workers in San Francisco 791
that the reports be published in “an official newspaper of the
City and County” of San Francisco. The requirement that the
continual failure to meet the on-time standards be circulated
in newspapers continues to enroll the public in the project of
constructing the system as chronically late. Newspapers have
been reporting on Muni’s substandard on-time performance
for over 15 years. During my fieldwork, a local newspaper
uncovered that Muni had been inflating its on-time perfor-
mance numbers by as much as 18 percent. While it appeared
that the system’s on-time performance was creeping up to
nearly 70 percent, the actual rate remained in the fifties.
The revelation that Muni had been publicizing inflated num-
bers was met with outrage yet little surprise from a public
who had grown accustomed to Muni’s poor performance
numbers (Elinson 2012).
Through the ballot proposition, the public took part in
the implementation of the on-time metrics and served as an
audience for the performance reports. The chief executive of
the transit system, Debra Johnson, explained the continued
use of metrics that define the transit system as always late
by deferring to the public political process. In an interview,
she said, “That was a proposition that a group of people put
forth on the ballot, and it was passed, and it’s something
to which we must adhere” (interview, May 9, 2012). The
chief executive did not expect that the transit system would
meet Prop E’s performance standards anytime soon. She
said, “Keeping in mind that we’re supposed to adhere to
85 percent on-time performance, that’s insane . . . I’m not
going to say it’s impossible to meet these standards, but you
would have to have a lot of different things in place to get
there.”
While transit managers and planners are also subjected
to a public expectation to meet impossible time demands,
the political pressure for more timely transit comes down
hardest on the drivers. As the drivers interface directly with
the public, their visible work practices are associated with
the late vehicles, and the drivers become targets of public
anger.
TIME AND NEOLIBERAL PUBLICS
I describe here how the oppositional relationship between
public workers and the publics they serve contributes to
the direct, political undermining of the transit workers’ la-
bor union. The construction and enforcement of impossible
time demands have sustained public disapproval of the transit
system and incited a high level of public hostility. City offi-
cials and civic organizations seeking to weaken public sector
unions have mobilized public anger about late service as part
of the attack on the political position of public workers.
In the wake of the 2008–2009 US economic recession,
Muni had a shrinking budget and began to cut service. Transit
vehicles were slower and more crowded than ever. In 2010,
Muni management sought concessions from the Transport
Workers Union to close the growing budget gap. Public
officials claimed that Muni would have to raise fares unless
the labor union agreed to concessions, representing possible
792 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016
solutions to the budget shortfall as a contest between the
drivers and the riders. The union’s rank and file rejected a
contract containing concessions, arguing that the concessions
were too broad and that the proposal attacked labor without
considering any other sources of revenue.
The mayor, city officials, SPUR, and Muni management
all framed the budget crisis as a contest between the public
interest and union wages. By 2010, there was growing public
animosity toward the TWU. In response to widespread con-
demnation, the TWU staged a demonstration on March 1st
outside of city hall to protest what they saw as a concerted ef-
fort on the part of the mayor and Board of Supervisors to pit
the public and labor against each other. Union members held
signs that read, “Operators are not to blame” and “Riders
and Operators Unite.” They chanted, “Where is the money?
Where is the money?” and claimed that city hall was exploit-
ing the budget crisis to attack labor. As one protestor said,
“What we need to start doing is asking, where is the money
downtown? Because what they are doing is pitting us [rid-
ers and drivers] against one another.” Union representatives
made speeches about the shared interest of riders and drivers.
One driver took the bullhorn and said, “As for the senior
citizens, I know firsthand how mayor Gavin Newsom and the
Board of Supervisors neglect the seniors in this city. We must
come together as one and show them that we are a team.”
Public resentment toward drivers continued to surge,
and a partnership between city officials and SPUR was
formed to launch the “Fix Muni Now” campaign, which
aimed to put the transit drivers’ labor contract up for a vote.
The campaign collected 75,000 signatures and successfully
added the voter initiative titled “Proposition G: Transit Op-
erator Wages” to the November 2010 ballot. The propo-
sition promised to revoke wage guarantees and reduce the
union’s bargaining power.6
The campaign for the proposition foregrounded the
lateness of the vehicles and connected the system’s time
problems to the transit workers’ contract with the city. A
television commercial promoting the proposition began by
showing a city politician, Sean Elsbernd, waiting at a bus
stop, checking his watch. A voiceover says, “Supervisor Els-
bernd is tired of waiting.” The bus stop becomes increasingly
crowded, and the voiceover explains that Proposition G will
“put riders first by ending the wasteful work rules and bro-
ken salary formula that contribute to poor Muni service.”
The camera cuts back to Elsbernd, who says, “Are you tired
of waiting? Let’s fix Muni now. Vote yes on Prop G.”
Proposition G promised to reduce the union’s bargain-
ing power by legally prioritizing the “public” over transit
system employees during contract negations. The proposi-
tion stipulated that when there is a conflict between the union
and management over a contract provision, the union must
“prove by clear and convincing evidence” that the union’s in-
terest “outweighs the public’s interest in effective, efficient,
and reliable service.” This stipulation echoes the popular por-
trayal of the drivers’ union as gaining resources and power
at the temporal and monetary expense of the riding public
(Nevius 2010).
Media and political discourse about overpaid transit
workers portrayed them as lazy, privileged, and respon-
sible for the city’s budget problems.7 These representations
correspond to the rightwing portrayal of public workers as
the new “welfare queens” (Collins 2012) who take advan-
tage of the public system through excessive benefits. In San
Francisco, city officials argued that transit workers simply
do not work enough for the pay that they receive. One offi-
cial told me in an interview, “They get paid sixty or seventy
thousand dollars, you know, 25 to 30 dollars an hour, plus
their overtime. And their benefits are a hundred percent of
their wages. So you’re talking about a 125,000-dollar per-
son. You need to do 125,000 dollars worth of work, and that
isn’t happening” (conversation with author, May 11, 2012).
Drivers and union officials charged that the political
attack on the TWU was underpinned by race-based assess-
ments of African American workers. An African American
driver with 13 years on the job told me that, in the eyes of the
public, the drivers “are black people getting paid too much”
(conversation with author, January 13, 2011). Drivers re-
ported in interviews and informal conversations that racism
plays a role in the riders’ frequently abusive and violent
treatment of the workers. A labor activist I interviewed
echoed this point, saying, “I think part of the hostility of the
San Francisco population towards the Muni drivers—the
spitting, the assaults, the aggressive driving—I think it’s a
classist and racist problem embedded in the San Francisco
psyche. This is apparent in the kinds of comments, ‘I don’t
sit on my ass to make 60 thousand a year,’ that you hear all
the time” (conversation with author, September 22, 2010).
While many drivers mentioned race as an important fac-
tor in the Proposition G campaign, references to race were
largely excluded from media and public discourse. One no-
table exception was when city supervisor Chris Daly, during
a meeting of the transit system’s governing board on April
27, 2010, described the TWU as “a largely black or African
American union” and said, “I believe that if a white politician
moves forward to do something that negatively impacts a
class of people who are African American . . . There are
racial undertones.” Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, who led the
Proposition G campaign, became infuriated and responded,
“A member of this board is accusing me of taking action
that has racial undertones, accusing me of being a racist.”
In Elsbernd’s view, Daly’s remarks were a personal attack,
which, as Elsbernd said, is “conduct against the rules of the
board.” Another white supervisor, Bevan Dufty, stated, “I
am deeply troubled by the discussion here at the board,
questioning the actions of one of our colleagues as being . . .
racially motivated . . . I am disappointed that that kind of
discussion is taking place here.” The quick condemnation
of references to race worked to reorient discourse back to
metrics of economic efficiency as the fundamental problem
of city governance.

The proposition passed with 64 percent of the vote.
In historically pro-labor San Francisco, this direct disman-
tling of organized labor was significant yet largely uncontro-
versial. With their decreased bargaining power, the TWU
gave in to concessions, including the hiring of part-time
drivers and wage freezes. The increased number of part-
time drivers, along with an agreement requiring new em-
ployees pay into their pension while established employ-
ees do not, ushered in a two-tiered employment system
at Muni. The introduction of flexible labor arrangements
(the hiring of part-time drivers) and the two-tiered hiring
system were widely seen as significant losses for the labor
union.
These events reflect a national trend toward states acting
to limit the bargaining power of public sector unions. In the
aftermath of the 2008–2009 economic recession, legislators
across the United States initiated a “war on public sector col-
lective bargaining,” representing the most widespread and
transformative attack on public sector unions in US history
(Freeman and Han 2012:387). Some states, most promi-
nently Wisconsin and Ohio, passed sweeping measures out-
lawing collective bargaining for public employees, precip-
itating large-scale mobilizations on the part of unions and
their allies. Wisconsin saw crowds of more than 100,000
people protesting the antiunion measures (Collins 2012),
and in Ohio a union-led coalition overturned the ban on
collective bargaining through a voter referendum (Freeman
and Han 2012).
Proposition G in San Francisco implemented far more
narrow reforms, and the political response did not extend
beyond the union’s legal challenges to the measure.8 As I
have argued, the public accounting of time in San Francisco’s
transit system—and the construction of chronic lateness as
a sign of inefficient labor—generates an antagonistic rela-
tionship between public workers and the publics they serve.
This antagonism erodes the solidarities between workers
and publics that have led to organized opposition to neolib-
eral labor reforms in other contexts (Collins 2012). Rather
than securing the conditions of wage labor, time discipline
in San Francisco’s public transit system undermines pub-
lic sector labor contracts by fracturing the social arrange-
ments supporting them. The capacity of chronic lateness to
incite political transformations asks us to consider further
how neoliberalism’s temporal accountings deepen and in-
strumentalize social and economic difference in the process
of remaking society.
Mark D. Fleming University of California; mark.fleming@ucsf.edu
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I am indebted to the many people who
contributed to my fieldwork, especially the transit employees. I
want to thank Nancy Burke, June Fisher, Deborah Gordon, Charles
Hirschkind, Sharon Kaufman, Janet Shim, Joel van de Sande, and
Fleming • Mass Transit Workers in San Francisco 793
Ian Whitmarsh for reading earlier drafts of this material. I also
want to thank Deborah Lustig, David Minkus, Christine Trost,
and the fellows at UC Berkeley’s Center for Research on Social
Change, as well as editor-in-chief Michael Chibnik and the anony-
mous reviewers at the American Anthropologist, for providing gener-
ous and insightful feedback. This research was supported by grants
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Science Research
Council.
1. Guyer (2007) suggests that the “near future” has been evacu-
ated, narrowing concerns to both immediate and very long-term
temporal horizons.
2. Muni implemented services for people with disabilities more
than a decade before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Muni employees often mentioned to me that Muni was the first
bus system to build in wheelchair lifts.
3. SPUR holds a complex mix of progressive and neoliberal visions
for city transit (Henderson 2013). While promoting a “livability”
agenda advocating increased public transit, walking, and biking,
SPUR has consistently identified the Muni drivers and their labor
union as a central obstacle to solving the transit system’s problem
with time.
4. All names are pseudonyms.
5. The proposition also restructured the governance of the Muni
system by creating a Board of Directors appointed by the mayor.
6. Drivers’ wages had been set by a formula guaranteeing automatic
wage increases. This formula was codified in the city charter in
1967 through a voter proposition meant to assure labor peace and
retain professional drivers.
7. I reviewed comments sections of online news media and found
a pervasive discourse about the drivers’ work ethic. Consider
this comment from Streetsblog SF (Rhodes 2010), for example:
“I suppose since they have no education, no work ethic and no
skills that yes not being able to drive a bus without getting in an
accident must be very ‘stressful and difficult’ . . . that must be
why there are so many fat, lazy bus drivers now on disability for
their injuries from sitting on their butts doing nothing.”
8. During my fieldwork in 2013, a Public Employment Relations
Board judge struck down the requirement that the public interest
be given precedence over workers’ interests, arguing that this
provision obstructed the union’s right to bargain on behalf of its
employees.
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