Mercury Rising #5, Moon Season 1992
The Chronicle’ s front page story on the Exec bike layoff (Jan. 8) concludedthat The Profession is approaching obsolescence, based on the questionablestatements of a couple of bosses, and perhaps on wishful thinking. Interestingly,the article’s central premise came by way of Speedway manager Robert Bubon,who pronounced, Bike messengers are becoming a thing of the past. Withina few years, you just won't be seeing them around that much. Speedway hasmore than doubled its bike staff over the last few months. Go figure!
Remember that old folk song about John Henry, the "steel drivin’man who heaved the last gasp of his profession when he died with his hammerin his hand after a showdown with the new steam hammer that was to throwcountless railroad laborers out of work? That old legend embodies a myth:that anything human power can do, machine power can do faster, more efficiently.
Throughout the 80’s the specter of John Henry loomed over MontgomeryStreet. Year after year, stories with headlines like Bike Messengers Facethe Fax sounded the death-knell of our jobs. Yet our numbers continuedto grow. Fax machines have cut into our market, but now that most everyonewho wants one has one,(Surprise!) there are still thousands of local tagsevery day. Fax isn't cost-effective for long documents, and it’s obviouslynot an option for much of the cargo we haul.
Fax having failed to finish us off, the new technology that’s supposedto send us riding into the sunset (and we don't mean 19th and Irving) isgood old fashioned cars! It’s clearly not that the four wheeled sludgespewers can out-perform us in the urban environment we can often literallyride circles around them. It’s supposedly that we get hurt too much, andare hence too costly to insure.
Chronicle reporter Carl T. Hall’s grasp on the complex workers’ compsituation was understandably shaky, and Executive manager Joe Kent apparentlymisled him by failing to point out that his company does not carry compcoverage. (We can't be certain that this omission was Kent’s, but we doknow that it did not show up in Hall’s notes.) Exec is, as far as we know,the only self-insured messenger company in town. They don't pay the workers’compensation rates that had allegedly forced (them) to discontinue bikeservice; they pay accident settlements directly. This places Exec in acompletely different situation from other companies with respect to lossmanagement, and renders it a poor example from which to extrapolate industrytrends. (For more on the comp morass, Spokes,page 9.)
This is where the well-intentioned Mr. Hall was led astray. It wasn't"Workers’ Comp Costs Throwing Bike Messengers Out of Work as the headlineannounced; it was a decision handed down by Mayne-Nickless, the Australianparent company. It may have been prompted by high losses from bike operationsand/or by corporate strategic concerns or even by cultural prefercences.
Our informal survey leads us to believe that a disproportionate numberof bike accidents happened to messengers working at Blueprint Service Company.ECN provided 30 bikers and a dozen scooter riders exclusively to Blueprintby special contract until they pulled out of the deal last November, citingheavy accident losses. Kent complained at that time of a couple of veryserious accidents at Blueprint, including one involving a scooter messenger.
It would only take a couple of major pay outs to make self-insurancea big problem for a company. Was it wise for a self-insured company tooperate a division (Blueprint) based on low hourly wage, inexperience,scooters, and high turnover? And why did it take Exec so long to get seriousabout loss-prevention? Mayne-Nickless seems to be betting that
ECN can save so much money on accident settlements by replacing bikeswith cars, the service failures will be worth the trouble. Yet Hank Newmanof COMPRO Insurance Services says most on-the-job deaths and permanentdisabilities occur from motor vehicle accidents.
Exec’s move to control damage by sub-contracting the tags of bike-orientedaccounts to Speedway provides a good indication that the four wheel stinkostrategy can't be applied by the industry in general. The economic andgeographic conditions that made us a fixture in San Francisco and dozensof cities worldwide haven't changed. A front page Examiner article lastmonth sounded the alarm that traffic congestion is reaching crisis proportionsin SF. Gas prices, dirt cheap compared to the world market, can only goup. And people still want stuff there NOW.
How can we explain the persistence of the John Henry myth? We're not,contrary to Joe Kent’s statement, part of the downtown culture. We havesome culture of our own, and at times it’s a pretty awkward fit with thedowntown scene. We're not wildly profitable. Ugly as it is, we exist partlyto facilitate the more lucrative vehicle work; for instance, keeping thatbig downtown law firm happy with their local deliveries so they'll callin that hot Santa Rosa court filing. As Now Courier manager Jack Stephenshas pointed out, It costs just as much to administrate a $60 truck jobas it does a zone 1 regular. (Stephens, Silver Bullet’s Jim Dunk and BatteryPoint’s Greg Austin have all recently expressed conviction that bikes willsurvive and remember the Austins built their business almost exclusivelyon bikes.)
Our numbers have only recently levelled off, and some decline may bea good thing for those of us who are already employed. The 80’s were characterizedby reckless overhiring and overexpansion. The 90’s will likely see increasedprofessionalism, with companies fielding only as many bikes as they need.But when people like Robert Bubon talk John Henry, they're essentiallytelling us we're lucky to have jobs. If we believe that, we'll never fightfor a fair shake. They need us. Don't think for a moment that they don't.And more than ever, what they need are cautious, experienced pros. Companiesmake their reputations through bike service.
We've got some steel to drive, and if we didn’t show up, things wouldn’tget done.
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