I spent 24 years on the inside as a management employee. For that entire time I was in Rolling Stock and Shops (rail vehicle maintenance) at the shop level, in the shops, every working day.

Although I was not in a union, I can tell you why it is a good thing the people who actually do the work are in one.

BART's upper management has not historically been composed of a majority of people who worked their way up from the bottom on the inside. Rather it has been a prime example of the MBA degree paradigm that has materially affected managerial practice in this country for the last half century.

The way it works is this: You go to college, get an advanced degree, say a masters in public administration and voila, you are ready to run the water works, the sewage treatment plant or the transit system, no experience necessary. No need to know the details of any of those pesky little widgets and thingamabobs that make it all work, oh, hell no.

(Two exceptions to this at BART were GMs Frank Wilson and Tom Margro who had engineering degrees. And I'm not saying all BART's upper management has always been or is currently useless. I'm just trying to make a point about why unions aren't a bad thing for BART.)

What you end up with is an intellectual, policy wonk, politically correct elite running the place. Many of these people have never had dirt under their fingernails, turned a wrench or used a voltmeter or a soldering iron.

With that mindset in place, what follows is that all the workers are just interchangeable units for the bean counters to juggle, identical to the machinery in any factory production line.

People with advanced non-technical degrees who don't know how technical things work or what it takes to maintain and repair them often have little respect for those who do. It's all just so simple to them:

"Oh, we can just hire technicians and mechanics off the street any time we need them. Those people are a dime a dozen. Look at them lined up waiting to come to work here."

I'm here to tell you, once technically trained and experienced people come to work at BART and find out how complicated everything is and how long it actually takes to figure out how everything works, it's not so simple. There's a lot to know that you can't know if you've never worked on something like a BART car. And you don't figure it all out in a week or two.

Unless I missed something, the gripe about union workers is that they get paid too much in wages and benefits. Obviously, the converse without the union is a lower paid fewer benefits workforce. Lesser pay and benefits means fewer people stick around long enough to figure out how to do the job with skill and confidence.

Large corporations and banks have recently used the argument that they need to pay exorbitant salaries and bonuses to retain the type of elite management talent that has ultimately run some of those companies into the ground.

The argument that unions at BART promote the retention of a more experienced and talented workforce is actually more valid.

What could likely result without a union with an elite public management educated mindset running the place, is a revolving door of low paid, low skilled, disenfranchised workers. You want those people fixing your trains?