Mercury Rising #5, Moon Season 1992
The Chronicle’ s front page story on the Exec bike layoff (Jan. 8) concluded that The Profession is approaching obsolescence, based on the questionable statements 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. Within a few years, you just won't be seeing them around that much. Speedway has more 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 hammer in his hand after a showdown with the new steam hammer that was to throw countless 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 Montgomery Street. Year after year, stories with headlines like Bike Messengers Face the Fax sounded the death-knell of our jobs. Yet our numbers continued to grow. Fax machines have cut into our market, but now that most everyone who wants one has one,(Surprise!) there are still thousands of local tags every day. Fax isn't cost-effective for long documents, and it’s obviously not an option for much of the cargo we haul.
Fax having failed to finish us off, the new technology that’s supposed to send us riding into the sunset (and we don't mean 19th and Irving) is good old fashioned cars! It’s clearly not that the four wheeled sludge spewers can out-perform us in the urban environment we can often literally ride circles around them. It’s supposedly that we get hurt too much, and are hence too costly to insure.
Chronicle reporter Carl T. Hall’s grasp on the complex workers’ comp situation was understandably shaky, and Executive manager Joe Kent apparently misled him by failing to point out that his company does not carry comp coverage. (We can't be certain that this omission was Kent’s, but we do know 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 bike service; they pay accident settlements directly. This places Exec in a completely different situation from other companies with respect to loss management, and renders it a poor example from which to extrapolate industry trends. (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 headline announced; it was a decision handed down by Mayne-Nickless, the Australian parent company. It may have been prompted by high losses from bike operations and/or by corporate strategic concerns or even by cultural prefercences.
Our informal survey leads us to believe that a disproportionate number of bike accidents happened to messengers working at Blueprint Service Company. ECN provided 30 bikers and a dozen scooter riders exclusively to Blueprint by special contract until they pulled out of the deal last November, citing heavy accident losses. Kent complained at that time of a couple of very serious accidents at Blueprint, including one involving a scooter messenger.
It would only take a couple of major pay outs to make self-insurance a big problem for a company. Was it wise for a self-insured company to operate a division (Blueprint) based on low hourly wage, inexperience, scooters, and high turnover? And why did it take Exec so long to get serious about loss-prevention? Mayne-Nickless seems to be betting that
ECN can save so much money on accident settlements by replacing bikes with cars, the service failures will be worth the trouble. Yet Hank Newman of COMPRO Insurance Services says most on-the-job deaths and permanent disabilities occur from motor vehicle accidents.
Exec’s move to control damage by sub-contracting the tags of bike-oriented accounts to Speedway provides a good indication that the four wheel stinko strategy can't be applied by the industry in general. The economic and geographic conditions that made us a fixture in San Francisco and dozens of cities worldwide haven't changed. A front page Examiner article last month sounded the alarm that traffic congestion is reaching crisis proportions in SF. Gas prices, dirt cheap compared to the world market, can only go up. 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 have some culture of our own, and at times it’s a pretty awkward fit with the downtown scene. We're not wildly profitable. Ugly as it is, we exist partly to facilitate the more lucrative vehicle work; for instance, keeping that big downtown law firm happy with their local deliveries so they'll call in that hot Santa Rosa court filing. As Now Courier manager Jack Stephens has pointed out, It costs just as much to administrate a $60 truck job as it does a zone 1 regular. (Stephens, Silver Bullet’s Jim Dunk and Battery Point’s Greg Austin have all recently expressed conviction that bikes will survive and remember the Austins built their business almost exclusively on bikes.)
Our numbers have only recently levelled off, and some decline may be a good thing for those of us who are already employed. The 80’s were characterized by reckless overhiring and overexpansion. The 90’s will likely see increased professionalism, with companies fielding only as many bikes as they need. But when people like Robert Bubon talk John Henry, they're essentially telling us we're lucky to have jobs. If we believe that, we'll never fight for 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. Companies make their reputations through bike service.
We've got some steel to drive, and if we didn’t show up, things wouldn’t get done.
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