BruinGo! should demand fares I use the Big Blue
Bus almost every day to get to campus and I noticed that drivers
usually do not seem to pay attention to whether or not students
have paid the full 25 cents, which I consider strange.
Shouldn’t drivers make sure that every passenger has paid the
correct fare? Why don’t they just ensure compliance with
current fares if the failure of students to pay it is the source of
their losses? Jeff Garnett UCLA master of public policy
candidate
Pre-union days not so glorious I found major
flaws in Alec Mouhibian’s column “Voters need to
initiate reform and ignore corrupt ad agendas” (Nov. 3). His
argument, especially regarding Proposition 75, was illogical and
should have been better thought out. For example, Mouhibian refers
to the pre-union conditions of Los Angeles as the impetus for the
Hollywood boom. He frames the pre-union days as glorious, but what
he fails to consider is that life before unions was only glorious
for the minority of bosses and company owners. For the rest, living
conditions were sub-par and the opportunity for economic growth was
minimal. Believing that the benefit of Hollywood industry was worth
the exploitation and poverty of pre-union Los Angeles is akin to
believing that life before vaccines was wonderful because there was
no overpopulation problem. I do not think the end justifies the
means. We are too young to have experienced the pre-union world,
but we can see examples of it today. Looking at companies that pay
employees far below the living wage and are resistant to provide
health care gives us a picture of what the pre-union country was
like. Unions, while corrupt and overly powerful, are necessary to
defend the job security, wages and health of working people.
Mouhibian dislikes the melodramatic and “dishonest”
messages portrayed in anti-Proposition 75 ads. Mouhibian is in fact
being hypocritical ““ he uses the most emotionally misleading
language I have ever heard, referring to the propositions’
opponents as “mafia” unions. He is guilty of using the
same scare tactics that he is accusing the unions of using. While
there are some valid reasons why these propositions might be
supported, none of those reasons were apparent in Mouhibian’s
overly emotional argument. David Damico Public health
graduate student