Photo by {ryan}.

WMATA has plenty of problems to deal with. But that won’t stop “protracted labor struggle” from being added to the list.

The Examiner takes a look into the not-so-distant future and finds that there’s a looming labor debate about to hit the beleaguered transit agency, possibly as soon as January. At the heart of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689’s concerns are the incredibly lengthy shifts worked by some Metro employees. As Kytja Weir notes, the union would obviously like to curb the number of its workers who are working “de facto” 16-hour shifts:

Train and bus operators currently must get eight hours off every 24 hours, meaning no more than a 16-hour workday. Other workers have no official limits. The report found that some employees occasionally work 16 hours or more in a day, as The Washington Examiner first reported in May.

The transit agency now says it is planning to phase in a 14-hour limit by April 2014. Additionally, the report found that some workers are logging shift after shift without a day off. There are no limits on how many days employees can work. Board members told the agency such practices need to end for the safety of the workers and riders.

“That’s negotiable,” Jeter said. “They have to come to us and negotiate it at the end of the day.”

Of course, the strained relationship between ATU Local 689 and WMATA will certainly make those negotiations tougher than they might have been otherwise: earlier this year, the union won a court case against the transit agency over back wage increases, and the union threatened to walk out on jobs in June. That’s even before we get to the general…unpleasantness between the two parties over the past few years.