By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
Due to the legal requirement now for transportation franchise holders to organize themselves as cooperatives or corporations, the small operators like those with only one or two jeepney or taxi units have no choice but to become one group. It means pooling of resources to come up with a coop or company supposedly so they will have more capital to assure better units and to do away with the boundary system as I said last week.
The big question is, will it work?
Before we go to that, despite the strong opposition to that measure, it is gaining traction, bit by bit. There is already one cooperative of jeepney owners plying the Trancoville and Aurora Hill routes, in Baguio City. The brand new units they acquired are actually mini-buses. One of these can accommodate 23 sitting passengers while the center aisle can comfoprtably accommodate 10 more standing passengers. The usual rickety jeeps can only accommodate 18 to 20. Those additional 11 passengers can mean a lot during rush hours when passengers around Baguio would be forming very long queues waiting for a ride. In many instances they endure that under the rain.
Those brand new mini-buses around are made in China but they look good and appear to be well-appointed. According to the coop’s chairman who is a client of mine, the units are airconditioned, with strong wifi internet signal and with HEPA filters. HEPA stands for high efficiency particulate arrestance. I asked my client, “Isn’t it that air-conditioning is bad because bad viruses like sarscov2 that causes Covid-19 will just be circulating inside the bus?” He said, that is why there are the HEPA filters which filters and kill bacteria and viruses.
Then he told me the story of kids staying in the buses so they can have access to the internet for free. They would stay there and when they reached their destination, they would not get down. They will pay the fare going back while enjoying the air-conditioning and wifi access.
Sounded good. Then I asked, “Why China buses and not Japanese or Korean?” His answer was, I have seen what all the Japanese companies could offer at competitive prices and the Chinese buses are better. They offer the same warranty on the drive train. There were no Korean models for our purpose.”
Well, while most of the Chinese gadgets or products I ever bought were good for nothing, there were a few that lasted really long. I have a couple of wrenches that have been with me for 28 years and they are still OK. My cellphone right now is made in China and had withstood all sorts of abuse for years already. Hopefully, those mini-buses are as good.
My client then added that they had already fielded brand new units in Bauko, Moutain Province. The next would be Tabuk, Kalinga.
But let us go back to that question, “Will the concept of a cooperative or a corporation work?”
As I see it, the possible downfall of such would be due to the lack of a proprietary sense. The members of the cooperative will not own any unit. They are just part owners of the coop or the company. So when their vehicle units become older and developing a lot of problems, they will not work overnight under the car to fix the problem so it could run again the next day as an individual owner would. They will just work like ordinary employees, just from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. If they have to work overtime it will mean a big cost.
I have seen a lot of bus companies, some of them former clients, that got bankrupt because of that. Most successful bus companies in this country are family corporations. They are just extensions of individual ownership.
But actually, a land transportation company or cooperative just might work. The biggest stumbling block is our being so emotional—you raise your voice to deliver a point in a board meeting and it would be taken personally. If we could only be objective in the boardroom to discuss managerial problems in an objective way, then the concept of collective management in a cooperative or corporate set-up should mean the success of the transportation modernization concept.**
