Looming over Thursday’s begin of the 2023-24 faculty 12 months is the specter of a college bus strike that would strand greater than 150,000 youngsters.
That’s proper: Amalgamated Transit Union 1181, which represents 8,000-plus faculty bus drivers, mechanics, and escorts, has determined to take hostages — baby hostages.
That is when it’s demanding far more than the “sample” of what different metropolis staff have gained within the present spherical of contract talks.
In talks for the reason that final contract expired June 30, it has reportedly pressed for raises above the “sample” 6% hike that Mayor Eric Adams has given metropolis staff — plus the restoration of worker privileges that had been jettisoned 10 years in the past.
Conscious of how unhealthy the hostage-taking seems to be, the union is seeking to order half its members to maintain working whereas the opposite half strikes.
However that also strands tens of hundreds of scholars, together with special-needs youngsters.
A strike would sideline 16 Division of Schooling-contracted bus corporations, together with NYC College Bus Umbrella Providers, a city-run nonprofit that took over Reliant Transportation (owned by a serious donor to then-Mayor Invoice de Blasio) and its 1,000 faculty buses for $890 million in 2021.
Past the wage calls for, ATU 1181 gained’t let go of insisting on the return of so-called Worker Safety Provisions which used to require any new bus firm contracting with the town to rent the earlier contractor’s drivers and attendants on the similar seniority ranges and pay and advantages scales.
The EPP system started after a college bus strike in 1979 and ended within the early 2010s below Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The union went on strike (technically, a “half strike” because it means to do now) in 2013 to attempt to get EPPs again; Bloomberg held agency and the work stoppage fizzled out after just a few weeks.
However the Metropolis Council and de Blasio in 2014 tried to place them again, devoting $35 million a 12 months to pay bus corporations to protect the employee privileges anyway.
However most corporations didn’t take the bribe, as that system made administration near-impossible.
And, certainly, the one firm that did go alongside, Reliant, went bust amid mounting losses.
The subsidy is now a lifeless letter.
In the meantime, the unions begged the state to mandate them for the town; then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed payments to try this in 2016 and 2019.
ATU 1181 factors to the nationwide scarcity of faculty bus drivers, claiming the town is brief a number of hundred drivers as a result of pay and advantages are too low.
“College bus staff transport the town’s most treasured cargo,” says ATU 1181 boss Tomas Fret.
On that, we agree.
However EPPs had been at all times distinctive to Gotham; each different US metropolis will get its kids to highschool simply superb with out them.
And taking that treasured cargo hostage has failed prior to now.
It appears the union is keen to throw the general public faculties, and the households that depend on them, into chaos in hopes it could possibly get Adams and/or the bus corporations to roll over this time.
If Fret actually believes what he says, the honorable course is to simply hold speaking previous faculty opening day on Sept. 7. for nevertheless lengthy it takes to succeed in an settlement.
