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February 15, 2013

City school bus drivers union weighing request to end strike

by Philissa Cramer, at 5:51 pm

Months of tortuous and torturous commutes could end as soon as next week for the tens of thousands of students whose school bus drivers have been on strike for the last month.

Five mayoral candidates who have supported the drivers’ demands for seniority protections in city contracts have asked the Amalgamated Transit Union to end the strike, and the union’s national and local leaders have said they are considering the request. The leaders are scheduled to address members during a conference call tonight.

Reports the New York Times:

A decision to return to work would represent a major victory for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who had begun to strip the employee protections in contracts that the city signed with the private companies who run the buses. …

One driver on strike, Everest Jones, 51, a single parent of two teenagers who lives in Brooklyn, said that the strike was hard but that he felt he had made as much of a stand as he could for the protections he still hoped for.

“We all want to go back to work,” he said.

For the striking drivers, returning to work would mean getting paid for the first time in weeks. For families, “it means a return to their normal routines,” said Maggie Moroff, special education policy coordinator at Advocates for Children.

“It means the students still out will be back in school,” Moroff said. “It means the parents doing exceptional gymnastics to get their kids to school can return to their normal lives.”

Thousands of students, many with special needs, have been in and out of classes or missed school entirely because the burden of transportation has been on their parents during the strike. The city will have to do something to help them, Moroff said.

“I’m sure there will be bumps since so many of these kids have missed so much school this past month,” she said. “And, of course, the Department of Education will need to figure out next how they’re going to make up for all the school time and service time these kids lost.”

City schools are closed on Monday and Tuesday but will resume in the middle of what had been a planned vacation to make up days missed because of another unusual disruption: Hurricane Sandy, which kept city students out of school for a week last fall.

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  • guest

    I would tell the candidates to go ….F…. themselves and thanks for their support.

  • guest

    those bus drivers are totally inflexible — the rules the union inflicts on the companies create unnecessary costs. unions better learn to innovate and help management work more efficiently … or labor will ultimately suffer. solution seeking unions should be able to figure out how to cut costs … so that ny doesnt have the most expensive bus service in the country. thank you bloomberg… as usual willing to take the unpopular, long term stand. — people should get paid but they need to work HARD, Work as efficiently as possible.. and put efficiency and cost reduction high on their list of priorities.. as well as getting their salaries. unions are so important to protect middle class wages but they kill business with work rules .. and stifle innovation. until union members understand that they have an incentive also to help reduce costs… by working more efficiently.. so they can actually ask for more money… we are going to see this story play out over and over….

  • guest

    BULL. Profits are high, but they want the workers to be paid like walmart greeters. Wait until kids start getting hurt because the drivers have no experience (and all the accidents because the drivers don’t know how to handle the buses on side streets). Shame on you. It’s not the drivers designing routes, that’s the DOE.

    I can’t wait until all the anti union people start having to go back to work 6 days a week, in locked rooms/buildings, with no breaks or sick days or rights…..oh right, that already happens in the ‘right to work’ states. And if it isn’t you, it will be your kids and your kids’ kids. (Just like how all the white collar people who sent jobs overseas….their kids can’t get jobs because they aren’t here anymore.)

    I AM UNION!

  • guest

    Your union isn’t your friend.

  • guest

    Plenty of organizations without unions maintain higher quality. the idea that the union protects quality is a joke. a complete joke. ha ha ha ha ha… the union protects the mediocre. It’s governments job to require and measure quality from the private sector.

  • MrKotter

    Unions lift all boats. Do you want to go back to the days of child labor, getting fired if you get hurt on the job, 80 hr work week with no weekends, unsafe and unhealthy work environments? We’ve seen what happens when industries police themselves (ever read the Jungle – Upton Sinclair?) – look at the fast food industry, 1990′s Jack in the Box salmonella outbreak, slaughtering cows with mad cow disease, the latest horsemeat mixed with other ground meats. You need look no further than the Mayor dragging his feet on PCB light fixtures and the Chancellor saying mold infested post Sandy school buildings were ok. The greed of the 1% knows no bounds, they will never have enough. The first decade of the 21st century more and more resembles the guilded age, in place of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Carnegie you have the Waltons, Gates, Koch Bros., and Bloomberg.

  • MrKotter

    You aren’t the friend of 99% of the population.

  • KitchenSink

    I would agree with your main idea, but not your supporting details.
    Unions have an important role, and there is a line in the sand between safe/unsafe, fair/unfair, child labor/no child labor.

    But the role of unions in this case, and the way the UFT protects child abusers from getting fired, etc., goes way beyond the proper role of unions. Unions should not be bankrupting the system that feeds them.

  • guest

    They do NOT protect child abusers. They allow a fair process. I know that if a person is guilty of terrible things and they are still on the books, they do NOT support them. There have been stories about certain people in the newspapers and in the small print it always says the union does NOT defend them.

  • MrKotter

    You are a charter school guy, you are 100% anti union. Unions drew that line in the sand you speak of; there were no protections for workers until the labor movement. People are innocent until proven guilty; that is all due process is. People have the right to confront their accuser and defend against allegations. It is the bedrock of the American legal system. Accusing someone of something doesn’t make it so.

  • MrKotter

    Management wants bus drivers to get buy on 20 grand a year. Try raising a family on that. That is what this is about, not greedy unions.

  • vanna

    AND, they will get that AND, the parents of NYC will have immigrants with little or experience driving your kids to school every day…but hey the city will save money……now im just sayin

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