Looming over Thursday’s start of the 2023-24 school year is the threat of a school bus strike that could strand more than 150,000 kids.
That’s right: Amalgamated Transit Union 1181, which represents 8,000-plus school bus drivers, mechanics, and escorts, has decided to take hostages — child hostages.
This is when it’s demanding much more than the “pattern” of what other city workers have won in the current round of contract talks.
In talks since the last contract expired June 30, it has reportedly pressed for raises above the “pattern” 6% hike that Mayor Eric Adams has given city workers — plus the restoration of employee privileges that were jettisoned 10 years ago.
Aware of how bad the hostage-taking looks, the union is looking to order half its members to keep working while the other half strikes.
But that still strands tens of thousands of students, including special-needs kids.
A strike would sideline 16 Department of Education-contracted bus companies, including NYC School Bus Umbrella Services, a city-run nonprofit that took over Reliant Transportation (owned by a major donor to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio) and its 1,000 school buses for $890 million in 2021.
Beyond the wage demands, ATU 1181 won’t let go of insisting on the return of so-called Employee Protection Provisions which used to require any new bus company contracting with the city to hire the previous contractor’s drivers and attendants at the same seniority levels and pay and benefits scales.
The EPP system began after a school bus strike in 1979 and ended in the early 2010s under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The union went on strike (technically, a “half strike” as it means to do now) in 2013 to try to get EPPs back; Bloomberg held firm and the work stoppage fizzled out after a few weeks.
But the City Council and de Blasio in 2014 tried to put them back, devoting $35 million a year to pay bus companies to preserve the worker privileges anyway.
But most companies didn’t take the bribe, as that system made management near-impossible.
And, indeed, the one company that did go along, Reliant, went bust amid mounting losses.
The subsidy is now a dead letter.
Meanwhile, the unions begged the state to mandate them for the city; then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed bills to do that in 2016 and 2019.
ATU 1181 points to the national shortage of school bus drivers, claiming the city is short several hundred drivers because pay and benefits are too low.
“School bus workers transport the city’s most precious cargo,” says ATU 1181 boss Tomas Fret.
On that, we agree.
But EPPs were always unique to Gotham; every other US city gets its children to school just fine without them.
And taking that precious cargo hostage has failed in the past.
It seems the union is willing to throw the public schools, and the families that rely on them, into chaos in hopes it can get Adams and/or the bus companies to roll over this time.
If Fret really believes what he says, the honorable course is to just keep talking past school opening day on Sept. 7. for however long it takes to reach an agreement.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
