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The city Department of Education is set to approve new lucrative contracts for yellow busing with a host of companies that employ non-union labor, new documents show.
Of the $142 million in annual school-bus contracts that will be voted on by the Panel for Educational Policy later this month, $54 million worth of work is slated for non-union firms.
Four of those companies have not previously done business with the city’s public-school system.
The contracts, which account for about one-sixth of the city’s yellow-bus routes, were bid out this year for the first time in 34 years — without long-standing job protections for current drivers and matrons.
The DOE believes the plan will save 100 million dollars over the next 5 years, or 20 million dollars each year.
Drivers from Amalgamated Transit Union’s Local 1181 — who went on a monthlong strike earlier this year in an unsuccessful bid to maintain those protections — are slated to get just $11 million worth of annual work among the new contracts.
Matrons from the union are slated to handle a separate $21 million worth of routes.
City documents also reveal that the city quietly extended contracts worth $160 million per year with two firms that had been forced to agree to external monitoring in 2010 after having been implicated in a federal bribery case.
The proposed contracts, which are up for vote by the PEP on May 22, were slammed by Local 1181 President Michael Cordiello.
“Seeing as how many of these bids are simply extensions of existing contracts, we once again ask the mayor to prove where he is finding his $100 million in cost savings,” he said.
“There is, and has never been, any evidence that removal of the [employee protections] result in cost savings.”
At least two of the firms — Mar-Can Transportation and Careful Bus — were also implicated in the federal investigation that found bus companies were bribing inspectors for favorable reviews.