Misguided school-bus drivers plan to take 152,000 New York City students (a third of them special-needs kids) hostage when they go on strike as early as tomorrow.
The drivers need to take a hard look at just who’s advising them — and Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott need to hold firm and not negotiate with hostage-takers: Don’t be blackmailed into granting illegal job guarantees.
Mind you, the city doesn’t even employ these drivers; they work for independent companies who contract with the city. And the employee protections that the union is seeking have already been ruled illegal by the state Court of Appeals. (That case covered drivers of pre-K kids, but the precedent still holds.)
The members of the Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1181, are being lied to and misled by their leaders. No other school district in the nation has such job protections.
Of course, the strike also targets the city’s move to bid out the bus routes in order to lower costs and gain greater efficiency for its contracted transportation services, for which it now pays far more than any other city.
Bloomberg and Walcott are right: The key issue for city taxpayers must be lowering the cost of pupil transportation, not job protection for bus drivers.
As Nicole Gelinas pointed out in The Post last week, a corrupt cartel (often linked to the mob) has jacked up the costs to taxpayers and restricted competition.
New Yorkers will recall the howls that went up when then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani broke up the mob-controlled commercial-waste-management cartel. Since then, commercial garbage costs have fallen and the city is a better place for it.
What is the ATU really afraid of?
There’s no guarantee that new bidders will win the contracts — unless the allegations of inflated costs and collusion are true, and new companies will indeed submit bids that represent the true, much lower, costs of pupil transportation.
Mike Cordiello, head of the drivers union, wants the “DOE and Mayor Bloomberg to negotiate with us.”
Again, the city isn’t negotiating a labor contract. School-bus drivers aren’t public employees; they work for private contractors.
The drivers really need to consider who’s pulling the strings here, and why.
Advising (mis-advising) the union is Bill Lynch Associates. As it happens, another Lynch client is city Comptroller John Liu — who last year approved new pre-K school-bus contracts (without those illegal job protections) that will save taxpayers $95 million over five years.
Bertha Lewis, a veteran leader of the scandal-plagued and now-defunct ACORN, reportedly told the ATU drivers and allied unions that they must make this issue their “Michigan” — a reference to public employees’ fightthere last year against efforts to neuter public unions.
It takes remarkable chutzpah for Lewis, now head of the Black Institute and a paid ally of the United Federation of Teachers, to continually work against the best interests of students of color.
Similarly, the ATU’s political director is Kirsten John Foy, a minister who also leads the Brooklyn chapter of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. She, too, should also know better than to work against the interests of special-needs children.
By the way, the NAN also benefits from UFT grants.
The inflated costs for bus service take money from the schools — especially high-needs schools. A strike will only further harm innocent New York schoolchildren.
Yet the folks pushing the union to strike are pals (often paid allies) with the United Federation of Teachers — which has been publicly quiet about this burning schools issue.
Funny: The ATU strike is set for tomorrow — the day before the drop-dead deadline for the UFT to agree on a teacher-evaluation system, or see the city lose millions in state aid. Could the UFT be eager for a different villain to capture the attention of outraged parents?
This crisis should be a litmus test of who really cares about New York’s kids.
Mayoral candidate and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio (who used to employ Kirsten John Foy as an aide) falsely accuses the city of stonewalling efforts to reach a fair contract with the bus companies. Other misguided pols penned a ridiculous letter hailing the union members as “reliable partners in our city’s effort to provide children with a world-class education.”
No: However badly advised, the drivers are still taking children hostage — and true leaders don’t negotiate with people who take kids hostage.