There’s a major labor action going on in New York City, as the unionized drivers who man the city’s school buses have gone out on strike — making life immeasurably more difficult for 152,000 kids, their parents, their grandparents, their friends, their babysitters and everybody else in their lives.
You should watch this one closely, whether you have kids who’ve been kicked off a bus or not, because it’s a sneak preview of what is likely to be coming over the next decade in municipalities across the country.
This strike is going to go on for a long time. The only card the drivers have to play is the inconvenience card. They’re looking to make life so unpleasant that parents rise up and demand the city cave in.
The drivers have to do this because the strike itself is a desperation ploy. They don’t have a legal leg to stand on. Three court decisions in the past two years have made it clear the goal of their action — preserving certain “employee protection provisions” amounting to lifetime job security — is illegal.
These workers aren’t city employees. They work for private companies. The city’s contracts with those companies are up in June. The city plans to bid out the work.
It has to. You want it to. Trust me: Under the terms of the current contracts, providing this bus service costs — I hope you’re sitting down before you read this next clause — $7,000 a year per passenger.
That’s seven grand per kid.
I have two children who ride a city school bus. If the city simply gave me the $14,000 it’s paying for the two of them, I could afford to have them chauffeured to and from school every day.
In a Bentley.
All in all, the city spends — again, are you sitting down? — $1.1 billion on school busing.
The ruinously expensive contracts governing the city’s schoolbus system date back to a 1979 strike, which followed the city’s attempt to create competitive bidding and lower the city’s costs, which were as insane then as they are today.
Back then, it cost the city $224 a day to transport handicapped children — the equivalent of $700 per day now.
The drivers stayed out for three months, and the city finally caved. It effectively ensured lifetime employment for unionized drivers no matter what private company they worked for. Contracts with the companies were renewed without competitive bidding.
The collusion between the union and the companies to bilk the taxpayer was so obvious that in 1995, the last time a mayor sought to fix the problem, Rudy Giuliani openly said the unions were nothing more than “stalking horses for employers” — in cahoots to keep the contract deals intact.
Cahoots is the only word.
The then-head of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181 pleaded guilty to charges of bribery in 2006; he was a member of the Genovese crime family. Four city workers whose task it was to ensure safety for handicapped riders were sent to jail in 2009 for soliciting and receiving bribes in the tens of thousands of dollars — from bus operators looking for lucrative routes.
In other words, everybody in the system was profiting from the colossal streams of cash guaranteed by the 1979 deal.
Again, three separate court rulings since 2008, at every level of New York state’s system, have deemed the deal’s “employee protection provisions” to be illegal. So the bus companies and the union can no longer hold the city hostage to its 1979 cave-in, because the courts won’t allow it.
Surely the union, the drivers and the bus companies know that the gravy train has derailed. What they must want, what they must be looking for, is some kind of financial settlement. A buyout. A payoff.
And the only way that’s going to happen, as they learned 34 years ago, is to torment parents until they turn on the politicians and make everybody beg for mercy.
Over the next decade, cities and states across America will be compelled to tighten their belts as the really big bills — the pension bills they cannot afford — come due. They’ll have to go after existing contracts with current workers.
And what recourse will those workers have, if the situation turns so dire that they can no longer depend on the ministrations of politicians who crave their votes?
They will disrupt. They will impede. They will seek to create civil chaos.
Welcome to the future.