Metro

Mayor torn over bus driver pay cuts

The bus stops with Mayor de Blasio.

One of the most pressing labor issues on the mayor’s plate isn’t any of the city’s 152 expired union contracts, but a request for bids sent out late last year by his predecessor for 4,100 school-bus routes.

Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg boasted that the new bids would end up saving taxpayers $210 million over five years.

But the projected savings came only after Bloomberg removed an employee-protection provision that required new bidders to hire from a list of current drivers based on seniority and at union rates.

De Blasio criticized that move when he was running for mayor last year. Now, he’s got to find a way to achieve the savings projected by Bloomberg while keeping his pledge to help the unionized drivers.

“Sometimes, you don’t always get what you want, and most of the times, you meet somewhere in the middle, but there has to be a mechanism in place,” said Councilman Daneek Miller (D-Queens).

“I don’t know if deregulating an industry is the best way to go. These drivers aren’t making a lot of money.”

The city is already saving a projected $195 million, given that the contracts were put out to bid for the first time since 1979.

The city doesn’t directly hire the school-bus drivers and matrons, who work for the private companies that fuel the vehicles.

With the employee-protection provision in place, drivers started at about $14 an hour and went as high as $29 at the senior level. But without it, drivers complained that they were offered sharply lower wages.

Still, the bids also came in much lower, which is how taxpayers saved tens of millions of dollars.

Drivers staged a strike to protest Bloomberg’s policies in early 2013, but failed to earn any concessions, and about 2,500 of them have since lost their jobs, union officials said.

Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181 President Michael Cordiello estimates another 3,000 of his 12,000 members could be out of work once the latest contracts expire June 1.

As a mayoral candidate last year, de Blasio said he “believes in the EPP [employee-protection provision]” and chastised Bloomberg for rushing through the new bids and not giving him a chance to “reset the situation.”

But de Blasio has also been on the other side of the fight, chastising the city for spending so much on the school-bus system.

His spokesman Wiley Norvell said only, “We are committed to working with school communities and bus operators to make sure we have the most experienced drivers behind the wheel keeping our kids safe.”