STRIKING OUT
School bus workers hope to avoid shutdown
THE CITY’S looming school bus strike could begin as early as Tuesday and impact the lives of 900 workers and 10,000 public school kids.
For bus matron Pia Phillips of Coney Island, Brooklyn, missing work in a strike would mean not having enough money to care for her granddaughter and son or celebrate the holidays.
“I can’t afford it,” Phillips said tearfully. “I won’t be able to afford any gifts for my granddaughter for Christmas. These companies need to realize we’re real people and we cry and we bleed.”
More than 85% of Teamsters Local 553 members working for Brooklyn-based Jofaz Transportation and Y&M Transit voted to authorize a strike Wednesday night.
The workers oppose a proposed contract that would make them pay for health care while slashing five of their paid holidays.
The current contract, which expires Tuesday, covers about 900 workers who handle 600 routes in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island for both special- and generaleducation students.
Under the old agreement, bus attendants make an average of $11 per hour and bus drivers average $17.50 per hour.
The old contracts covered workers’ health-care costs completely and union officials said it is unclear exactly how much the companies would take out of the workers’ paychecks to cover health-care costs under a new deal.
Phillips, 47, said she’s been a matron for eight years, a job she loves because of the kids she works with.
She earns $10 an hour, or $400 each week before taxes.
Her current route covers Public School 370 in Brooklyn. She wakes up at 2 a.m. every morning to get ready for work and prepare for a one-hour, 45-minute commute to the bus depot in Red Hook. The mother of five and grandmother of seven lives with her 3-year-old granddaughter, who she is raising, her husband , who is unemployed, and her 17-year-old son.
She has no disposable income and has diabetes. If she had to pay for health care, she said, it could sink her family.
“We can’t survive on what (they’re) paying us,” Phillips said.
Union officials said they’re hopeful a deal can be reached before a strike is enacted.
“We’re not that far apart, if the companies can tweak their offer a little bit,” said Demos Demopoulos, secretary treasurer of Local 553.
A bus company spokesman said the threat of a strike came from the union.
“(That) had nothing to do with management,” the spokesperson said.The city’s last school bus strike was in 2013 and involved a different union — Local 1181 of Amalgamated Transit — and affected about 5,000 routes across the city.
In all, yellow school buses take about 147,000 students to school citywide on roughly 8,000 routes.