Vol. 77/No. 2      January 21, 2013

NYC school bus drivers
prepare possible strike

At issue is the city’s refusal to maintain employee protection provisions in more than 1,100 school bus contracts being put up for bid for the first time in more than 30 years.

The protections require any bus company that wins a new contract with the city to hire employees from companies that lose their contracts in order of seniority, at the same rate of pay and with pension benefits intact.

“The elimination of [job protections] in this bid not only impacts the safety of general education school children, but especially impacts New York City’s special education children who are most in need of an experienced, steady and professional workforce,” Michael Cordiello, president of ATU Local 1181, said in a statement.

More than 150,000 public and parochial school students get yellow bus service daily.

In an opinion piece in the Jan. 3 New York Daily News, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott emphasized the need to “control the costs of this service.”

“There’s nothing to negotiate,” Walcott told the New York Post. A 2011 State Court of Appeals ruling “indicated that the employee protection program they wanted included is illegal,” he said.

—Brian Williams

East, Gulf coast dockworkers
resist concession demands

From the outset of talks in March 2012, the Maritime Alliance, which represents shippers and terminal operators in 14 ports from Maine to Texas, has pushed for concessions to boost productivity and profits. The strike deadline has been extended twice, most recently from Dec. 28 to Feb. 6.

“We’ve worked with them for decades and they’ve never taken this position,” ILA spokesman James McNamara told American Shipper in August. “The proposals they made would gut any gain we’ve made in the past 30 years.”

“We’re working from 6 a.m. to midnight, five days a week,” ILA member Monte Simmons, who drives a large forklift that moves containers, told the Militant Jan. 5 on his way to work on the dock in Newark, N.J. “The company wants to change our blows so we don’t get any breaks.” Blows are two-hour paid breaks the drivers get after working for four hours, won by the union as a safety measure.

Longshore work, as it’s organized under capitalism, is among the most dangerous occupations, with a fatality rate higher than firefighters.

The most recent contract extension came after the bosses agreed “in principle” to maintain royalty payments for handling container traffic won by longshoremen as part of their wages in 1960. The payments were to make up in part for the massive loss of jobs from the shift to container shipping.

“Management’s primary goal in these negotiations is to maintain the competitive position and market share of the ports by improving productivity and removing the inefficiencies that threaten the economic viability of the ports,” Maritime Alliance Chief Executive Officer James Capo said in a statement released early in the negotiations.

Many of the bosses’ demands are contained in supplementary local agreements that are part of the negotiations, especially those between the ILA and the New York Shipping Association.

Among the most contentious issues are relief staffing, minimum hours and starting times. These are both safety and pay issues for longshore workers, many of whom don’t get a full 40-hour week.

One important gain won by ILA members that the bosses are targeting is guaranteed full-day’s pay whenever they are called out to work a ship.

“Early on, the ILA negotiated a guarantee of a day’s pay,” the union said in a statement. “Otherwise, the employer had no obligation to pay if a vessel did not arrive on schedule.”

—John Studer