Why Passengers Cheered a Vermont Bus Strike
An 18-day bus drivers’ strike in Burlington, Vermont, ended in a win April 3 when drivers ratified a new contract 53-6.
Strikes are rare these days, and fewer still result in victories—so why was this one different? What generated public support for the strike, despite management’s aggressive plan to blame drivers for the loss of bus service for nearly three weeks?
This strike succeeded through a powerful combination of workers organizing on the job and organized community solidarity, the roots of which go back to at least 2009.
REHEARSAL
In the face of aggressive management and worsening working conditions, and dissatisfied with the response of their union, Teamsters Local 597, some drivers began to meet as the Sunday Morning Breakfast Club. They reached out to Teamsters for a Democratic Union in 2009 as they were getting ready for contract negotiations.
Through TDU they held workshops on member-to-member organizing and contract campaigns.
According to driver Jim Fouts, “When I first came here the union was weak, because it was a business-as-usual union. Then some activists started saying, ‘This is wrong. We can vote on things. This is supposed to be a democracy.’ And really it was a bottom-up movement to change our union.”
Their first success was winning the right to elect stewards and participating as equals with the Teamsters business agent on the bargaining team.
Members didn’t win the contract they wanted the first time, but they got organized, gained experience, broadened their leadership team, and built relationships with other labor activists and the Vermont Workers Center. That was the rehearsal for the current struggle, where rank-and-file organizing and community outreach came together in a big way.
By 2014 years of harassment by the Chittenden County Transit Authority (CCTA), forced-overtime shift spreads of up to 15 hours (where drivers work in the morning and afternoon-evening with unpaid hours in between), and the threat of replacing full-time jobs with part-time ones had created a toxic work environment. Drivers said the fatiguing long shifts were unsafe.
Management stonewalled negotiations for 10 months (the contract expired last June), refusing to bargain seriously over drivers’ demands for safe shifts and fair discipline procedures and even demanding to lengthen the “normal” working day from a 12.5-hour spread to 13.5.
“We have been swallowing this pain for the last 10 years. We cannot live in this hostile environment,” said driver Noor Ibrahim.
SUPPORT COMMITTEE
From the relationships built in the previous contract campaign, supporters knew the drivers were ready to make a fight. That confidence inspired community members and labor activists to form an energetic Committee to Support the CCTA Bus Drivers.
In February drivers voted to reject the company’s offer and authorize a strike.
The Committee made driver fatigue and public safety the issue. Driver Rob Slingerland promised, “We will not let the public down by driving under unsafe conditions. Driver fatigue is a leading factor in accidents in the transit industry.”
The Committee coordinated dropping 5,000 leaflets door to door and on buses the weekend before the strike, put out 500 lawn signs paid for by the AFL-CIO, scheduled “Invite a Driver” informational meetings, set up public forums, spoke out at CCTA commissioners meetings, organized rallies, marches, and daily pickets with up to 200 participants, and produced press releases, radio shows, video, and social media.
There was no discussion of the drivers’ issues on the Teamster Local 597 website or in Teamster press statements. The local’s top official even asked other unions not to publicly comment about the dispute, and especially not to mention public safety. But drivers maintained their own website, and supporters created a Facebook page, issued press releases, and made their own video.
CCTA and corporate-friendly politicians tried unsuccessfully to whip up public resentment against “greedy union drivers,” but the driver-community alliance managed instead to put “predatory management” on trial.
HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS MARCH
On the strike’s first day, Burlington High School students, usually dependent on the buses to get to school, turned out on the picket line and then marched miles, accompanied by their bus drivers, to school.
A good list of Burlington-area unions took the initiative to support the drivers on the picket lines, with solidarity statements, and with funds, although Teamsters 597 officials had not authorized support. These included nurses, state employees, university professors, teachers, United Electrical Workers, and the Vermont Workers’ Center.
Soon they were joined by every vital element in the Vermont labor movement, student and environmental groups, the Vermont Progressive Party, and ultimately… Local 597, which organized the picket lines and paid out strike benefits.
POLITICAL INTERFERENCE
Eight of the 14 members of Burlington’s City Council co-sponsored a resolution calling for binding arbitration—which at first confused many people. While the union rejected binding arbitration, it fell to the nurses’ union to issue a statement explaining why this was a strikebreaking maneuver.
When 150 chanting drivers and supporters packed the council’s March 26 meeting, the council retracted its call for binding arbitration and instead created a committee to review management’s labor practices.
Entering the third week on strike, union negotiators presented another “last best offer” from management, which drivers voted down 62- 0.
Finally, CCTA agreed to limit monitoring and unfair discipline, reduce forced overtime to 13.5 hours a day instead of 15, and maintain drivers’ split shifts at the current 12.5 hours. Though drivers conceded an increase from 13 to 15 part-time drivers, language prevents CCTA from using retirement or termination to reduce the entire bargaining unit slowly to part-time status.
In the aftermath, the “troublemakers wing” of the Vermont labor movement is growing. A citizens group that includes drivers, Vermonters United for Public Transportation, has started up, with a focus on both optimal working conditions for drivers and better transportation options for citizens.
The support committee has transformed itself into an ongoing Solidarity Committee and is planning a Labor Notes Troublemakers School to continue to build new leaders.
Ellen David Friedman is a retired organizer for Vermont NEA and a member of the Labor Notes Policy Committee.
With Solidarity in Spades, Vermont Bus Drivers’ 18-Day Strike Results in Big Win
At 6am on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, 40 bus drivers and a dozen community members defied negative-10-degree weather to picket outside the Chittenden County Transportation Authority (CCTA) bus garage in Burlington, Vt. The action marked the beginning of nearly three-week-long transit strike over concessionary contract demands that would capture the imagination of much of Vermont and culminate in victory.
“Management misjudged us,” said CCTA driver Jim Fouts, speaking to In These Times from the impromptu victory rally on April 3. “We don’t drive together, we don’t have a lunch room to eat together,” said Fouts. But on the picket line, he says, “we turned into icicles together and we started to get to know one another.”
After months of failed negotiations and working without a contract since June 30 of last year,drivers voted 54-0 on March 12th to reject CCTA management’s final contract offer. Drivers could not stomach monitoring and disciplinary procedures that they saw as “abusive," such as being tailed by supervisors, reviewed via bus videotapes, and suspension of as long as a month. The added demand that drivers work eight hours over the course of an exhausting 13.5-hour “split shift,” which could be extended through forced overtime to 15 hours, sparked concerns among bus drivers and community members that CCTA management’s demands risked“community safety.”
A new generation of strikers
St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Monday, a school day, and the temperature was negative 5 degrees, but at 7a.m., a steady stream of parents dropped off their students to march the picket line. Seventy-one Burlington High School (BHS) students walked the proverbial mile in another’s shoes, shoulder to shoulder with their bus drivers in a show of solidarity that harkens back to a much older, bolder labor movement. The students accompanied the bus drivers every foot of the circuitous 2.3-mile bus route from the Cherry Street picket line to the front office of the high school, where administrators greeted the students with applause and excused absences. The handmade signs students carried would paper the lobby for the duration of the strike.
“This is Vermont, and even record cold temperatures cannot keep us away from supporting the workers of our state,” says Sabine Rogers, a senior at BHS. “Students showed how much they support fair working conditions and how much they support the work that you bus drivers do each and every day.”
“As we started to walk, we went from a fairly quiet group to chanting with a bullhorn and really getting into it,” says BHS senior Henry Prine. “One quiet student told me he doesn’t like loud noises or large crowd, but it was such an incredible experience. He fell in love with organizing in that moment.”
Prine detailed the prefigurative movement-building BHS students did before the strike. Through his student delegate position on the school board, Prine convinced the body to pass a resolution stating the school district would not hire scab bus drivers to cross picket lines. Prine says that as negotiations broke down and a strike appeared imminent, he began talking with other seniors ("and underclassmen too") about ways BHS students could take an even more powerful public stand. The students drafted a petition calling on CCTA management to meet the drivers’ demands, and Mayor Weinberger and the Burlington City Council to support the bus drivers.” According to Prine, the petition drew more than 500 signatures in one day’s time. “That’s more signatures than people get to keep the hockey program,” he says.
This petition would be presented to Democratic Mayor Miro Weinberger in a March 10 City Council meeting by ten BHS student organizers. Weinberger and his City Council allies had earned a reputation as anti-labor for gutting Burlington’s Livable Wage Ordinance despite popular support for policies to reduce the growing disparity of wealth.
Rogers, motivated by her experience on the strike line, would build out a student carpool in solidarity with drivers, using some dusty ward maps to collectivize students’ overlapping routes to school. In the strike’s final week, students organized teachers to host bus drivers in their classes. Striking drivers presented labor history and origin story of their job action to 80 students in four classes in the three days leading up to the strike settlement.
Rogers believes the experience transformed a culture of alienation at her school. “The solidarity and community and sense of activism that has been such a big player in this whole past few weeks—I definitely see that continuing as part of the atmosphere at BHS,” she says.
‘This is the movement of the people’
Nine days into the strike, the drivers would face a massively heavy lift. With the backing of Mayor Weinberger, eight of the 14 members of Burlington's City Council co-sponsored a resolution calling for the contract negotiations to enter “binding arbitration.”
According to a statement in responde to the resultion by the Vermont Federation of Nurses and Healthcare Professionals (a local of AFT Vermont), binding arbitration decreases the likelihood of a favorable outcome for workers and communities by placing “all decision-making in the hands of a third party, someone with no relationship to the workplace or community directly affected by his or her decision” and who is not accountable for the results.
To speak against binding arbitration, 150 drivers and supporters marched upon the City Council's March 26 meeting, chanting “We are the union, the mighty, mighty union!" After they filed into the chamber, City Council President Joan Shannon informed the crowd that the customary public comment period at the beginning of the meeting would be delayed by a special executive session. At that point, the entire driver solidarity march assembled outside the chamber door and unleashed perhaps the most boisterous rally City Hall has ever seen.
The hallway and steps leading to City Hall’s second floor and the Mayor’s office were suffused with swelling throng of students, members of United Electric (UE), the Vermont Workers’ Center, the Vermont State Employees Association, Vermont National Education Assocaition (Vermont NEA), the newly formed Vermont Homecare United (a local of ASFCME) and many bus drivers. Loud applause and chants of "What do we want? Fair Contract! When do we want it? Now!" resounded in hallway’s marble and into the City Council chamber in a scene many would compare to the 2011 occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol by pro-union protesters.
"Where is the freedom? Where is the chance?” bus driver Noor Ibrahim, an immigrant from Somalia, asked the impromptu rally. “I was told there is a chance here in this country. Where is the right of the poor people? [CCTA management] are misusing the money of the taxpayers. From now on we have this strike as experience, we don’t need to back down.”
Noor detailed how three years ago his wife was pregnant and “the doctor said the baby wasn’t moving.” He set up an appointment on his day off so he could support his wife, even filling out the vacation paperwork as an extra precaution. Less than 24 hours before the appointment, he said, CCTA’s management told him he would have to work. “When I asked them, they said ‘We don’t care about you, we don’t care about your family all we care about is the bus moving,’ " said Noor.
As drivers continued telling personal stories like these and the raucous rally spilled over intopublic comment, two of the eight resolution sponsors, Karen Paul and Tom Ayres, pulled their names off. Councilor Paul was evidently moved by the driver’s stories; she introduced a successful amendment to “remove the resolution from the agenda” entirely, adding, “I’ve learned a great deal tonight. If we go forward with the agenda, I’ll remove my name from the resolution.” By the council meeting’s denouement, the focus had shifted from binding arbitration to a discussion led by progressive councilors of whether or not to sanction CCTA management.
“This is the movement of the people,” Nigerian CCTA driver Ade Fajobi told In These Times. “The voice of everybody changed the votes of City Council.”
‘Every step you take on your picket line is our step’
On Saturday, March 29, the 12th day of the strike, an all-night, 18-hour negotiation session broke down, yet again, over CCTA management’s demand to increase drivers’ split-shifts 12.5 to 13.5 hours. “They basically tossed the same pile of dung back in our faces,” said Jim Fouts. In response, hundreds of supporters gathered at Burlington City Hall, beneath a 12-foot wide bright blue banner reading “Work With Dignity” and “Fair Contract Now.” A massive University of Vermont (UVM) feeder march and brass band joined, and Vermont residents lent their voices to the drivers’ cause.
“By using your right to strike, you're creating a stronger movement of workers,” said Amy Lester, a member of Vermont NEA and the vice-president of the Vermont Workers’ Center. “Your strength is our strength. Your courage is our courage. Your momentum is our momentum. Every step you take on your picket line is our step. We all have your back, keep fighting and don’t give up.”
To loud applause, FaRied Munarsyah, a Workers’ Center member and 20-year CCTA rider, called for “temporary replacement managers.” Michelle Gałecki of UVM’s Student Climate Culture said, “Livable jobs and public transportation is a green issue, but it’s also a human rights issue.”
“We have been swallowing this pain for the last ten years,” said Noor Ibrahim, from the steps of City Hall, with dozens of CCTA bus drivers behind him. “We cannot live in this hostile environment. We deserve respect.”
Just days later, after threatening picket line-crossing scab drivers, CCTA management would finally capitulate. CCTA agreed to a contract with language limiting monitoring and discipline, reducing "forced overtime" to 13.5 hours a day instead of 15, and maintaining drivers’ split shifts at the current 12.5 hours. Though drivers conceded an increase from 13 to 15 part-time drivers, the union was able to win language preventing CCTA from using retirement or termination to reduce the entire bargaining unit slowly to part-time status. On April 3, inside the local VFW’s Eddie Laplant ballroom, drivers voted 53-6 to adopt the new contract.
A growing movement for work with dignity
According to James Haslam, director of the Vermont Workers Center, "In the current context of the attack on public transit, the public sector and the labor movement nationally, this is a tremendous victory for work with dignity that benefits all working people in the long haul.”
Indeed, the solidarity unionism that blossomed in Vermont’s late-winter snow could be—like the Chicago Teachers Union, Portland Teachers Union or Boeing Machinists—another harbinger of rebirth for rank-and-file reform movements buttressed by community solidarity.
The successful 18-day job action “really shows what happens when a few people speak out and continue to speak out towards a common goal of having a strong union,” said driver Jim Fouts in the bus terminal, in the afterglow of the victory celebration. “When I first came here the union was weak, because it was a business-as-usual union. Then some activists started saying, ‘This is wrong. We can vote on things. This is supposed to be a democracy.’ And really it was a bottom up movement to change our union.”
According to former drivers Chuck Norris-Brown and Scott Ranney, a reform caucus with the local solidified over breakfasts in local restaurants in the spring of 2009, around a petition circulated amongst drivers that helped win stewards elected by drivers, not merely appointed by Teamsters higher-ups. The caucus, nicknamed the Sunday Breakfast Club, soon began coordinating with Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a national, independent rank-and-file movement within the Teamsters. In 2011 contract negotiations, Breakfast Club members did the shopfloor organizing and the local outreach to community members and other unions to build public support. "A seed was sown which kept the Teamster Local to the grindstone, and almost all of the community action that resulted in major support for the recent drivers strike was based on earlier Sunday Breakfast Club contacts and strategies," says Ranney, who also believes the caucus empowered rank-and-file members and paved the way for the unanimous rejection of the concessionary contract.
Tearing up, Fouts describes how Local 597 followed the advice of a Labor Notes organizer Ellen David Freidman, to build power and beat back concessions: “ ‘Turn enemies into neutrals, you turn neutrals into activists and you turn activists into leaders,’ ” he quotes. “That’s what we did.”
"We won this fair contract because of our unity and the tremendous support from our community,” says Rob Slingerland, CCTA bus driver and spokesperson for the drivers.
Many drivers, even in the midst of the victory party, said they’d already begun reciprocating the solidarity unionism they experienced from other unions during their strikes. “We were talking about solidarity with other unions before we even went over our contract today,” says Slingerland. He says that drivers have already volunteered to join marches on the boss at Vermont's HowardCenter, a counseling and medical-services center where workers are in the process of unionizing with AFSCME. “We got the help and now we’ve got to give the help," he says. "Vermont is so small, but this movement is so big."
Slingerland described an “umbrella of fear,” his co-workers used to work under and how the victorious strike changed workplace power relations and gave drivers a sense of dignity. “A lot of drivers have discovered the power that they have within as a person,” said Slingerland, “you put that together as a group and you end where we are today, with a victory.”
Vermont Bus Drivers Approve Contract, End Strike
A nearly three-week-long bus drivers' strike in the state's largest county has ended with the approval of a new contract — and a promise of free rides on Friday.
The Chittenden County Transportation Authority board ratified the contract Thursday evening. The bus drivers had overwhelmingly approved the deal earlier in the day.
Read more here from the Associate Press.
Click here to read TDU's story on the strike in the current issue of Teamster Voice.
Driver-Community Alliance Powers Teamster Bus Strike
April 2, 2014: Bus service is at a standstill but solidarity is on the rise in Vermont where a Teamster strike has shut down the state’s largest public transit system continues.
As Teamster Voice goes to press, the strike at the Chittenden County Transportation Authority is entering its third week.
Community groups, unions, and the public are uniting in support of the drivers who have made driver fatigue and public safety a key issue in the contract dispute.
“We will not let the public down by driving under unsafe conditions,” said driver Rob Slingerland, one of the lead organizers of the drivers rank-and-file contract campaign. “Driver fatigue is a leading factor in accidents in the transit industry.”
A typical work day for drivers already begins at 7 a.m. and ends at 7:30 p.m., a 12½ hour spread for which workers get paid only seven hours. Management wants to increase the spread of hours even more to 13½ hours a day.
Local 597 members are also demanding an end to unfair discipline, including management’s abuse of anonymous tips to write up drivers.
CCTA refused to budge on these issues, provoking the strike. Management’s plan was to to pit “greedy union workers” against the public.
This strategy has been used by employers and corporate politicians across the country to attack public employee unions and force concessions. But Local 597 members were
prepared.
Long before the strike, shop stewards and other rank-and-file leaders began meeting with members from other unions, students and concerned bus riders at the Vermont Workers Center.
They organized Town Hall meetings and press conferences to make their case to the
public and build community support.
On the first day of the strike, drivers and supporters knocked on doors and passed out handbills across Burlington. They posted “I Love My Bus Driver” lawn signs across the city.
Throughout the strike, public supporters and other unions have been a fixture on the picket lines, in marches and rallies, and in an emergency meeting of the City Council.
Management thought that drivers would be isolated and cave in after a few days on the picket lines.
But a driver-community alliance continues to power the fight for a fair contract at the CCTA.
NY Bus Drivers Win Big Grievance
April 18, 2014: Contract enforcement action by a TDU member has paid off—winning a $100,000 grievance victory for new York City school bus drivers.
Consolidated Bus Transit (CBT) tried to pull a fast one and cheat more than 160 drivers and bus aides out of their vacation pay for President’s Day week.
New York City schools are closed for President’s Day week but Teamsters at CBT have always been paid for that week for 20 years as part of a contractual guarantee.
TDU member Juan Carlos Rodriguez circulated a group grievance that members signed, they pushed the union to fight for their pay—and they won! The company is paying members about $100,000 in lost wages.
“This is a big victory for us."
“It shows everyone that we can organize to hold the company to the contract and push the union to do the right thing.”
Juan Carlos Rodriguez, CBT Local 553, New York City
CCTA management and drivers still make no deal
After another marathon negotiation session, no deal was reached between Chittenden County Transportation Authority management and the Teamsters Local 597 bus drivers’ union, the two sides said Saturday.
Teamsters business agent Tony St. Hilaire said the negotiation using a federal mediator lasted 17 hours, and at the end, there was still no contract agreement. No further negotiations are scheduled at this time, St. Hilaire said.
Click here to read more at the Burlington Free Press.
Driver-Community Alliance Powers Teamster Bus Strike
March 28, 2014: Bus service is at a standstill, but solidarity is on the rise as a Teamster strike shutting down Vermont’s largest public transit system continues.
More than 50 people spoke out at an Emergency Meeting of the City Council in Burlington, Vt. to discuss the strike at the Chittenden County Transit Authority which began on March 17.
The Council passed a resolution calling for a settlement that gets “drivers back to work with a fair and equitable contract” and restores “needed transportation services.”
The resolution also calls on management to report back to the City Council every two months about “labor management relations” even after the strike is over.
Unfair discipline, including management’s abuse of anonymous tips, and the Chittenenden County Transit Authority’s (CCTA) predatory management style have been a hot button issue in the strike.
Driver fatigue, scheduling, and public safety are also key concerns. A typical work day for drivers already begins at 7 a.m. and ends at 7:30 p.m., a 12½ hour spread for which workers get paid only seven hours. Management wants to increase the spread of hours even more to 13½ hours a day.
Community groups, unions, and the public are uniting in support of the drivers. Labor and community supporters have been a fixture on the picket lines, at press conferences, and before the City Council.
Teamsters Local 251 in Providence joined the action this week, sending up the Local’s tractor trailer to support strikers at the main picket line in downtown Burlington.
Bus service is at a standstill but solidarity is on the rise.
Click here to see a video report on this story.
Students join CCTA bus drivers on picket line
Bundled against the cold and clutching signs, placards and coffee about 70 Burlington High School students this morning joined striking Chittenden County Transportation Authority drivers and other community members on a downtown picket line.
The drivers’ union called for the strike last week in response to stalled contract negotiations over shift lengths and what they say is an over-reliance on part-time drivers.
Click here to read more at the Burlington Free Press.
Teamster Bus Drivers Hit the Streets
March 17, 2014: Teamster bus drivers were joined by 150 community supporters on the picket lines in Burlington, Vt. this morning.
The Teamster Local 597 members work for the Chittenden County Transportation Authority. Riders include many public school students, and they stand with the drivers.
Students gathered in below-zero temperatures this morning to rally and picket with drivers. Then they marched together to school.
CCTA drivers are united for a contract that provides good full-time jobs to bus drivers and safety for drivers and the public. They voted 54-0 to reject the “last, best and final” offer from their employer and to strike the CCTA.
Community groups, unions, and the public are uniting in support of the drivers. “I Love My Bus Driver / CCTA Fair Contract Now” lawn signs are going up across Burlington.
Burlington High School students collected signatures from more than 500 students—half their school—in support of the drivers and workplace dignity and delivered them at a City Council hearing jammed with community supporters.
School teachers are sending support petitions too. There have been community speak-outs, press conferences, and practice picketing outside of contract negotiations.
CCTA’s efforts to pit riders against the public have hit a dead end thanks to these savvy organizing efforts.
The public stands behind Teamster bus drivers and Local 597 members and so do we.
What’s at Stake?
- SAFE & REASONABLE WORKING CONDITIONS: Management wants to extend the length of split-shifts. This extension of already long hours raises obvious issues for everyone on the road.
- FULL-TIME EMPLOYMENT: Management wants to bring in more part-time workers. Drivers do not want to see full-time jobs being turned into part-time work. We want our drivers to have livable jobs.
- PREDATORY MANAGEMENT: CCTA drivers are constantly spied on, followed, and threatened with suspension for small issues. They want a contract that will protect them from disciplinary abuse.