Albin Lohr-Jones/Sipa USA via AP Images
An MTA bus driver in New York last month
Mobile, Alabama, isn’t the easiest city to traverse these days—nor, in all probability, the safest. On April 3, the city suspended all fixed route bus services at least until May 1.
The city of nearly 200,000 has nearly 500 cases of the coronavirus and 17 reported deaths. Essential workers’ need to get to work and back, however, hasn’t gone away, and many of them did that by riding the bus.
The state’s paratransit system, which offers individual transportation services and is often used for people with disabilities, is still running. By design, though, the system requires even closer contact between operators and passengers while boarding than happens on regular buses, and like regular route service, still needs maintenance and cleaning staff to be working.
If paratransit services don’t reduce the risk of spreading the virus, and if Mobile’s bus service is still a necessity for thousands of workers, why close it down? The reason may well be to weaken the leadership of the bus drivers’ union, which has demanded more personal protective equipment (PPE) for its members. And with good reason: Throughout the country, bus drivers have been coming down with and succumbing to the coronavirus at an alarming rate.
“On about the third of this month, the company decided out of nowhere to suspend service. They were mad because the union was pushing providing PPE equipment for drivers,” says Antonie Mabien, a mechanic who’s the president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 770. Mabien spearheaded the push for protective equipment and other steps to protect the local’s members. On April 9, the company responded by abruptly putting Mabien on administrative leave.
“I’ve been with the company 19 years, I’ve never been written up, and they decide to put me on administrative leave, with no documents to show what I did wrong,” he told the Prospect in an interview on Tuesday.
Damon Dash, the general manager for Wave Transit (the company with which Mobile contracts for its transit services) did not respond to a request for comment.
Mabien said that he is returning to work Wednesday after nearly a week on administrative leave, but that he’s worried the company could be moving to fire him.
Mabien and his local are hardly alone. All across the country, transit workers are urgently fighting for more protection. In New York City, more than 50 MTA transit workers have died from the virus. Nationally, the Amalgamated Transit Union counts at least 21 of its members among those who have succumbed to COVID-19, and at least seven members of the Transport Workers Union have also died. An ATU shop steward who warned of COVID-19’s effects on his fellow members, later died of the virus. Bus drivers in Queens, New York, and transit workers in San Diego have walked out on the job. In Detroit, bus drivers won some protections after a strike.
The transit workforce is a high-risk sector, and not just because of its high rate of exposure to the public. A disproportionate share of transit workers is over age 65 and more likely to be black or Hispanic than the workforce at large. The ATU and TWU have released a joint statement calling for “aggressive action” to protect frontline workers, demanding that employers provide more PPE, strategies to maximize social distancing, rear-door boarding, and pandemic leave. The unions also announced a public petition for their demands.
While ATU President John Costa acknowledges that some transit agencies have stepped up to protect frontline workers, he warns it’s far from enough. In New York City, Costa said, 5,000 transit workers who were exposed to COVID-19 were home and almost 2,000 tested positive. “We didn’t sign up for these jobs to die,” Costa said. “We understand it’s essential that we need to get frontline worker protections to the hospital and the grocery store, but at the same time, this makes no sense—if we don’t have the same protection, aren’t we spreading it, too?”
Bus operators have been some of the hardest hit. A bus’s shared ventilation and lack of barrier between passengers and operators means that operators are exposed to hundreds if not thousands of passengers. Bus drivers have improvised their own barricades to protect themselves from passengers, many of whom are essential workers themselves and many of whom don’t wear masks. Some drivers have put up shower curtains or heavy-duty plastic barricades. Costa says that the transit agencies should direct efforts to enclose the operator’s workspace as part of the protection from the virus. Paratransit drivers, whose work often involves being very close to passengers, are particularly at risk. Maintenance workers and mechanics who clean and maintain machinery have also died from the virus, often after working without gloves, masks, or disinfectants, Costa said.
According to the Transportation Learning Center, there were already shortages in bus operators before the pandemic; agencies couldn’t keep the positions filled. The pandemic has only intensified the problem and made it more difficult to train operators as well, said Xinge Wang, deputy director for the Center.
In New Jersey, the state has passed a law requiring masks for people in grocery stores—but not on public transportation. Costa says the federal government should recommend that states require masks for those using public transit.
In most locations around the country says Jack Clark, executive director of the Transportation Learning Center, agencies have waived fares and gone to a rear-entry model for buses. This helps eliminate some contact between operators and passengers, but it also eliminates revenue for agencies already hard hit. Clark says the CARES Act has offered some bailouts to transit agencies, but he’s worried they’re not enough. According to the Eno Center for Transportation, $114 billion has been earmarked for transportation.
The typical agency receives roughly a third of its revenues from fares, says TLC spokesperson Kenyon Corbett, and those revenues have now all but vanished. Many transit agencies were already struggling financially before the pandemic, and there are fears that the shutdown and the cratering economy may bring transit in some cities to a very long halt.
And in some cities, transit agencies are using the pandemic as an excuse to attack their workers and their unions. In Mobile, Mabien says, Wave manager Dash has attempted to pit regular route operators against paratransit operators, telling the paratransit drivers that the other drivers refused to work. The reality, Mabien said, is that the operators were demanding adequate protection for their work during a pandemic, to which Wave Transit responded by shut down the bus system.
“It’s not fair that they get all this money [from the stimulus],” Mabien says, “but they don’t want to use it to keep us safe.”
