Partial Bus Service to Continue; No End of Strike in Sight

Orange County Transit District supervisors were scheduled to climb back behind the wheels of buses this morning to resume limited service after a complete shutdown Sunday in the seventh day of a walkout by striking bus drivers that had no end in sight.

Contract negotiations remained stalemated over the weekend and an official for the drivers’ bargaining unit, United Transportation Union Local 19, said Sunday night that no new talks are planned.

OCTD management personnel, with the help of driver trainees, have operated buses on about a dozen of the system’s 53 routes, providing transportation for about 22,000 passengers daily--or slightly less than 20% of the regular 112,000 riders. With the addition of eight union drivers who had crossed picket lines by Friday, another route was added. That is route No. 35, which runs on Brookhurst Street between Huntington Beach and the Fullerton Park-and-Ride lot.

Bus service was halted Sunday for the first time since a drivers’ strike in 1981. The halt allowed a respite for the limited pool of management drivers and trainees who have been behind the wheel of 55 district buses during the six days of the strike. Traditionally, bus ridership in Orange County is slowest on Sunday, district officials have said.

But union officials claimed that stranded commuters, particularly the handicapped, were complaining Sunday nonetheless.

“We’ve heard from people who’ve called the transit district then they’ve called here (at union headquarters) and say, ‘Is there anything we can do?,’ ” said Juliene Smith, general chairman of the local.

“Short of taking them in our own cars, no, there isn’t anything we can do. . . . We try to explain what our position is and why we are on strike. We feel like we’ve been thrown out on the street,” Smith said late Sunday.

A decision on whether to honor the driver’s strike was expected today by the Teamsters union local in Orange that represents about 225 OCTD mechanics and maintenance workers, said Joanne Curran, spokeswoman for the district.

As with the driver’s strike, Curran said, supervisory personnel in the mechanics and maintenance areas would take on those duties in the event of a Teamsters walkout.

“Anytime you have a strike . . . it will always affect you,” Curran said. “And even though there are lesser numbers, (a work stoppage in) maintenance would still have an impact, no doubt.”

“Within the last six weeks,” Curran said of that bargaining unit, “they just ratified a new 3-year contract of their own. And it’s similar in scope to the one the district is offering to the drivers.”

The union’s 732 bus drivers walked off the job last Monday after three-fourths of the members rejected the district’s last offer and voted to strike.

In what it calls its final offer, the district has proposed a 7.5% pay increase over the next 3 1/2 years. The union is seeking 10% over three years. However, both sides concede that the major issues center on drug testing, absenteeism, elimination of cost-of-living allowances and the use of part-time drivers.

The union will agree to drug testing but wants the drivers to have the option of choosing a private clinic for the screening, while OCTD demands that all testing be conducting at its own facility.

Jim Reichert, OCTD general manager, has said the current economic climate calls for the elimination of the cost-of-living allowances and for more part-time drivers. The OCTD, however, is willing to guarantee that no union drivers will be eliminated to reach the 20% goal for part-time drivers.

Negotiators for the Orange County Transit District and the drivers’ union met Friday for the first time with a state mediator assigned to help resolve the labor dispute.

Each side met separately at an undisclosed location in Orange County with Douglas Thompson, who works in the Los Angeles office of the California State Mediation and Conciliation Service, according to officials for both the district and United Transportation Union Local 19, which represents the 732 bus drivers.

On Saturday morning, OCTD officials gave Thompson a draft contract of the final offer presented Dec. 4, but no progress was reported nor were any new meetings scheduled, according to Smith and OCTD officials.