Travelers Stranded as Greyhound Drivers Strike : Transportation: 80% of the nationwide bus system shuts down. Replacement workers are being hired.

Tempers were flaring on the picket line and in the ticket line at the downtown San Diego Greyhound bus station on Broadway Friday night as would-be passengers tried to hop buses out of town and striking drivers and maintenance crews attempted to keep the buses from leaving.

Across the United States, thousands of passengers were stranded Friday as Greyhound Lines Inc.’s drivers went on strike after their contract expired, shutting down at least 80% of the country’s only nationwide bus system.

Greyhound executives, who spent the past two weeks recruiting strikebreakers, said they were servicing main routes with replacement drivers and would “make every attempt” to fully rebuild the system by the month’s end as more new drivers are added.

A company spokeswoman said 20% of the buses were in service Friday, manned by 700 new drivers. But she declined to predict if that figure will grow over the weekend.

The Dallas-based company carried 22 million passengers last year, an average of about 60,000 a day. It is particularly crucial to low-income travelers who live in smaller communities. Greyhound is the only intercity transportation in 9,000 of its 9,500 destinations, and half of its ridership comes from homes where the annual income is less than $15,000.

The Amalgamated Council of Greyhound Local Unions, which represents the company’s 6,300 drivers and 3,075 office and maintenance workers in 19 local unions, ordered its members to strike at 11 p.m. PST Thursday when a three-year contract expired.

The union accused Greyhound of bad-faith bargaining for refusing to modify an initial three-year contract offer that had been solidly rejected by a rank-and-file vote. The company accused drivers, who now average $24,700 a year, of asking for wage increases that could be financed only through a fare increase. Each side accused the other of distorting its positions.

Negotiations, which had continued through the week and were augmented by a federal mediator Thursday night, ceased when the strike began.

The work stoppage pits two legacies of the 1980s that are clashing increasingly in contemporary collective bargaining: a new owner who borrowed heavily to buy the company and is now burdened by large debt payments, and a union that made substantial wage concessions in two past contracts and now wants to reclaim much of what it gave up.

All of this was lost on passengers with more immediate concerns.

Greg Walter and his 5-year-old son, Nick, seemed a bit dazed after their 1 1/2-day trip to San Diego from Billings, Mont.

“We had a (union) driver from Billings to Las Vegas, but then this lady driver got on and said this was the first time she’d ever driven a bus,” Walter said. “She was real careful, but she had us real shook up. Said she’d driven a truck for eight years but never a bus with people.”

Walter said passengers used road maps to guide the driver to the Anaheim bus station “because she was lost and the maps didn’t make sense to her. I sat with her for a long time, reading the maps.”

Walter, whose parents live in San Diego, said he would not return to Billings on Greyhound unless the strike is settled. “Her attitude was all right, but, give me a break, she’s never driven a bus.”

In the station, security guards directed confused travelers to ticket agents. The posted schedule indicated that buses were leaving every hour on the hour for Los Angeles, but striking drivers maintained that the schedules were not being met.

“They’re lucky if they’re getting three buses out of here today,” said Jeff Atencio, a driver for two years.

“All I want is my money,” said Riley Shannon, a driver with 26 years’ experience, who claimed that, in 1987, the unions agreed to cut their salaries to help a new management team restore the bus line’s financial situation. “But, under this contract, even after six years I won’t be back where I was in 1987,” Shannon said.

“All I want to do is get on a bus,” said Bill Kreidel, who waited in line Friday night at the Broadway station hoping to catch a bus to San Bernardino. “I had no idea there was a strike.”

Three irate Los Angeles residents complained that their bus left Los Angeles three hours behind schedule, despite promises that the schedule would be met. Then, “we got here, and they said they wouldn’t bring us to San Ysidro, which is what they promised us in L.A.,” said one of the weary travelers. “Now they’re making us stand in line for refunds.”

“They didn’t tell me anything about this when I called,” complained Dorothy Fullilove, who spent $10 on a cab ride from her sister’s home to Greyhound’s downtown Los Angeles bus station, only to find that her bus home to Indio, Calif., had been canceled.

Similar problems were repeated throughout the nation. Rob Wilkins, 22, from London, was trying to get from Minneapolis to Memphis when the labor dispute intruded.

“I’m not going to see Elvis,” he said, alluding to Elvis Presley’s home- cum -museum. “I come to bloody America, and they’re on strike.”

Greyhound was last struck by drivers in 1983 for seven weeks in a dispute that completely shut down the system for the first two weeks. At the time, the company was owned by Greyhound Corp., a diversified conglomerate with the financial resources to absorb a long strike.

In 1987, the parent corporation sold the bus business to a Texas investor group led by Fred G. Currey, who subsequently bought Greyhound’s remaining national competitor, Trailways Corp.

Both bus companies were a shambles. Falling fares on deregulated airlines had drastically cut bus ridership. The best deal drivers could get when they settled their strike in 1983 was a 7.8% pay cut over three years. In 1987, the union agreed to even sharper cuts--23% over three years. Those concessions allowed Currey to slash fares and attract more business.

After losing $17 million in 1988, Greyhound finally made a small profit of about $1 million last year, only about 1% on revenue of $1 billion.

Late last year, Greyhound offered the union a new three-year contract that included what the company described as a 6.9% increase in wages and benefits in the first year.

Union members voted 92% against that offer on Jan. 26.

Times staff writer Greg Johnson in San Diego contributed to this story.