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

Thousands of passengers across the United States 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 were 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.

Scattered strike-related violence was reported around the nation, with the most serious being a sniping incident in Chicago Friday night.

United Press International reported that a sniper shot out windows of a Greyhound bus traveling on a Chicago highway, injuring passengers. Police said it was unclear if the incident was related to the labor dispute.

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 hikes 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.

“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.

Scores of ticket-holding passengers slumped in seats or slept on the floor of the downtown terminal, advised by the public address system that trips would be scheduled as drivers became available. Television monitors that normally show departure times were turned off. Fifty people stood in line to buy tickets, serviced by only two clerks.

Only four buses pulled into the station during a two-hour period where 30 would normally arrive. Greyhound’s maintenance yard, a few blocks away from the terminal, was jammed with unused buses.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Hortensia Torres of Palmdale, whose daughter had dropped her off at Greyhound’s Hollywood station, unaware that the morning’s bus to Oxnard--like all other morning rides--was canceled because of a lack of replacement drivers.

Throughout the nation, similar moans were audible.

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.”

Sharon Kois, a senior at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W. Va., was trying to get to Bozeman, Mont., for a job interview when the Greyhound ticket agent asked her: “Don’t you read the papers?” She solved her problem by reserving a seat on a Montana-bound Amtrak train. Amtrak said it had advised its agents to honor Greyhound tickets when buses were unavailable.

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. The company is regarded as financially troubled because, in addition to its operating expenses, it must make payments on more than $370 million in long-term debt resulting from the 1987 acquisition.

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. The union has refused to disclose its demands. According to Greyhound, the union first sought $400 million in pay and benefit increases over three years, about six times as much as Greyhound offered and the equivalent of a 33% first-year pay hike. The union this week cut that demand roughly in half, according to Greyhound.

Jeffrey Nelson, a union spokesman in Phoenix, where negotiations had been taking place, said Greyhound had broken its promise of 1987, which he characterized as saying: “Help us get back on our feet, return to profitability, and we’ll share it.”

Greyhound Executive Vice President P. Anthony Lannie, the head of the company’s bargaining team, said: “We made extraordinary efforts to find common solutions to problems in order to reach a contract.”