The Rich Can’t Have All the Money : Greyhound: Where’s the corporate or national benefit in dragging down the working class? Why can’t driving a bus be a worthy career?

I am a Greyhound driver, celebrating my 10-year anniversary with this company by walking the picket line. I am 41 years old and have given a decade to paying my dues in this organization--working the “extra board” and being on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, especially on weekends and holidays.

When the holiday barbecues are being lit, “and it just doesn’t get any better than this,” I am surely behind the wheel, heading for some spot along the Greyhound way. Many a Christmas morning I’ve awakened in a hotel room in El Centro or Phoenix, as we move folks east from Southern California toward their homes and families.

I’m not complaining, just stating the commitment of every driver who works to accrue enough years of seniority to one day hold a regular run and get some semblance of stability. Maybe I’ll get a schedule that allows me to go bowling or introduce myself to my wife and children.

My reason for doing all this--putting up with the separation from friends and family--is tied to my love of my job and equitable financial compensation. The disillusionment that I’m feeling now is also tied to all that I believe in. I see myself as a simple working man trying to survive in a series of shell games that seem aimed at convincing me that I am worthless, though I see the fruits of my production every time my bus arrives on time and people arrive at a destination to meet families and friends.

This is my second strike. We went out in 1983 to maintain our wages and benefits at the status quo. At that time, Greyhound wanted a rollback to meet the “threat” of deregulation to the bus industry--deregulation that Greyhound lobbied for, apparently so it could drop unprofitable services.

This strike was during the early Reagan years and the air traffic controllers’ union fiasco doomed us. People feared for their jobs and crossed picket lines. We took a 14 1/2% pay cut and lost our cost-of-living allowance.

The tide of union-bashing has continued. While there arguably was a need to cut back union rules, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water. Even George F. Will, the right’s journalist darling, has extolled the value of unions in making our capitalist system work. The unions defined conditions that made working life stressful and unhealthy and bargained about these nuts-and-bolts problems to get changes or compensation. This allowed the United States to become the industrial giant that it was.

Now this is coming apart. There are people like Texas Air’s Frank Lorenzo, Greyhound Dial Corp. chief executive John W. Teets (who sold Greyhound Lines in 1987) and our present leader, Fred Currey (head of the investment group that bought the bus line for $350 million), who spend all of their waking hours convincing me and my working-class colleagues that we are not worth a living wage. Currey pleads poverty, while saying out of the other side of his face that he has a multimillion-dollar war chest to defeat this strike and make it “irrelevant.”

I don’t understand the complicated financing system that Currey and Teets have set up. Currey takes in a billion in revenues but claims only a million in profit. He pays 50 million a year in interest and nothing on the principal to Teets. This is all part of the shell game that’s being played on us.

I just want to go to work and be able to make a living, but I can’t. Currey spends his time going from bus company to bus company to raid their drivers. His buses get turned away at the Canadian border because up there they have laws that prohibit using replacement drivers. The Canadians insist that things be worked out between the differing parties without the posturing that is being used by Greyhound management.

How am I supposed to live with dignity in this carnival atmosphere? Why do good people have to be dismissed out of hand simply because they want a little of the raise promised on this contract after we took a 24.5% cut in 1987 (on top of the 1983 cut)?

We have a whole generation of kids out there in gangs, lured by the quest for big money, selling drugs to each other as an alternative to a future as minimum-wage fast-food servants. Our national coffers are being emptied by HUD scandals, S&L; failures, the unconscionable price of the B-2 bomber.

How can this government and its corporate leaders be so short-sighted as to misunderstand what it takes to develop a career working class? I fear for the entire system when people become desperate, with nothing left to lose. The rich simply cannot have all the money.