Riding Out the Strike : Transportation: Greyhound’s union members have no jobs, the company is in bankruptcy court and riders are telling horror stories. It may get worse.

Carlos Morales has spent the better part of a year anticipating and then living through the Greyhound bus strike. Jennifer Delora only recently discovered that there was a strike.

Morales is a striking driver in San Diego. Delora was one of 13 passengers who angrily stomped off a Greyhound bus in the middle of the California desert earlier this month, claiming that their driver--a non-union replacement hired weeks ago--was nodding off to sleep on Interstate 15.

Together, the two stories illustrate how the Greyhound strike has managed to become increasingly painful while growing increasingly obscure. Everyone involved in it is suffering.

Most of the 6,000 Greyhound drivers who went on strike March 2 have gone on to other jobs, unable to survive on $50-a-week strike pay from the Amalgamated Transit Union--a benefit that the union will no longer be able to afford in another month.

Greyhound, meanwhile, has kept America’s only nationwide bus system rolling with 3,000 replacements and a public relations blitz that has convinced many people that the strike is over. Indeed, pickets at bus terminals are harder to spot. Sniping incidents that erupted in the first weeks of the strike have faded from memory.

Yet the strike goes on, with its stakes quietly rising.

The dispute has financially crippled Greyhound, forcing it into bankruptcy court, where it is temporarily protected from creditors. It has until Oct. 4 to submit a financial reorganization plan.

Also pending is a potentially costly National Labor Relations Board complaint against Greyhound for unfair labor practices. It is due to be heard by an administrative law judge next month.

The complaint alleges that Greyhound violated federal labor law by failing to negotiate in good faith before imposing new contract terms and giving preferential seniority to replacement drivers. If upheld, the complaint would force Greyhound to rehire the strikers and reimburse them tens of millions of dollars in back wages.

Strikers are hoping that Greyhound’s creditors will demand a financial reorganization plan that includes settlement of the NLRB complaint--in effect dismissing the replacement drivers and hiring back the strikers.

In case Greyhound cannot satisfy its creditors, the union is drafting a proposal to buy the bus system with financing from a New York investment banking firm.

It is against this background that people such as Morales continue to cluster at sporadic anti-Greyhound rallies sponsored by union locals, holding out wistfully for their jobs.

Morales, 27, grew up in Texas. He worked for his father’s plumbing company until the oil bust hit and work disappeared. In 1987, businessman Fred G. Currey bought Greyhound and began a campaign to increase ridership with lower fares. He also hired some new drivers. Morales was one of them.

Once Morales got behind the wheel, he was hooked. “I’m in heaven. I like to drive those buses,” he said. The thought keeps him going today.

In retrospect, a strike was already in the cards when Morales joined Greyhound. The union had struck before--for seven weeks in 1983--but eventually accepted a 15% cut in wages and benefits over three years. In 1987, shortly before Currey bought the company, the union accepted another cut of 22%. All of this was done at management’s insistence that costs needed to be slashed in an era of deregulation and heightened competition.

By the time the 1987 contract expired last March, drivers were asking for some of the cuts to be restored. Currey was asking for more cuts. He wanted to trim vacation and sick leave and tie wage hikes to increased productivity. Negotiations went nowhere. Weeks before the strike, Greyhound began training replacement workers.

Currey vowed to “rebuild” with replacements, attempting to become the latest in a string of companies that have tried to break strikes by effectively firing strikers.

Today, Greyhound says it is carrying 80% to 85% of the passengers it did at this time last year. Still, in many ways the Greyhound strike resembles the disastrous Eastern Airlines strike of 1989, in which management demanded concessions, hired replacement workers when a strike began and was subsequently forced into bankruptcy court by financial problems. Eventually, a bankruptcy court placed the airline under the control of a trustee.

Greyhound’s managers, now operating with thousands fewer drivers and having slashed a number of unprofitable rural routes, insist that they can avoid such straits.

And so the war of attrition continues.

“I really didn’t believe he (Currey) would take it this far,” Morales said. “I thought maybe we’d be out a month.”

Morales saved his money in the months before the strike, allowing him to spend time on picketing activities for the first two or three months. Then the money struggle started. He went from one odd job to another. He drove a truck to Denver, fixed some friends’ cars.

He and other strikers still without jobs got a break in May when many states, including California, ruled that strikers could begin collecting unemployment benefits. Technically, the states said, the strikers became eligible in the third month of the strike, when their union offered to return to work under the old contract and resume bargaining. Greyhound turned the offer down.

The driving jobs do not pay especially well--$24,000 for 60 hours a week, drivers say. Nobody hired since 1983 has pension benefits. For all his loyalty, even Morales has inquired about a few other jobs recently. “You really have to get something (solid) when you’re around 24 years old,” he said. “That’s why I jumped to Greyhound. They didn’t have a pension, but I figured we’d get one at the next contract. Now I’m getting a little scared.”

The fear of striking and being permanently replaced has percolated throughout the labor movement. Last week, after 146,000 United Parcel Service employees ratified a new contract against the recommendation of their Teamsters union leaders, Teamster President William J. McCarthy speculated that many workers voted for the contract because they were “frightened by management’s ability to use permanent replacement workers . . . in the possible event of a strike.”

Organized labor has thrown considerable muscle into promoting a bill in Congress that would prohibit employers from hiring permanent replacements during a strike. However, it is given little chance of passage.

Greyhound strikers are discouraged that news media people stopped visiting the picket lines after the first few weeks of the strike.

“A lot of people come by our rallies and say, ‘I thought you settled it,” Morales said glumly.

That’s what Delora thought. A 28-year-old actress who moved to Beverly Hills earlier this year from New York, Delora wasn’t aware that there had been a strike in the first place. Two weekends ago she wanted to visit a friend in Las Vegas, but she hadn’t yet bought a car and couldn’t schedule the right air connections. So she paid $70 for a round trip on Greyhound on Aug. 3.

When the bus was west of Baker, according to a letter of complaint signed by Delora on behalf of herself and 12 other passengers, the Greyhound driver began to swerve from one lane to another and back.

“His head was down. He’d obviously nodded off. Everybody on the bus was panicking. We were asking him to pull off the road,” she said in an interview. “I walked up to the front of the bus and asked him if he’d stop, maybe get a cup of coffee. I told him I was going to get sick if the bus kept swerving. He said, ‘Then get sick.’ We were really frightened.”

“His eyes were shut tight; he was asleep,” said another passenger, Dorris Morrison of Van Nuys. “We could see ourselves crashing. We were screaming, asking him to stop the bus.”

Several miles east of Baker, the driver stopped the bus because of a mechanical problem. The 37 passengers got off. Delora, Morrison and 11 others refused to reboard. Reluctantly, the driver continued to Las Vegas after a sheriff’s deputy took the recalcitrant passengers back to Greyhound’s Baker depot.

Greyhound spokeswoman Liz Dunn said the driver, who she said reported the incident to supervisors in Las Vegas, denied having fallen asleep. He acknowledged that the bus swerved over a lane, but said that happened because he was leaning over to hit a switch to correct an engine overheating problem, Dunn said.

Dunn said the driver believed that Delora and the others “panicked” and misinterpreted his behavior. “We’re sorry that people were afraid, but they should not have been afraid,” she said.

Delora acknowledged some embarrassment when a reporter whom she telephoned about the incident informed her that Greyhound was being struck and was relying on replacement drivers, whose training has been criticized as inadequate by the union.

“I had absolutely no idea there was a strike. If I’d known, I never would have gotten on the bus,” she said. “I’m a union actress. I don’t promote this (strike-breaking).”