Anxious Striker Sees Pile of Bills Coming

For the first time in months, Lydia Reeves has been able to catch her breath: No rush hour traffic or abusive passengers or 13-hour work schedules.

But as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s strike completed its seventh day Friday, Reeves--a bus driver and single mother of four--was eager to return to work. She and her 4,400 fellow drivers have so far lost a week’s pay during the strike that has stalled the nation’s second-largest public transportation system.

On a picket line at San Pedro and 16th streets, Reeves, 39, gripped the $900 paycheck--for two weeks of work--that will have to carry her family until she is back behind the wheel. Striking drivers got their last full paycheck Friday morning.

“When the first comes up, how am I going to pay rent?” she wondered.

It is a question that will be asked with greater urgency as the MTA strike continues and unpaid bills begin to pile up. Many of the MTA’s drivers make far less than the average pay of $50,000 per year, a figure that includes the overtime the strikers stand to lose if management prevails during the ongoing labor dispute. (About 1,500 drivers make less than $45,000 and roughly 330 make less than $25,000, MTA figures show.)

With a 16-year-old bound for college next year, and 9-year-old twins and a 4-year-old to care for, Reeves said her struggle has been hard enough without the MTA’s proposal to take away overtime pay. Reeves, who has been a driver since 1998, has earned about $18,000 so far this year.

With the extra hours of overtime, Reeves said, “I was just starting to get on my feet.” Before the strike began, she said, “We were just starting to taste life” after living in poverty for so long.

For the Reeves family, the steady pay translates into an occasional trip to the movies, a dinner at a Denny’s and, maybe, a trip to a store besides Payless Shoes or Kmart.

The pleased look on her 9-year-old son Steven’s face when she bought him a pair of Nike Air Jordan sneakers “felt really good,” said Reeves, who lives in north Long Beach.

Those are the rewards that have kept Reeves going, despite only five hours of sleep each night, unwanted advances from male passengers and long hours away from home.

“Usually, when I get home my babies are sleeping and when I get up to go to work they’re sleeping,” she said. “They ask me, ‘Can’t you take off Saturday?’ But I can’t.”

A religious woman who believes in sacrifice, Reeves said the stressful life of an MTA bus driver has been the cost of climbing the bottom rungs of the middle class. She sympathizes with the roughly 450,000 bus riders who have been inconvenienced by the strike. But she fears she will lose what little gains she has made under the MTA’s contract proposal.

Reeves said a brief stint on welfare during the late 1980s made her determined to make a better life for her family. She joined the MTA, in part, because it offers family health benefits, which were not offered at her previous job, which was driving a school bus in Long Beach. But because she lacks seniority, Reeves said, her unpredictable schedule makes child care difficult. She works six, sometimes seven, days a week.

The twins, Steven and Stephanie, are usually taken to a local YMCA about 6:30 a.m. They return there after school until about 6 p.m. Four-year-old Domanique spends 12 hours with a local baby-sitter, costing Reeves about $420 a month.

And 16-year-old Latanya cares for her younger siblings when Reeves is not around. “It’s been hard,” Reeves said.

So is her job, she said. Although she is friends with many of her regular passengers, a few riders have been outright scary. Some passengers refuse to pay the $1.35 bus fare, she said, challenging Reeves to demand payment.

“You can tell from their body language when you should just keep your mouth shut and let them on,” she said. “But we’ll get in trouble if a supervisor sees us do that.”

Others have flirted with her, touching her braided hair. Once a man sat opposite Reeves as she drove, with his pants pulled down.

“I didn’t know what to do at first,” she said. “I told him: ‘Sir, you can’t do that on my bus.’ And he said: ‘Sorry, ma’am’ and got off.”

Her mother says Reeves should write a book. But Reeves hopes she won’t have time for that.

“I need to get back now,” she said, worrying about saving enough to help Latanya go to college and buying her other children school clothes. “I want to get back on that bus.”