School Bus Strike Strands Students

Thousands of Los Angeles Unified School District students were left stranded Tuesday--some for as long as three hours--as school bus drivers went on strike against the district’s main bus contractor, Laidlaw Educational Services.

The strike by Teamsters Union, Local 572, which followed months of haggling over salary levels and benefits, is the first in at least three decades, a district official said. It came so suddenly that about 100 union members were caught unawares and drove their morning routes as usual.

By the end of the school day, however, Laidlaw drivers had abandoned all 700 of their routes, and employees of the district or its five other bus contractors were scrambling to replace them.

“We knew about the possibility of a strike,” said Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer, “and we had a reserve fleet ready.”

Still, many youngsters and their parents were inconvenienced--particularly the families of students who attend magnet schools or who live in overcrowded areas. Many children were absent, were hours late for school or had to be transported at the last minute by their parents. About 20,000 students in the district depend on Laidlaw buses.

“We’ve been held up in the auditorium for three hours!” yelled one frustrated student as he boarded a replacement bus at his Koreatown stop, Virgil Middle School, and headed for Webster Middle School in West Los Angeles.

At the same stop, Jose Gaona, a father who works nights as a janitor, said he had just fallen asleep when his son, Jose 11, called to tell him that he and his brother, Ulises, were stuck.

“I’m very tired,” the elder Gaona said. “I work every night. What happened? ... How long will this last?”

Teamsters spokesman Rick Middleton said he could foresee the strike lasting for as long as a month, although he acknowledged that the local union had no strike fund to help support drivers. Middleton said the national office in Washington would offer union members assistance after two weeks on the picket lines.

A federal mediator from the National Labor Relations Board has called a meeting between the two parties for Thursday morning, and both sides expect the strike to last at least until then.

Teamsters officials said they want parity with district-employed drivers, whose hourly wages range from $15 to $22. Laidlaw drivers, they say, often make half that much and have inferior health and retirement plans.

Laidlaw Vice President Jim Ferraro said the company cannot afford to compete with district wages. The Teamsters rejected Laidlaw’s last offer in March, and the two sides have been at an impasse since then.

“The cost of living is going up, wages need to go up,” said Jason Baldwin, 23, who has been a Laidlaw driver for five years. “We’re making the point that we’re sick of it, we’re fed up with it, and today we’re making a stand.”

The bus drivers marched outside of all four Laidlaw bus yards Tuesday morning, chanting slogans including “Si, se puede!” (“Yes, it can be done!”) and “No benefits, no pay raise, no drivers!”

Strike Is a First for Many of the Laidlaw Drivers

Tuesday’s action was the first time many of the drivers had been on strike. Outside the entrance of a yard near Inglewood, drivers leaned on the wall, greeted friends with cheers and hammed it up for news cameras.

A few drivers were unaware, until they arrived at the bus depot, that there was a strike. When one driver entered the yard near Inglewood, strikers pounded on her bus, yelling, “Overworked, underpaid!”

Although the district had sent letters warning parents of the possibility late last week, a Teamsters official insisted Monday that the union had no immediate strike plans.

Magnet school students were most affected by the strike because many of those campuses take children from all over the city.

Children in areas with crowded schools, like Koreatown, were also affected because many of them take buses to less crowded schools elsewhere.

On Tuesday morning, 150 students waited more than three hours in the auditorium of Virgil Middle School in Koreatown for buses headed as far as the San Fernando Valley.

Many of the youngsters waiting at the Virgil stop attend Daniel Webster Middle School in West Los Angeles, which receives students from all over the city. Nearly 300 of 1,365 students at Webster were absent from school Tuesday, according to Principal David Legacki.

“Normally we have about 4% or 5% absent,” he said. Twenty-two percent absent is rare, he said.

Still more were late.

“If [the strike] goes on, it will be very disruptive,” Legacki said. “If a kid has math first period or science first period and he has to learn an important lesson, when is he going to learn it?”

Many parents had their fill of disruption Tuesday, as the strike wreaked havoc on their work schedules.

Celestine Lewis, of South-Central Los Angeles, got up at 4:50 a.m. Tuesday so that her two teenage sons could catch the bus from 108th Street and Van Ness Avenue to Taft High School in Woodland Hills.

The boys are bused to Taft because high schools in their area are overcrowded.

Usually they have to wait in the dark. Lewis worries about gangs and drug dealers in the area and waits with them.

After two hours, the bus was nowhere to be found, so Lewis persuaded a friend to cover for her at the day-care center where she works and drove her sons to school, about 35 miles away.

In all, 175 of about 3,100 students were either late or absent because of the strike, according to Taft Assistant Principal Margaret Kearns.

Despite the concerns of parents and students, Romer insisted at a news conference at Cahuenga Elementary School that the district could absorb the extra bus routes indefinitely.

The strike carries a cost for the district, however--about $75,000 a day in overtime to replacement drivers, said Antonio A. Rodriguez, the district’s transportation branch director. District officials said they were prioritizing special education students and students who attended schools that had scheduled Stanford-9 assessment tests this week.

Banned From Striking, Supervisors Take Over

“One hundred [district-employed bus] supervisors are driving buses today, and we have gone outside the district as well--including five drivers from Downey,” Romer said. “We will continue to put more reserve drivers on tomorrow. All of these reserve drivers are supervisors who are former drivers. They are fully licensed.”

Many of those supervisors are Teamsters members but do not work for Laidlaw. Middleton called the workers “scabs” and said he was “going to deal with those members personally in their face ... possibly sometime tomorrow.”

District officials, however, said those managers are under a separate contract and are prohibited from joining the strike.

In addition, the district has 1,100 in-house drivers of its own, who are with Service Employees International Union, Local 99. The president of the union, Janett Humphries, said Tuesday that they would not join the protest.

Diane Means is one of those drivers. On Tuesday morning she drove her usual special education students and then, “My supervisor called me on my cell and asked me if I could do another route,” Means said.

“It was pretty hectic in the morning,” she said. “I was driving down the street and kids were flagging me down, ‘bus driver!’”

If Laidlaw and union members disagree about how to resolve the strike, they agree that the Los Angeles Unified School District has made tensions worse.

Laidlaw and union officials complained Tuesday that the school system has used in-house drivers to pressure contractors to offer lower bids.

They also complained that the district hires away Laidlaw drivers to avoid having to pay training expenses, which leaves the bus company short-staffed.

Then, when Laidlaw fails to cover all its routes because of high turnover rates, the district fines the company $150 for every missed route, both sides contended.

Romer said the district does not mandate Laidlaw’s pay rates or “dictate their labor conditions.”

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Times staff writers Milton Carrero Galarza and Sufiya Abdur-Rahman contributed to this report.