Major Contract Violations by Veolia Began Months Before Lockout Claims Bus Drivers Union at Boston City Council Hearing

BOSTON/Government Center - Union leaders and members of the Boston School Bus Union 5/United Steelworkers gave extensive testimony at a Boston City Council hearing into Veolia Transportation’s labor practices Thursday night.

In addition to an audio report on the hearing, this second report provides details on some of the key issues raised by union leaders Steve Kirschbaum (Chair of the Grievance Committee) and Steve Gillis (Vice President).

In an effort to set the record straight, they were adamant that they never engaged in a wildcat strike on October 8 – affecting thousands of families with school children across the city – and instead were lock-out by Veolia following months of dispute with the company; filing 172 grievances.

According to Kirschbaum, “What we’ve said all along is that what happened to the Boston school bus drivers on October the 8th was an orchestrated and well-calculated effort at union-busting.

“And, we don’t raise this rhetorically. There is documented evidence that this company participated in an illegal lockout in violation of this collective bargaining agreement they signed, article 16, and more importantly, the United States federal law under the National Labor Relations Act,” he continues.

Referring to two images that were on display in the council chamber, Kirschbaum claims that they show a company supervisor chaining closed the gates of the Readville bus yard at 1135am, and another supervisor chaining closed the gates of the Freeport facility at around 1045am.

“In the entire history of local 8751 there has never been, nor will there be a surprise strike, because we drive this city’s most precious cargo,” he says.

Kirschbaum says that “Veolia Transportation is a global, multinational corporation out of France, that has a reputation of poor union-busting relations throughout the globe. They have a reputation of disrespecting communities from Boston to Palestine, from St. Louis to Detroit to Maryland, in every city across this country.

“In the Spring, we started negotiations with Veolia Corporation, because they did not wish to adhere to many of the specific articles of this contract, including full payment for our long-term disability, which we had just won in the last contract battle. And, for our people – God forbid any worker should have to go on long-term disability – this is the difference between feeding your family and getting the medical relief that you need.”

According to Gillis, “The negotiations with Veolia started in April, and lasted for three long months.

“The main issue that they wanted to begin with, the Veolia Corporation,” he continues, “was to demand that we school bus drivers, some of us who have been driving since 1974 – many of us have been driving 40, 30, over 20 years – file applications as new-hires, so that they could pick and choose amongst us who they wanted.”

He also claims Veolia wanted the drivers to sign a waiver form in concerning “Sterling Infosystems (a background check provider), which provides them the right to do consumer credit reports on our families, on ourselves, to go into our social media, to do checks on all aspects on our private and personal lives. And, it was a very conflictual, rancorous two months that we went through with the Veolia Corporation to convince them we had been here, that they were the new ones in town, and we were not going to fill out new-hire applications; that’s how our relationship started.”

Gillis claims that “when there was finally an agreement on that in early June, whereby all members had to do was fill out a one page simple information form … we moved onto issues of the terms and conditions of the contract. It was, from our point of view, very near to a strike situation, at the end of June, going into the beginning of July … they wanted to throw out sections of our contract about sickness and accident insurance … about getting 60% of our wages for long-term disability … to change various terms and conditions about their ability to use Global Positioning System technology to route the routes … they assigned times that were impossible to do; they assigned pick-up times one minute, two minutes apart from each other.”

As a result of the GPS, “The routes that  our drivers, our members, perform, are getting children late to school for breakfast in the morning, getting kids home late in the afternoon; have an almost domino effect as we do trip one, trip two, trip three … to the point where children are getting home hours after school ends.”

As a result of getting rid of a punch-card system, Gillis says the company instead relied on dispatchers to “put people in and out on computer systems, which has resulted in weekly mass payroll problems.”

Some of the other of the 172 grievances concern safety and training, changes to benefits’ payments, and the company not training and hiring monitors.

Gillis explained that despite having previously resolved the issues of the new-hire application, and employee background checks, the drivers were called to fill out the same applications and a waiver for the checks on October 7; there was also an issue with bus routes that resulted in cuts to drivers’ pay.

“On the morning of October 8th,” he says, “when drivers showed up for work, punched in, got their keys, and noticed that the managers – the top-level managers from both the bus company and the school department – where in the bus yards; the drivers told the managers that they wanted to have a meeting. And, they wanted a meeting scheduled right then. The bus company not only didn’t schedule a meeting, they refused to even acknowledge the drivers’ request. It wasn’t even anybody from the union leadership to tell you the truth, it was everybody that you see sitting around you here (in the hearing room) that morning who had been incensed the day before by what was a direct threat to their employment, and to their jobs after 20, 30, 40 years of seniority.”

He continues saying, “the managers refused the meeting, and instead called in the highest levels of the police department in the city of Boston. Where I ended up being at the Freeport bus yard, where Councilor Yancey ended up being, then superintendent William Evans was sent in by the mayor – now he’s the police commissioner – with large numbers of police, at Veolia’s calling, to not only kick Councilor Yancey out of the property, but to demand that every bus driver who was there and our vehicles, get out of the property, in the morning, well, well before afternoons (picking up kids from school) were scheduled to go out, and threatened us with arrest and trespass if we didn’t do it immediately; so we had to do it. And, we evacuated the yards, and they locked the gates behind us.”

Gillis concludes, “I think it would be well to know who ordered this lock-out, from where did it come? The lower level management told us it wasn’t them, but we saw the mayor of the city of Boston, we saw the highest-ranking police officers in the city of Boston, and we saw the highest levels of the bus company, and the school department in the yards at that time.”

Despite invitations, Veolia, the city’s administration, and its school department, failed to attend the public hearing.

Councilor Yancey did not adjourn the meeting, instead ordering a recess that will resume when the absent parties appear to testify; something he intends to compel them to do.