Two weeks ago, on Tuesday, March 11, a group of nearly thirty bus drivers for Wave Transit System rallied in the form of what’s called a “sick out,” protesting major concerns they have had regarding the company’s non-cooperation at the negotiating table and overall poor treatment of drivers.
Antonie Maiben, who is President of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 770 based in Mobile, Alabama, joined us during this past Saturday’s broadcast to discuss what the union has been protesting and trying to raise awareness of.
“We’ve been mistreated,” Maiben stated without hesitation. “The company’s not honoring the contract. The company picks and chooses what part of the contract they want to honor.”
According to Maiben, their last contract expired on September 30, 2024, and despite numerous attempts to get the company to come to the negotiating table and bargain in good faith, they have been not only uncooperative but have also deviously used this contract-less period to both implement problematic changes and retaliate against the unionized drivers.
“We have a lot of rules that are being changed, and people are just tired because it’s like… we’ve been trying to get the company to sit down and give us a fair share at the table, and they’re basically telling us they’re not going to give us any other increases, and the fact that we are having things taken away from us because the company states that, ‘You no longer have a labor agreement.’”
Describing some of the unfair treatment and retaliation they have experienced, Maiben told us how one of his coworkers and fellow union members was wrongfully terminated after she called out sick. “A person that had never been written up, she had sick time, vacation time, and personal time even when they terminated her… a 12-year vet.”
While Wave Transit’s more recent actions have been increasingly egregious, their anti-worker and anti-safety actions have been more generally ongoing since even before the end of the previous contract.
Maiben explained that one big issue they’ve been running into consistently is with management, in particular, being both uncooperative and unknowledgeable about transit operations, and that the company has a “policy” in place that requires their attorney to be present for any and every conversation between workers and management, no matter how simple. This of course adds an extra step, and not an insignificant one, that makes communications between the workers and bosses all the more convoluted and difficult.
In addition, Maiben said that the turnover rate is high. “They are terminating people, we don’t keep people… if we have a person that says there for one week, they’re doing good.”
There was a Tentative Agreement on the table, but Maiben made it clear he fully expected the workers to vote it down, because while it includes a wage increase, it does not include an increase in any kind of safety for the drivers, which is just as important to them as the wages.
But even with the wages themselves, there are issues.
“We have a real big wage gap between Montgomery, Alabama, transit and Mobile. We are ran by TransDev, both companies, but Montgomery is actually smaller than us, but their drivers are making $4 more than what we are.”
As of Wednesday, March 26, ATU Local 770 not only voted down the Tentative Agreement as expected, but also voted to authorize a strike in the event that the company does not return to the negotiating table and work with the drivers instead of against them. We will give updated reports as this situation unfolds.
Watch our full interview with Antonie Maiben, President of ATU Local 770: