Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 26, 1990 TAG: 9003262332
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Motorists driving by the shady side of the building, along Salem Avenue, may have noticed a small group of men and women carrying signs on the sidewalk. They were members or supporters of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which has been on strike against the Greyhound Lines Inc. since March 2.
Larry Sowers of Christiansburg joins the picket line at the Roanoke Greyhound terminal for six hours every three days.
Before striking, Sowers, 34, had driven a bus for Greyhound for the past 10 years. He's one of 50 drivers who work out of the Roanoke terminal.
But Sowers said his bus-driving days will be over soon. "When I first came to work here, I intended to retire here. I have no intention to stay now."
Sowers said he's been looking for a job for the last three or four months and will keep looking until he finds one. He hopes to succeed before the strike puts him in a financial ditch.
Sowers' wife, Rhonda, works for a Blacksburg company. The couple have a 3-year-old daughter and another child on the way. Before Sowers drove a bus, he drove a delivery truck for Theimer Foods in Roanoke.
The father of one of Sowers' friends was a bus driver and it seemed like an interesting job. In March 1980, Sowers went to Jacksonville, Fla., for the first three of seven weeks of driver's training.
Sowers drove an empty bus around an old Air Force base in Florida for eight hours every other day and went to school the days he wasn't driving. In the classroom he learned how to fill out government-required paper work and watched traffic-safety films.
When he came back to Roanoke he spent two weeks driving an empty bus over the routes he would work and another two weeks driving with passengers under the supervision of an instructor.
Learning how to handle passengers is an important part of the job, Sowers and other drivers said. Bus passengers tend to be low-income or elderly people.
All kinds of things can happen when you're on the road by yourself, Sowers said. "You're constantly having to deal with drunks and people smoking pot." Drug Enforcement Administration agents have come onto his bus in Washington looking for drug dealers.
"It's dangerous; you don't know what you're hauling back there behind you," said Fred Miles, 41, of Cloverdale. Miles, who has been driving 16 years, said he keeps his mirror positioned so he can see what's going on.
Miles said he feels sorry for Greyhound's replacement drivers who are driving with little training. "I feel even sorrier for the people who have to ride with them," he said.
Sowers and Miles drive from what the drivers refer to as the "extra board." They fill in when other drivers take vacations or a driver is needed for a chartered bus. The first five years on the job Sowers said he worked an average of only four months a year.
About one-half the drivers in Roanoke are on the extra board. Drivers with as many as 20 years service still don't have enough seniority to get a regularly scheduled run.
On the extra board, Sowers is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week with two hours' notice.
Sitting on the tailgate of a striker's pickup truck at the terminal entrance, Sowers reflected that bus driving is no job for a family man. "Since I've been here I've had two Christmases at home . . . I've had no summer vacations."
Sowers said he likes to travel but traveling gets old fast when he has to sit by the phone when family and friends are pressing him to do something else.
Greyhound has said its drivers average almost $25,000 a year. Sowers said he made about that much in 1989 but it was an exceptional year.
The drivers are paid 30 cents for each mile they carry passengers, half that for driving an empty bus. They get $6.50 an hour when they're on duty and not driving; and they have to buy their own uniforms, which cost about $200.
They have to drive a loaded bus more than 83,000 miles to make $25,000 in a year.
One Greyhound proposal that's particularly angered union drivers calls for drivers who are on a layover away from home to perform general labor around Greyhound terminals at half pay while they wait for a ride home.
Sowers had no complaints about his job for the first three years. Then, in 1983, he and other drivers took a 22 percent pay cut. In 1987, after current owner Fred Currey bought Greyhound from the Armour Co., the drivers took another cut.
When the drivers took that pay cut, Currey told them that when he started making money they would get the money back, Sowers said. Currey's announcement that he had amassed a multimillion-dollar fund in preparation for a strike only served to further embitter his union drivers.
"I enjoy the driving part and enjoy dealing with people but I've lost all respect for top management," Sowers said. "I'm just totally burned out by the direction this company's going in."
Greyhound has implemented the terms of its contract and has continued operating some bus routes with replacement drivers and union drivers who have crossed picket lines. Last week the company said it had increased its passenger service to almost one-half of its prestrike miles.
The strike, which has entered its fourth week, turned nasty almost at the start.
One striker in California was crushed to death by a bus driven by a replacement early in the strike. Strikers in Roanoke accused a non-striking union driver of hitting them with a bus, but a local magistrate refused to issue a warrant against the driver.
Greyhound has hired security guards to protect working drivers in Roanoke. The guards dress in blue jump suits and combat boots. They keep watch from a van with Oregon license plates parked just inside the city-owned Roanoke bus terminal. The guards refuse to say who they work for or why they're here.
About two dozen shooting incidents involving buses have been reported around the country, including one between Christiansburg and Roanoke. Another bus was hit by a concrete block dropped from an overpass in Christiansburg and a bomb threat was phoned in for the same bus.
The union does not condone violence, said Tommy Mullins, an ATU vice president who lives in the Roanoke Valley. Union leaders can't keep up with every union member, he said. He suggested that union members may not be responsible for all the violence that's been reported.
Sowers said he doesn't believe union members in Roanoke had anything to do with the shootings on I-81. "All of them were pretty shocked about it," he said.
The union, which represents 6,300 drivers and 3,075 office and maintenance workers, called the strike after contract talks stalled. Since then federal mediators have been trying to get the talks back on the road.
The weekend of March 17-18, the two sides met for the first time since the strike began. The union gave the company a complete counter-proposal but the company responded that it would not negotiate while incidents of violence continue, said Tommy Mullins, a union vice president who lives in the Roanoke Valley.
The union has estimated that its contract demands would cost the company $40 million over the contract's three years, said Mullins, who has taken part in contract talks. Greyhound has estimated the contract it offered the union will cost $63.1 million or about one-third more than the union's demands, Mullins said.
If that's the case, he said, the union told Greyhound, "There's got to be a contract there and we'll give you change." Greyhound, however, refused to sit down with the union and determine the true costs, Mullins said.
Greyhound, however, has estimated the union's contract would cost the company $180 million over three years, said Bernadette Barney, a company spokeswoman. "We don't know where the union came up with the figure of $40 million." She said the union's counter-proposal was just a retyping of its earlier demands.
The company had losses totalling $20 million between 1987 and 1988 and made a $0.7 million profit last year. Greyhound cannot raise fares to cover the union's demands and has offered all it can, Barney said.
Originally, the union had asked Greyhound for a raise to 44 cents a mile, but in its latest proposal is asking for 34 cents a mile in the first year of the contract and a penny a year increase over the next two years. Drivers had been making 40.5 cents per mile before the 1983 pay cut.
The drivers complain that Greyhound offered only incentive increases, rather than raising the base rate. The company offered pay increases, based on safety performance and passenger increases. Greyhound offered bonuses of 2 1/2 cents a mile for safe driving and proposed continuing the current additional one cent a mile bonus when the number of passengers increases by one per trip.
The company has also proposed a profit-sharing plan, funded by 15 percent of profits in future years. The company has proposed bringing the wages of mechanics up to market rates over a six-year period.
Greyhound also wants to be allowed to subcontract some union work and to use part-time workers. The union sees that as a threat to the drivers on the extra board, who believe they would get little work under such an arrangement.
Strikers have set up a coffee pot on cans at the terminal entrance in Roanoke. Bags of donuts and other snack food, much of it donated by other unions, are heaped alongside the coffee.
On Saturday, members of other Roanoke unions turned out for a rally in support of the striking drivers. Jackie Stump, president of the Virginia United Mine Workers District, and a group of UMW wives and daughters who call themselves the Daughters of Mother Jones also drove up from the coalfields for the rally.
Stump said the UMW wanted to return the show of union solidarity that the Roanoke unions had shown during the UMW's strike against the Pittston Co.
by CNB