Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 3, 1990 TAG: 9007030255
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A sign draped over a pickup truck on Salem Avenue outside the Campbell Court bus station in Roanoke reminds passers-by that the Amalgamated Transit Union's strike against Greyhound Lines continues.
Fred is Fred Currey, Greyhound's part-owner and chairman. Striking drivers despise Currey as much as striking airline workers hate Frank Lorenzo, who was recently replaced as head of Eastern Airlines by a court-appointed trustee.
The strike against the nation's only coast-to-coast bus company entered its fifth month Monday. Although news reports about the strike and strike-related violence have dropped off sharply since the start, strike-fired emotions continue to simmer under a lid of court injunctions the company has obtained in Roanoke and several other cities.
Strikers in Roanoke believe most people neither understand the strike nor care about it. "I have mixed emotions about the Roanoke Valley; I really do," said striking driver Joe Gore of Vinton.
"They don't know what we're up against. They don't understand our circumstance," said William Rice, a striking driver with 30 years experience. "From most of the information that gets out, they think we're greedy.
"If we could just get our story out there, they'd be a lot more of them have sympathy for us," Rice said. News reports have exaggerated the wages drivers were making before the strike, strikers said.
Roughly 60 union drivers worked out of the Roanoke Greyhound terminal before the strike. One has crossed the picket line. The strikers draw $50 per week in strike benefits from the union and pay $35 per month in union dues.
The strikers say when Currey took over the company three years ago, he told them that if they would not make demands and would helphim make Greyhound profitable,he would take care of them during the 1990 contract talks. They felt betrayed when Greyhound management offered a contract package that included using part-time drivers, leasing out some lucrative runs and linking an increase in their 30 cents-a-mile wage to passenger ridership.
"They're next," the strikers said of those who criticized them for walking out. Other workers should realize the only reason they are making good wages is because of unions that are willing to challenge management of big companies, the strikers said.
Greyhound - whose passengers often are the poor and elderly - has run its buses since the strike began March 2, using roughly 3,000 replacement drivers and union drivers who have crossed picket lines. Approximately 6,300 union drivers and 3,000 more office and maintenance workers are striking the company.
Replacement drivers from Roanoke said a court injunction has not stopped strikers from trying to intimidate them. "There's trouble every day out here," said Wayne Jackson, who drives a Roanoke-Washington, D.C., run.
Jackson and fellow replacement driver Robert Lee of Roanoke accused law-enforcement authorities of showing favoritism toward the strikers. Lee said that would not stop him from taking strikers to court. "I've got one person now for assault," he said.
Lee, who said he was once convicted of a crime but has since turned his life around, said the strikers bring up his past to harass him, even calling him at home. "I paid my time for that," he said.
Jackson said he drove a bus into Washington last month during a union rally and was blocked outside the bus terminal by demonstrators who threw passengers' luggage from the bus.
Lee and Jackson said they do not believe they've taken the strikers' jobs. "They gave up those jobs," Jackson said.
Jackson, a former truck driver, said he has a family to feed. If the union drivers want their jobs back, jobs are open and they can come back to work, Jackson said.
Last month, Roanoke Circuit Judge Roy Willett found there was enough evidence against two strikers to convict them of violating an injunction by intimidating a working driver. But Willett said the charges would be dismissed in six months if the strikers stayed out of trouble. Noting only three violations of the April 5 injunction, Willett commended local union members for complying with it.
Nationally, Greyhound's ticket sales are 89 percent of what they were last year, and the company's freight business is running at 57 percent, said Bob Harman, the bus line's Roanoke-area general manager. Greyhound is now serving 98 percent of the communities it was serving before the strike, including all of those communities in Western Virginia.
But the strikers, who keep notes on the passenger traffic in and out of Roanoke, said Greyhound is not performing well.
Normally, around the July 4 holiday, the company runs two or three buses on each scheduled run, but this week only one bus per run, roughly half-loaded, is passing through Roanoke, they said. "And they run anything from 15 minutes to three hours late," said Rice, the striking driver.
Harman, however, said ridership this July 4 cannot be compared with previous years because the holiday falls during the middle of the week this year.
Greyhound, based in Dallas, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 4, saying it was worried that creditors would try to seize buses and terminals. The company lost $56 million during the first quarter of this year and between the end of April and early June missed more than $16 million in loan, interest and lease payments.
The Roanoke strikers wonder why U.S. Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole has not intervened in the Greyhound strike the way she did in the United Mine Workers strike against the Pittston Co. They also wonder why the government allowed a monopoly to development in the interstate bus business.
"The people that ride buses don't vote," Rice said. "They don't give a damn about us because there's no votes there."
The strikers said Greyhound's goal was to break the union rather than negotiate a contract. Union busting is a national trend launched by Ronald Reagan in his dealings as president with the air-traffic controllers and condoned by government since, the strikers said.
Gore sees some irony in the way politicians heap praise on Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and other East Bloc labor leaders and the way they treat unionized workers in this country.
"They say you can't fire a man for striking, but they can replace him, so what's the difference?" Gore asked.
In May, the National Labor Relations Board's chief investigator authorized the filing of the union's unfair labor practices charges against Greyhound. If the charges are upheld by the NLRB and through the courts, striking drivers would be entitled to reclaim their jobs and possibly back pay.
by CNB