“School Bus Drivers- Professionals Who Deserve Respect”

By Dean Phinney
First Student driver
Iowa City, Iowa

Respect. This one simple word means the world to school bus workers. Unfortunately, it is in short supply.

The driving force behind a happy work force is the feeling that your employer sees and treats you as the professional that you are.

A lot of people don’t understand what goes into this profession. After all, that’s what it is—a profession. Driving a school bus takes skill and hard work. We school bus drivers take on serious responsibilities. We are entrusted with transporting children to school safely every day. Parents, teachers and entire communities put their trust in our capable hands and we work hard to deliver for them. We enjoy working in our communities and we take pride in what we do.

It made our jobs all the more difficult when we would strive to achieve the highest levels of performance only to be faced with poor, unsafe working conditions at our yard in Iowa City. We become disillusioned when First Student would not show the same level of respect and commitment to us as we did them.

That’s why we formed our union with the Teamsters. We were tired of not getting the respect we deserved. We were tired of different rules for different people. There were drivers who would get into accidents and get reprimanded, while others were not reprimanded at all because they were friends with management. Favoritism was rampant and just one of the many problems that needed to be fixed.

 It’s one thing to see inequities in treatment on the job, but it’s another thing when the safety of the drivers, monitors and children on the bus are blatantly compromised. In Iowa City we experienced safety issues that other drivers across the country have also faced. We experienced broken speedometers that took months to fix. I had my stop sign freeze, and was told that when my sign got stuck I should just reach out and push it back in each time I made a stop. In freezing cold temperatures I would keep sticking my arm out of the window to push the sign back in. This was a health and safety hazard, and indicative of the lack of respect that we faced on the job. Despite all of this, we had hope because we knew that things would get better if we stuck together.

The day we formed our union in Iowa City was one of the happiest days any of us has ever experienced. It meant we would be able to bargain for improvements and get heard on the important issues that mattered to us. When we formed our union we came together to fight for what mattered most to us—respect and dignity on the job. We now feel hopeful where other school bus workers in this country do not. I hope that more school bus workers can feel the same camaraderie and sense of accomplishment that we did. By forming a union they, too, can earn the respect that we have won.