Credit the Legislature’s steady eroding of mayoral control, a union’s quest to protect outrageous perks and disarray at City Hall for a standoff that threatens to strand 150,000 city kids by week’s end.
The proximate cause: Amalgamated Transportation Union 1181’s demand for employee-protection rules that violate state law.
The union has convinced enough members of the Panel for Educational Policy, which oversees the city Department of Education, to refuse to renew yellow-bus contracts for the normal five years until they mandate illegal and costly “seniority privilege” rules.
The PEP instead has voted month-by-month temporary contracts since June, in hopes the Legislature will pass a state law to legalize such rules (though it has refused for more than a decade) — and City Hall’s been too caught up in other drama to whip the panel into shape.
A frustrated group of school-bus companies now threatens to suspend pupil transportation — idling 12,000 unionized workers and leaving 150,000 children with no service — unless the PEP OKs the City Hall-negotiated five-year deals without the illegal privileges.
The companies need new long-term commitments so they can maintain workforce stability and underwrite the costs of obtaining and maintaining new electric bus fleets as state climate laws mandate.
The watered-down mayoral-control law lets Mayor Eric Adams appoint a bare majority of the PEP’s 24 members, but City Hall has let three seats go vacant, and some Adams appointees are asserting independence from the lame-duck mayor.
Under the influence of ATU 1181 and its allies, the PEP rebels hope to undo gains made by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in breaking the union’s grip on the industry and drastically lowering costs in 2013.
Mind you, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vacillating on the issue has left as much as two-thirds of the city-contracted bus companies still working with renewed versions of the decades-old illegal seniority privileges.
Fingers crossed: It looks like City Hall is working out a deal where the PEP this week will approve one-year contract renewals, allowing the companies to do what they need to and at least kicking the can down the road.
But this is just a taste of the chaos to come if Zohran Mamdani manages to kill mayoral control: Special interests will eat the system alive, at the expense of the taxpayers and the schoolchildren.