Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild asked Tuesday that both sides in the 13-day-old municipal bus strike resume bargaining.
“We’re encouraging both sides to come to the table and resolve their differences," Rothschild said in a statement posted on his website. "This strike is hurting the community."
The strike began Aug. 5 after the Teamsters Union rejected the "firm and final offer" of Professional Transit Management, the private company with which the city contracts to operate the Sun Tran bus system.
The strike left thousands seeking alternative ways to get to work, school and on other errands around the metropolitan area, where Sun Tran normally operates 43 bus routes on 66,000 passenger trips a day. Since the strike, it has operated eight routes on limited Monday-through-Friday schedules, carrying 14,000 passengers, a 79 percent reduction.
The Teamsters want higher wages for all 530 of Sun Tran's drivers, mechanics and station workers, whose pay has been frozen for several years. They also want increased pension benefits and solutions to what they have said are workplace safety issues, including assaults on bus drivers and mold at a bus maintenance facility and on buses.
Sun Tran managers have said they have worked with the union on the safety issues. They have offered entry-level drivers a 50-cent an hour raise, to $13.80, increased pension payments and an 11th paid holiday each year. They have offered no raises to workers above entry level and have said the money is not available to offer such increases.
The average Sun Tran driver is paid more than $16 an hour, management officials have said. The company pays all medical insurance and all pension contributions.
Rothschild's statement came a day after City Council members Steve Kozachik and Karin Uhlich said in interviews that the union members must understand that the city does not have the money to meet what they want in a new contract. Kozachik told the striking employees "to get back to work."
The city accepts federal money to run the bus system and thus under federal law, city officials cannot be involved in the negotiations, Rothschild explained in his statement.
"Under applicable law, mayor and council cannot intervene in, or dictate the outcome of, these negotiations," the statement said. "Sun Tran employees are not employees of the city of Tucson. The Federal Transit Administration requires that, to receive federal funding for transit, transit employees must have strike rights."
Tucson’s City Charter prohibits city employees from striking, the mayor said. Thus, the city has a contract with professional Transit Management to run the system, making the employees private.
Kozachik has said the city spends more than $30 million on the bus system each year, a taxpayer subsidy that it cannot afford to increase. He has said he wants to see bus fares increased, but the majority of the City Council and members of the Tucson B us Riders Union have opposed that for several years.
This is the fourth bus strike in Tucson in the last two decades, and it is the longest.
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