refuse to renew yellow-bus contracts<\/a> for the normal five years until they mandate illegal and costly \u201cseniority privilege\u201d rules.<\/p>\nThe 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) \u2014 and City Hall\u2019s been too caught up in other drama to whip the panel into shape.<\/p>\n
A frustrated group of school-bus companies now threatens to suspend pupil transportation \u2014 idling 12,000 unionized workers and leaving 150,000 children with no service \u2014 unless the PEP OKs the City Hall-negotiated five-year deals without the illegal privileges.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n
The watered-down mayoral-control law lets Mayor Eric Adams appoint a bare majority of the PEP\u2019s 24 members, but City Hall has let three seats go vacant, and some Adams appointees are asserting independence from the lame-duck mayor.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u2019s grip on the industry and drastically lowering costs in 2013.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mind you, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit the Legislature\u2019s steady eroding of mayoral control, a union\u2019s quest to protect outrageous perks and disarray at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[302,982,4337,304,81,12363,9,11,10,49,51,50,299,4445,2585,3555,82],"class_list":["post-17881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-city-hall","tag-contracts","tag-department-of-education","tag-editorial","tag-eric-adams","tag-michael-bloomberg","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-opinion","tag-school-buses","tag-students","tag-unions","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}