WAKE COUNTY SCHOOL BUS DRIVER SHORTAGE DRIVERS
The strike began on Friday, October 29, with at least 200 out of 600 drivers calling out sick. The Cumberland County strike comes on the heels of a four-day strike by bus drivers in North Carolina’s largest school district, Wake County, where drivers’ pay starts at $15 an hour. With inflation rising at a 30-year high of over 6 percent, such a pay “increase” will in fact amount to a massive pay cut.
She added, “We call ourselves CNAs with CDLs” because of the extra responsibilities such drivers have to care for the medical needs of these students.Ĭumberland County, which has 46 vacant driver positions, has not offered any specific wage increases to date, only the “possibility” of a 3 percent increase, according to county spokesperson Lindsay Whitley. “We love our kids, but we have to stand out here to make people see how we are being treated,” Gwendolyn McKelvin, a bus driver for special needs students, told local television station WRAL. Starting pay in the county is only $12.21 an hour. More than 100 bus drivers in Cumberland County, North Carolina, are engaged in an ongoing strike that started on Tuesday. On Monday, unionized bus drivers in Smithfield, Rhode Island, voted to authorize a strike and a strike vote was due to take place Friday involving drivers from three Delaware counties. Since October, strikes of bus drivers have taken place in North Carolina, Maryland and New Mexico. The drivers are protesting abysmal pay and increased workloads amidst a massive nationwide shortage of bus drivers exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent weeks, school bus drivers in a number of states have engaged in strikes, including numerous wildcat actions independent of the unions.
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