Bus drivers call off stopwork

South Auckland bus passengers have been spared serious disruption today by a decision of union leaders to call off a stopwork meeting in expectation of a new pay offer from Stagecoach.

Their move follows a return to negotiations yesterday afternoon, which combined unions advocate Gary Froggatt said led to an indication by the company that it would table a new offer tomorrow.

A threat by four unions representing almost 1000 drivers of a stopwork meeting today at Stagecoach's big Wiri depot had the company warning passengers it would have to cancel all its South Auckland services down to Pukekohe between 11am and 3pm.

Passengers suffered some disruption yesterday from a meeting by about 40 drivers at the company's smaller Penrose depot, but Stagecoach said it had to cancel only 19 services.

Operations director Warren Fowler said the cancellation of today's scheduled meeting was a big relief, even though the unions intended keeping two work bans in place at least until tomorrow.

These involve drivers working "to rule" and missing the last trip of their working day if they are running late, but a voluntary ban on overtime has been suspended.

Although the company lists on its website 394 services as being particularly vulnerable to disruption from the "last-trip" ban, an absence of school-related traffic from the region's roads meant few delays to buses yesterday.

This may not be the case today, when school starts after the Easter break.