KEY POINTS:
After 20 years as a bus driver, Jim Kelly warns new drivers with children away from the industry.
"I see young guys come into the industry and I have said to quite a few of them, 'If you've got three kids at home, mate, this is not the job to be in, because it will just kill your family life'," he says.
"They think they are doing well. They are trying to pay their mortgage. And you just watch their family life fall apart.
"They are all trying to do the longest hours they can to pay their mortgages, and as house prices have come up, mortgages have got higher and they are just working longer and longer."
Shiftwork in service sectors such as bus driving is a mounting issue in the free-market economy that has emerged since the 1980s, with round-the-clock shopping and minimal restrictions.
A Labour Department survey last year found that 40 per cent of all workers now have variable hours, 18 per cent do shiftwork and 27 per cent routinely work at least some of their hours between 10pm and 6am.
Mr Kelly, 46, a National Distribution Union delegate at Howick and Eastern Buses, says bus drivers have always worked split shifts covering morning and evening peaks, with time off in the middle of the day. But the shifts have got longer.
"Twenty years ago, when the buses were owned by the Auckland Regional Authority, their shifts were better. They brought them back to the depot for breaks," he says.
This began to change when the ARA sold its buses and subsidised bus routes were put out to tender in the 1990s. This led to companies competing against each other by extending shifts.
"Stagecoach started it because it was an offshore-owned company. They started pushing it, and of course everyone else had to push it to be competitive with them," Mr Kelly says.
Instead of morning and evening runs totalling eight hours a day, he says it is now common to work 11-hour days spread over 13 hours or more. He often works from 6am to 7pm, with a two-hour break.
Another typical Howick and Eastern run, taken from the roster in the week before Christmas, started with a near-four-hour shift from 10.45am to 2.30pm. The driver had a one-hour unpaid break, worked again from 3.30pm to 5.30pm, had another hour off unpaid, and worked again from 6.30pm to 11.15pm.
"Times have changed because we never had the shopping on a Saturday, so a lot of them worked only Monday to Friday, but now all the shops are open and your nightclubbing and going into town for dinner or whatever is far more open now, so we are actually working a lot more," Mr Kelly says.
Pay rates have been affected too. Howick and Eastern drivers still get time-and-a-half after working 40 hours a week or on Sundays, but Stagecoach drivers were cut back to time-and-a-quarter in 1992 and Swanson-based Ritchies pays only a flat rate of $15.30 an hour. (Stagecoach and Howick base rates are $16.20 and $16 respectively.)
National Distribution Union transport secretary Karl Andersen says Ritchies has used its low wages to undercut the other companies in the route tenders, winning many North Shore routes from Stagecoach.
It opened a depot at Albany and now has more than 100 drivers based there, registering its own company union last July.
Mr Kelly's own first marriage was a casualty of the long hours.
"I lasted three years or something, and then you don't see your wife and you don't see your children," he says.
He has survived by marrying another bus driver. "She understands."
But this time there are no children.
"I have never really got involved with children again. I just knew the lifestyle didn't suit it."
Mr Andersen says the bus drivers' unions have made a joint submission to Parliament seeking a clause in a Public Transport Management Bill to require a "good employer" provision in future route tenders.
But Labour MP Mark Gosche, who chairs the transport and industrial relations committee considering the bill, says the bill gives regional councils powers to regulate public transport, not working conditions.
"As a concept there is nothing wrong with looking at some sort of generalised requirement, but it's a new step to be thinking about legislating in what is a piece of law that deals with commercial relationships," he says.
Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee says his council is also reluctant to "get in and do a trade union's business for it".
"Over the last four years ARC and Government subsidies to the bus companies in Auckland have increased 89 per cent," he says.
