Road gridlock looms as bus drivers strike

Auckland faces even worse traffic gridlock than usual on Monday as a strike by bus drivers threatens to force more cars on to the roads.

The region's main bus fleet operator, Stagecoach, fears the one-day strike has become unavoidable after officials of four unions representing almost 1000 drivers walked out of renewed negotiations yesterday.

This means about 80,000 passengers who between them make some 150,000 bus trips a day in an area from Orewa to Pukekohe will have to find other ways of getting to work, classes or shops - or else stay at home.

More strikes are threatened the following week, at two bus depots at a time on four consecutive days.

Not even inner-city Link services or school buses, which the company managed to keep going during recent stopwork meetings, will run if Monday's action goes ahead.

"They are looking hellbound to have a strike," company operations director Warren Fowler said last night of the unions.

"We have now made four offers or proposals to the combined unions to reach a settlement and avert industrial action, but we just don't seem to be making any headway - it's very frustrating."

But unions advocate Gary Froggatt said his team was similarly frustrated that successive offers simply represented different ways of packaging the same amount of money.

"They are using the same money - there is no increase in the money they are offering," he said.

Mr Fowler confirmed the company was offering the same 7.6 per cent initial pay rise as initially proposed, from $13.94 to $15 an hour, but said it had been willing to lift this to $15.33 next year and to $16 in 2007.

This represented 14.8 per cent over three years, compared with 12 per cent offered earlier, on top of pay rates which he said were already the best in the industry.
He said the union had responded by expanding on a claim for $16 an hour, pushing for $16.50 next year.

But Mr Froggatt said the company wanted drivers to forego backpay from when their previous agreement expired in November, so was in effect proposing a three-and-a-half year deal.

He said that if drivers accepted $15, they would still be earning $6.25 less than the national average wage.

He acknowledged that the company offered to reduce the maximum down-time period in the middle of split shifts to four hours, from six hours now, but said it rejected basic claims such as for morning and afternoon tea breaks and for staff transport outside bus operating hours.

He challenged the company's insistence it had no more money to pay drivers, saying it had made after-tax profits of more than $38 million from its Auckland operation in the past three years.

Company accounts show an after-tax operating margin of 14.9 per cent on Stagecoach's New Zealand bus services, compared with 10.9 per cent in Britain, its home territory.

But Mr Fowler said Stagecoach had invested $80 million in new buses for Auckland over six years "to build confidence in public transport", pumped $50 million in wages into the region each year, and had never paid a dividend to its overseas parent.