By Joe Maniscalco

Threats to personal safety and underfunding are making it tough for cities all across the United States to attract new bus operators — but those same factors  are hitting Canadian transit workers just as hard.

The Montreal Transit Company [STM] in Quebec, for instance, is down some 400 to 500 bus operators since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and finding it hard to keep the buses it does have in operation on schedule.

According to Syndicat CA.OM.SC. — the union representing Montreal’s transit workers — only about two out of five busses are on time.

It’s a volatile situation that’s only fueling a rise in ugly confrontations between frustrated riders and hard-pressed bus operators — and potentially helping to keep new hires away.

“Relations with customers have changed,” 58-year-old STM bus operator Hakim Mansouri told Work-Bites. “Sometimes it’s scary wondering how my day will go.”

The former chef and father of a 14-year-old has good reason to worry — during his time behind the wheel, several of his STM colleagues have been viciously assaulted on the job.

In 2013, an operator driving the 363 bus along St-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal was attacked and sent to the hospital with head injuries. In 2015, an STM bus driver still in uniform was stabbed inside the Henri-Bourassa station after wrapping up a late-night shift. In 2018, another bus operator was brutally attacked after coming to the aid of a mother and daughter being being menaced aboard the 99 bus in the Villeray-St-Michel-Parc-Extension borough in Montreal.

Union President Giuseppe Pino Tagliaferri says “aggression” against his members is a “constant problem.”

“I don’t have major aggressions everyday,” Tagliaferri told Work-Bites, “but I have aggressions every day. A lot of verbal attacks — a lot of people spitting on the plexiglass [barrier meant to shield drivers]. One of the factors why people don’t want to come and work for us anymore is because they have to interact with people like that.”

The union says plastic shielding installed on buses in response to Covid offers Montreal drivers little more than “psychological protection” against physical attacks.

“It’s not enough protection if somebody wants to hit you with a baseball bat,” union spokesperson Marcin Kazmierczak told Work-Bites. “Most aggressions happen at night. It’s not easy to be a bus driver. We like to say we are working for the citizen — we are here for them. But I don’t know how much those people really care.”

The STM, according to Tagliaferri, is grappling with an $85 million shortfall and remains less than receptive to offering bus operators better protection. “When you try to bring this up at the table, the discussion doesn’t last very long because the money is not there,” Tagliaferri says.

Mansouri left the restaurant industry eight years ago, to become an STM bus operator. He likes the work, but says in order to protect drivers and make the job more appealing to new hires, the STM has got to start “listening to the human beings doing the job.”

“The people have to understand it’s not the fault of the bus driver that the bus is late or there is some problem with the service,” Mansouri says. “Stop thinking that the bus driver doesn’t care about the schedule. The work is magnificent — the only thing we need is the food to feed this network to make sure we have enough bus drivers and enough buses.”

Many bus operators in Montreal are pulling lots of overtime, but Kazmierczak says it’s not the answer.

“We still have reduced service,” he says. “If you want adequate service we need more people.”

The lack of support many transit workers feel extends beyond far beyond the fiscal. During the pandemic Montreal transit workers kept the buses and trains rolling, but Tagliaferri says they didn’t get recognized as “essential people.”

“That hurt us a lot,” he says. “Other blue-collar workers were recognized as essential workers — but not us.”

Despite the problems facing Montreal transit workers, Tagliaferri — who started his own career as a bus operator back in 2003 — says he’d still get behind the wheel today. But, he says, a lot of his members simply would not.

“And I don’t think the sun is much brighter in the states for transit,” Tagliaferri says.

Indeed, it is not.

As Work-Bites noted earlier, a recent TransitCenter report called “Bus Operators in Crisis” finds “Many potential employees are wary of, if not opposed to, taking a job that could involve hostile interactions with the public.”

According to the Federal Transit Administration, operator assaults per unlinked passenger trip increased fourfold across the U.S. from 2009 to 2020.