August 20, 2020
Healthcare Is A Human Right!
Restore Health Insurance Benefits for the Duration of the COVID-19 Pandemic Shutdown
to San Francisco’s 250 Professional School Bus Drivers and their Families!
Full Pay & Benefits for SMART Local 1741 and All Public-School Workers, Now!
United Steelworkers Local 8751, the 1,000-strong Boston, MA school bus drivers’ union, is outraged to learn that our former employer, the First Student corporation, and the City of San Francisco, CA have conspired – with less than two weeks’ notice! – to throw 250 school bus drivers and their families off their health insurance and into the unemployment lines as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage, spread and kill throughout California and the nation.
It is an unconscionable and condemnable act that First Student – a multi-billion dollar, profitable, transnational corporation – and San Francisco – one of the world’s wealthiest cities with a corporate base that includes Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, Facebook, Uber and Google – are attempting to cut their budgets during this time of deadly health and economic crises by directly endangering the lives of workers who have transported San Francisco’s most precious cargo to school for over 50 years.
This injustice cannot stand! We workers in Boston join in Solidarity with SMART 1741, the San Francisco Labor Council, and people of good-conscience from coast to coast in demanding that Health Insurance be immediately restored and guaranteed to San Francisco’s school bus drivers. To continue on this dangerous road of cutting hundreds of frontline school workers and their families off of health insurance can only objectively serve to spread the pandemic and exacerbate the health crisis facing California, Massachusetts and the world, as these frontline workers will be denied medical care and prescriptions to stay healthy and ready to return to work once the pandemic is under control.
The San Francisco United School District must reverse course immediately and demand of First Student and all the other billion-dollar corporations within its own district to pay for full wages and benefits of all bus drivers and school workers in the district.
In addition, SFUSD’s subcontracting of SMART 1741’s professional work to unqualified rideshare companies like Zum – operating illegally under CA’s own AB-5 law – is nothing but a thinly veiled, unsafe, union-busting scheme designed to increase the relentless impoverishment of San Francisco’s largely Black, Latinx, and immigrant workforce. Wells Fargo, Uber and Google cannot be allowed by their bought-politicians and government to eat their filthy-rich cake and have it too.
Hire more full-time, professionally-licensed and trained, union school bus drivers to do the job safely, now and for our children’s future!
Never before than in this unprecedented world-pandemic has it been truer and clearer,
“An Injury To One Is A Deadly Injury To All!
Solidarity Forever and Victory to our dear siblings of SMART 1741! Your victories will be ours!
Click here for Photo Album of SMART 1741 Rally for Justice 8/20/2020