Why America has a school bus driver shortage
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I don’t think any amount of money would be enough for me to work with retail customers again. Much less unruly kids that you can’t do anything about.
If it’s between your story and the story the kid told their parents, you’ll lose that battle most of the time and likely end up getting yourself in more trouble than you already were.
As soon as the customer stops being always right, we can talk about pay.
You're not wrong, but I wanted to add to it.
This is the reason the district where I live has 7 cameras per bus, 4 of which are inside, IIRC.
Those cameras bring big peace of mind.
That _really_ depends on how much money you currently have.
and those "abused and exploited" people are providing the labor, leading to a labor shortage.
I don't understand people who think "shortage" need to be qualified by how sympathetic the reason for the shortage is. You can either be the type of person who thinks any failure to meet demand is a shortage, or that shortages don't exist because people can simply pay more. The in-between of "there's a failure to meet demand but they deserve it so it's not really a shortage" seems like trying to inject subjectivity to an objective word.
There is a shortage of people willing to accept their terms. There isn’t a shortage of people who want to work.
Would you also agree that there's no housing shortage in the US, only a shortage of houses available at locations and prices that people are willing to accept?
Either way your comparison is moot, as houses are not people, and as such cannot be treated badly and so decide it doesn't want to be bought/sold.
This is where there's disagreement. Is it people fed up with poor working conditions, life circumstances that prevent employment, or purposeful unwillingness to work?
I believe the first 2 categories are significant and worth fixing to identify if/how many fall into the 3rd category. Not many do in a well functioning society, IMO.
Could say, "there's not a hamburger shortage, there's a shortage of cows willing to be abused and exploited for their flesh".
Which is true, and probably worth evaluation, but at the same time, there is in the hamburger isle a hamburger shortage... no point talking past each other here.
Imagine a job that required your entire day, but they decided not to pay you during the late morning through the early afternoon. This has got to be one of the worst paying jobs in the country. I'm surprised they could fill their roles during normal times.
Those hours represent an opportunity cost and should be paid for. They are not free.
Try pulling that on the emlloywr though and see how quickly you are fired. The imbalances we put up with are maybe getting ironed out.
As late as 1969, about half of kids under 15 usually walked or bicycled to school. By 2009, the figure was 13 percent."
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/9/23/the-school-bus...
In addition to more money, they need more power to throw kids off the bus or ban them outright. Today they must just tolerate kids cussing you out, throwing things at you, and oftentimes trying to physically assault you. You wouldn't believe the awful things I saw on a public schoolbus.
You'd have to be insane to sign up for that in current conditions.
The district I am in does that, and they cannot find enough drivers at all.
To be fair, they'd be happy to keep the drivers on the payroll if the schools continued to pay for their service.
I get it, it cost money and it sunk your profits for the year. And driving a bus, while it needs some skills, is not a hard trade to teach, so the company owners thought they would be fine.
But the effect of this pandemic on the laborer class is huge. Most of them think that they were nothing but a cog at best, and something to be exploited by the capital at worst. Working for a company, you are expected to earn less, but to have work security. Some (most?) of them will work for themselves now, whether its hairdressers or plumbers.
Online engineering classes during the pandemic were sky-high. My brother was a sound technician, working for event and sometime TV. After the lay-off during the pandemic, he taught himself some code. Most of his ex-coworkers are now working for themselves and are way more expensive than they use to be for companies hiring them, only on temp contracts. Also, they now work less hours, so not only the costs for TV production/event recording are way higher, a small labor shortage is growing in a trade where most people couldn't find a job easily, and were forced to do pro-bono work to build their CVs.
How much would it cost to keep the drivers on the payroll? If the drivers are available to be hired, but your business is driven to bankruptcy a few months into the pandemic, that doesn't really improve the situation.
Oh, and we should also shame the elected officials that keep on cutting the amount of money being given to public education. And possibly everyone who votes for them, as well.
Why not? They're private entities too, with plenty of money to keep the neighborhood resturant from having to shut down. Or better yet, pay their babysitter/dog walker even though they don't need their services?
>but we should shame the rich silicon valley workers for participating in the same kind of relentless race to find perfectly functioning systems that they can wedge themselves into the middle of and extract profit from while making life for everyone else a little shittier
I fail to see how this applies for someone working for FAANG.
>just as we should shame the for-profit bus companies.
No, we shouldn't, because that's not their job. There's a clear delineation of what's the private sector's responsibility and what's the governments. I sure as hell don't want my pandemic stimulus checks to depend on whether I happened to work for a well-off company or not.
>we should also shame the elected officials that keep on cutting the amount of money being given to public education
US has above-average per-pupil spending compared to other OECD countries. I doubt money is actually an issue. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/figures/CMD/Figure_3_CMD-fl...
Of course for that to work, you have to have a viable public transport system.
If you pay enough, you'll get those microchips delivered to wherever you want by tomorrow morning, trust me. That's how the world works, like it or not.
I quit my job as a bus driver on my second day because I was stressed out about hurting kids. (Yes, I know school buses are among the safest vehicles on the road; it was an irrational fear.)
But the other part of the equation is the schedule.
You are hired as a part-time employee, no benefits, but the schedule is such that finding a second job is unlikely. In the district I trained in, the schedule was 6-9, 12-2. Those are awkward hours to work around.
It is also a good I'm retired but need to get out of the house to do something job.
Otherwise yes, you can earn more elsewhere with better hours.
Curious: does your district have a shortage too?
If not, maybe the benefits make the difference?
School buses are super inefficient because kids are all spread out, so you end up driving a huge 6 MPG diesel a lot of miles to pick up 40 kids. Or worse, driving it a lot of miles to pick up less than 40 kids.
If you used smaller vehicles to pick up the same number of kids, you would need more of them, but they would each only have to cover a fraction of the bus route, and they get much better mileage.
The main reason not to use smaller vehicles is that you need more drivers. Not as many as you would have additional vehicles, because with shorter routes the same driver could cover two of them in the same time. But if you're all out of CDL drivers and there are a surplus of, effectively, Uber drivers, then that goes the other way, right?
In wealthy countries, labor costs are already much higher than the costs of operating the bus itself. (People often claim 70% vs. 30%.) If the economy grows in a way that benefits the working class, labor becomes even more expensive relative to the vehicle. The key to cost-effective services is therefore minimizing the number of people needed for providing the service.
Good solutions to skilled labor shortages frequently involve replacing the skilled labor with a larger amount of unskilled labor.
The labor shortages we see in the US are mostly caused by the wide gap between the working class and the (upper) middle class. The pandemic disrupted the job market and forced people out of their daily routines. In the aftermath, many people didn't return to their old jobs but started trying harder to improve their lives. They are looking for jobs that pay better, offer better working conditions, and where they get more respect. Many traditional services have a hard time hiring enough people. The solution is likely a mix of offering better jobs, providing the same service with fewer people, and not providing the service at all.
That's how the market adapts.
They already get paid more than Uber drivers. The problem is that "more" isn't enough right now, and there comes a point where the alternative is less expensive.
> You'll get drivers that are more skilled and care more.
There isn't a "caring" section on the CDL test. Why is the assumption that anyone without a CDL is some kind of negligent drug addict?
Plus, the driver of a smaller vehicle has fewer kids to care about, so the same amount of caring goes less diluted. If you get into a collision, the driver only has to take care of 8 kids instead of 40.
It's a pretty standard/common assumption that employees that are paid more are willing to take on more responsibility and care more about their job.
> Maybe they need the job more because they can't just go make more money driving a big rig and are then less likely to jeopardize it by doing something wrong.
This hypothetical is unsubstantiated, and I can easily flip the script: How do you know the non-CDL drivers need the job more when they can easily just go work for Uber, or at a Taxi company or similar?
> Plus, the driver of a smaller vehicle has fewer kids to care about, so the same amount of caring goes less diluted. If you get into a collision, the driver only has to take care of 8 kids instead of 40.
Presumably, more caring drivers (even if they have less "care per kid") will get into fewer accidents, which will be a magnitude of impact more than any actions taken after an accident ever could.