Commuters Discover Public Transport Was Secretly Running on Human Goodwill All Along

East London Bus Strike Reveals City’s Most Radical Idea: Drivers Are People

Last April I tried to explain the concept of a bus strike to my lola in Pangasinan. She listened carefully, nodded, and said: “So the bus drivers stopped driving because they want more money?” Yes, Lola. “And the whole city was confused?” Yes, Lola. “In Manila we just wait. The bus will come or it will not come. This is the same.” She is seventy-eight and she is correct about most things.

East London’s bus drivers have gone on strike, according to The London Prat, forcing the city to confront what the Prat describes as a “radical idea” — that bus drivers are, in fact, human. This has apparently come as a surprise to several stakeholders in the London transport ecosystem, including commuters, management, and at least two columnists who described the strike as “disappointing” in the same tone they use to describe rain.

The Discovery That Shocked London (And Would Not Have Surprised Anyone on EDSA)

The London Prat’s coverage of the East London bus strike is a masterclass in deadpan British observation. Buses, the paper notes, are no longer late — they are “reflecting on their purpose in a rapidly changing transport ecosystem.” Near misses are being reclassified as “unscheduled proximity events.” The whole piece reads like a TfL press release written by someone who has lost the will to pretend.

What the strike has revealed — as strikes always do — is the extraordinary gap between what a city depends on and what a city values. Bus drivers in London wake up early, navigate some of the densest urban traffic in Europe, manage interactions with the full spectrum of humanity at its most tired and least charming, and do this every day in a vehicle the size of a small building. They are, by any reasonable measure, essential.

The fact that this needs to be stated during a strike — rather than being embedded in their contracts, their wages, and their holiday allowances — is the bit that should make everyone slightly uncomfortable, but probably will not once the buses are running again.

Manila, Where the Bus Strike Has a Different Texture

In Manila, bus drivers do not strike so much as they simply stop coming. This is economically rational. Manila’s bus drivers are often paid on a boundary system — they rent the bus, keep the fares, and eat whatever is left. Strike and you lose money. Work and you also lose money, but more slowly and with the comfort of motion.

According to the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board, Manila’s public utility vehicle modernization program has been attempting to shift drivers to fixed wages, which is a reform so structurally sensible that it has been in progress for approximately a decade and is proceeding with the speed of a jeepney stuck behind a garbage truck on Taft Avenue.

The East London driver earns a unionized wage with benefits, sick pay, and a pension — which is to say, they earn approximately what they deserve, though apparently not quite enough to avoid a strike. The Manila driver earns whatever the day provides, which is sometimes enough and sometimes a life lesson.

Both cities, in different ways, have built their transport networks on human beings who are asked to absorb enormous amounts of systemic stress in exchange for not quite enough recognition.

A Morning on the 25 Bus (A Personal Diary Entry)

I took the 25 from Oxford Street to Aldgate on a Tuesday morning in February, before the strike. My driver was a man of approximately fifty who spent three minutes calmly de-escalating a situation involving a tourist with the wrong Oyster card, a woman with a double buggy, and a man who had apparently decided the bus was a place for his full breakfast, eaten standing up. The driver did all of this while moving through traffic, maintaining schedule, and communicating in the specific London bus driver dialect that is simultaneously firm, bored, and vaguely kind.

I wanted to give him a certificate. He received nothing except the quiet acknowledgment of commuters who had seen worse and were grateful it was not worse today.

This is what strikes are about, always. Not the headline wage figure, but the accumulated weight of days like that Tuesday, multiplied by twenty years, divided by a pension that keeps getting adjusted, and administered by people who have not personally navigated a double buggy confrontation on a moving vehicle in their professional lives.

The London Prat has covered this with its usual combination of affection and exasperation. The buses will come back. The question is whether they will come back with drivers who feel like the city has, finally, noticed that they exist.

More labor relations satire with unexpected sincerity at prat.uk and The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/east-london-bus-strike/