The Dublin Community Blog

The unofficial strike at Dublin Bus escalated this morning with pickets being places on 5 depots. Dublin Bus are claiming that windows on buses in one of the depots were broken and that drivers who are driving buses from unaffected depots are being intimidated. The drivers claim that the strike was called because there was no agreement on the new schedules.

I would list the affected bus routes but there are too many and they are changing regularly (now only 4 depots are listed as affected) so you should go to DublinBus.ie to check your bus route.

Personally I cannot understand how one driver can be allowed to cause disruption to 150,000 commuters on the affected routes. If trade unions cannot control their members then what good is negotiating with them? Why did Dublin Bus and the Labour Court sit down with the unions for weeks of talks, negotiations, agreements, votes and re-votes if at the end of the day the workers those unions claims to represent are still free to act how they want? Dublin Bus managers wouldn’t be allowed to turn around and announce to their workers that despite a company agreement they personally wont hold to the deal in their depot and half the drivers are fired.

Perhaps the only long term solution to this problem is to look at privatising Dublin Bus. Privatisation has it’s risks, the argument for keeping Dublin Bus in public ownership is that private companies would cut unprofitable routes but Dublin Bus are doing that anyway so now may be the time to address the privatization issue once and for all. If achieves nothing else, putting privatization back on the table might focus the minds of the drivers and bring them back under the control of their unions.

Update: The strike is over and the bus service is back to normal in time for the evening rush hour. At least some sanity has been restored to the situation.