Press Release: Local 689 Members Employed by Transdev at MetroAccess Hubbard Road Garage to Strike Starting Monday, August 1st
(Forestville, Maryland) July 31st, 2022 – After voting 96% in favor of authorizing a strike over four weeks ago, Local 689 members will go on strike starting Monday, August 1st. This strike will last however long it takes to win a fair contract that puts our members on a pathway to the middle class. Local 689 has over 200 paratransit drivers, utility, dispatchers, maintenance workers, and road supervisors as members at the Hubbard Road MetroAccess facility.
Over the last month, Transdev has only doubled down on its bad faith bargaining and unfair labor practices that make a fair contract impossible. The company is now refusing to even offer three year contract proposals as they had during all of the early sessions of negotiations. Despite Transdev already paying $20/hour as starting wages in Baltimore, they refuse to do the same for our members serving passengers around the nation’s capital. Transdev is even posting job announcements online offering wages for some Hubbard Road positions higher than what they are offering our members at the bargaining table. Hubbard Road Garage has been 100+ workers short for over a year and a half, forcing all drivers to work schedules of at least 48 hours per week. This is a company that is categorically uninterested in doing what is right for transit workers or riders. Transdev’s only interest is to skim public money into their pockets by underpaying their workers.
Ultimately, WMATA should reconsider its relationship with private contractors for essential public services. In 2019, ATU Local 689 members stayed out on strike for 85 days as Transdev refused to agree to a fair contract for the MetroBus workers at Cinder Bed Garage. WMATA was able to end that strike by agreeing to a deal that fully ended MetroBus privatization. We’re proud to say that those workers were brought in-house and are now full WMATA workers. We know that MetroAccess privatization has been a failed experiment that leaves transit workers and riders behind.
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Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 has more than 15,000 members and retirees performing occupations within the many skilled transportation crafts for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), MetroAccess, DASH, and the DC Circulator and Streetcar among others. A member of the Amalgamated Transit Union (AFL-CIO/CLC), the largest labor organization representing transit workers in the United States and Canada, Local 689 was established on January 19, 1916. For more information please visit our website at atulocal689.org.
