WASHINGTON—Under pressure from workers, riders, and its unionized drivers, the D.C. City Council will tackle the fate of the endangered DC Circulator buses at a “virtual” Zoom hearing at 1 pm on September 26.
Supportive Council member Charles Allen, D-6th Ward, told the crowd of more than 100 people three days before the hearing that pro-corporate Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Department of Transportation and a rep from the D.C. area’s Metro system will be grilled about the looming shutdown of the buses and sudden firings, scheduled for October 1, of its drivers.
The council’s website calls the session a “virtual meeting” at 1 p.m. at https://bit.ly/2ooL0l1.
Speakers at the union-called rally three days before to save the bus system for its passengers—and its workers’ jobs—exposed Bowser’s indifference to the city’s working class on a host of issues, with the fate of the buses being the latest.
The rally in front of the John Wilson Building, D.C.’s city hall, drew a mixture of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 members and Circulator riders, plus a retired Steelworker active in community organizing. The local represents the system’s 178 drivers, plus its mechanics and other workers.
All feared both loss of needed bus service and workers’ jobs—but also saw Bowser’s decision as part of a pattern. The Metropolitan Washington Central Labor Council has joined the chorus of closure critics, posting a story on the rally on its website.
“I’m really angry,” said Yannik Omictin, who holds a 2nd Ward seat on the lowest level of D.C. elected government, Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. The “mayor has done what she’s done all the time: Let down working people.
“We have been the heart of the Circulator” and its clients. “And now, poof! It’s all gone!”
“People are going to lose their jobs on October 1. That’s next week!” said Allen.
“We’ve been lied to. I’ve been lied to. You’ve been lied to,” ATU Local 689 President Ray Jackson told the crowd. When Bowser first floated plans, early this year, for eliminating the Circulator at the end of March 2025, the union met with her and top aides and she promised to phase in both routes and workers and develop a plan for the transition, he explained.
She’s reneged. There’s still no plan, and there have been no notices about who’s going to be fired and who won’t.
“There’s no joy. There’s no laughter. There’s no nothing at the Circulator,” said its shop steward, C.J. Miller. “I’ve had drivers sitting on my bus, crying,” added Circulator operator Natasha Guest.
No coincidence in timing
Not coincidentally, Jackson said, when Circulator workers “started asking for fair wages” when bargaining their first union contract, Bowser and her City Council backers “started doing this to you,” Jackson said.
“If they did this to us, they can do it to all of you” who work for the city, he warned. That includes “doing it” to people not just at the Circulator, but at Metrobus and Metrorail, the nation’s third-busiest transit system.
The Circulator, started as an experiment 11 years ago, has been extremely popular connecting neighborhoods from Union Station in the east to Georgetown in the west in the Nation’s Capital, with branches northwards into racially diverse Adams Morgan and south to Nationals Park. Its distinctive red buses with a yellow stripe are often jammed with commuting residents, tourists, or both.
Bowser caters to downtown developers and the corporate class, as did her mentor, ex-Mayor Adrian Fenty. She told the union some Circulator drivers would be added to the Metrobus driver corps, but Bowser never said how many.
She also didn’t say if the Circulator drivers would have to start all over again at the bottom of the pay and benefits scale, costing each of them thousands of dollars a year.
And Bowser promised a plan to integrate Circulator routes into Metrobus—even though Metrobus and Metrorail are undergoing their own financial troubles. Metro’s general manager proposes eliminating or drastically restructuring almost half of all Metrobus routes, depriving many neighborhoods of any service at all. He also wants to cut the frequency of non-rush-hour subway service.
Then, on September 22, Bowser lowered the boom, saying most Circulator routes would be eliminated and the recently unionized drivers would be laid off in eight days. And there’s no future plan for routes, passengers, or drivers, either.
“They told us the shutdown would be in March, but then we got slapped in the face with a shutdown this December” and the pending layoffs with no notice, said Jackson.
The fight isn’t over, though. Supportive City Council members Allen and Brianne Nadeau, D-1st Ward, spoke at the union-called rally. The Circulator is such a success that “they should be rolling out the red carpet for you on wages and seniority,” Nadeau said, “I’ve also been told the Mayor has the power” unilaterally “to keep all of you on your places on the benefit and seniority lists.”
“We’ve seen enough to know Bowser doesn’t care about the working people in this city,” said Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Omictin. He added that 43 ANC commissioners citywide already signed a protest letter to Bowser, the city council, and the Metro Board about the Circulator’s termination, and urged the crowd to contact their ANC members to join that group.
And Allen borrowed a phrase Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump uses, referring to replacing the Affordable Care Act, when describing the D.C. government’s vision—or lack of it—for the Circulator’s passengers, routes, and drivers.
“We hear they have a concept of a plan,” Allen said.
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