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.
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.
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.
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.
