Thomas Giblin, who represents the 34th legislative district in Trenton, was a union leader before he become a legislator. So it’s not surprising that he was the one to orchestrate last weekend’s agreement to get DeCamp buses running. Not that it wasn’t a little nerve-wracking.
“I was kind of walking on eggs because I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be,” Gilblin told Baristanet in a telephone interview Monday. He described circling back multiple times to DeCamp’s Gary Pard, to Pard’s lawyer and union leaders.
Giblin arrived on the scene of the DeCamp drivers’ Friday rally. In addition to giving a check to the union, he met that day with Pard, DeCamp’s vice president of operations. “He seemed to be a reasonable man,” Giblin said.
Giblin later floated the idea of a cooling off period to DeCamp’s lawyer Desmond Massey, and then went back to Pard. “He kind of signaled okay,” Giblin recalled.
Giblin met with ATU leaders at his West Caldwell office around 11 a.m. Saturday morning, and they signed off on the idea. But they had to present it to the membership for a vote. That meeting took place Saturday afternoon, around 3:30 p.m., in the Trinity Temple Church of God in Christ.
“I told them I thought it was the best move for them,” Giblin said. “Both sides knew a protracted strike wasn’t in anybody’s interest.” Both management and drivers would lose if customers defected to other modes of transportation, he pointed out.
But Giblin says that his main concern was the hardship the strike was putting on commuters. In its first week, many DeCamp customers were on vacation. But by the second week, most vacationers were back and Giblin became concerned that the misery was deepening.
As for why DeCamp decided to resume bus service on Wednesday, rather than Monday, Giblin said it was because Pard discontinued the auto insurance on his fleet during the strike. He needed the extra days to make sure they were covered. Mechanics did return to work on Monday, however.
Union leaders told Baristanet today there are plans to sit down to the bargaining table in October. Meanwhile, bus service is expected to resume completely tomorrow.
Thank you Mr. Giblin. It was a good decision for everyone to get back to work.
Yes, nice to see cooler heads prevailing.
Giblin worked a small miracle here.
A union boss turned politician… I guess (hope?) that explains why he thought it was appropriate for an elected official to give $12,000 to a striking union in such a public way.
On, a related note: by how many orders of magnitude do you think the rudeness level is going to go up on Wednesday?
Mike, I really don’t get the rudeness thing that so many people talk about. There are a lot of perfectly nice DeCamp drivers. There are some rude DeCamp drivers just like there are rude Montclair passengers. I ride NJ transit busses, and I wd say that maybe both NJT the drivers and the passengers are a bit friendlier to each other.
Maybe if you expect the worst from people you will get what you expect, and if you expect the best from people you will also get what you expect…just a thought…let’s give it a try Wednesday.
Miracle? Nonsense,former union leader Giblin just enabled the Union to make a graceful exit from a ill conceived and potentially disasterous strike – the wrong time for such a dumb strike.
Incidentally, has everyone noticed how much less reader participation there is now on Baristanet. Sort of reminds me of the way a good restaurant expands to make more money and loses the qualities that made it good in the first place. Next step is usually to sell the business to some sucker.
I thought they might have needed the extra two days to do the calculations on how much the strike cost the company in order to increase the fare and, of course, send the fare increase announcements out to the printer and decorate the buses with them!
Rubber,
I very rarely have to take the bus. The train is way more convinient for me and even then I only have to go during rush hour if I’m doing a trade show.
In my limited experience; the NJT conductors are generally much nicer, finding a seat is easier, and no one yells at me if I have a coffee with me in the morning.
yeah I hear ya…I get nervous whenever there’s coffee near me on the bus
The reason why people complain about drivers’ rudeness is simple — too many of them are rude. and this is unacceptable.
I stopped taking DeCamp over a year ago, other than those times when NJT has an issue, which, admittedly, occurred far too often this summer. That said, there is no comparison between the experience of riding a bus that is improperly heated / air conditioned, with a (frequently) surly driver, and with overhead lights that (frequently) don’t work, and which are (frequently) left off so that one feels they need to beg the (frequently) surly driver to turn on.
When you couple all of this with the fact that the DeCamp schedule is usually no more than a talking point, it’s hard to have any sympathy for anyone involved with the company, and unless there’s a compelling reason, i.e., proximity to the bus vs train, I can’t see why anyone would willingly ride on this wretched company’s buses.