Dublin Bus is planning to withdraw 120 buses with the loss of 290 jobs – and the most recently recruited will be the first to face the axe. Metro Éireann spoke to two such drivers – one immigrant and one Irish – about their fears for the future.
‘My family back home will suffer’
For Beauty Mawena, news of the cuts came like a bolt from the blue. “I had just come back to work from a holiday when my colleagues told me about a poster that the management had placed in the garage,” she says.
That poster informed workers that 160 newly recruited bus drivers would lose their jobs. “The company used our contracts against us,” says Mawena, who started working for Dublin Bus as a driver last March. Having been with the company for less than a year, it is free to dismiss her without any redundancy payments.
“I was really shocked when I found out,” says the South African woman. “I still don’t know what’s going to happen. How am I going to pay the mortgage? How will I cater for my kids? My family back home will suffer as well because I am their only breadwinner. I send money home regularly, but now this will stop.”
Mawena’s husband works as a head chef, but his salary is not enough to provide for them, she says, and he could be laid off too as restaurants and hotels are closing throughout the country. “It’s really, really painful. I am afraid that the bank will repossess our house and we will have to sign on the dole.”
For Mawena, leaving Ireland is not an option. “I don’t know where I could go,” she says. “I don’t know how I’m going to start and where.”
For the moment, her only hope is that Dublin Bus may reverse its plans. “I am determined to fight this decision and I will support the strikes,” she says. “I believe that the company’s problems are not the drivers’ fault. We are all working hard. If the company loses money it’s due to the incompetence of management.”
‘No driver wants industrial action, but the company has left us no choice’
“Bankers get bailed out to the tune of billions. I think 15 million was given to the pork industry when it got into trouble. Why can’t they find the 31 million Dublin Bus needs? Why do families have to suffer?” asks Irishman Niall Murphy, another Dublin Bus driver who’s about to be laid off.
“It’s a very stressful time for all of us,” he continues. “Most have mortgages, spouses, children.”
For Murphy personally, redundancy will mean an uncertain future for himself, his wife and two-year-old son. Originally from Dublin, he moved to Leitrim and then back to the capital to join Dublin Bus.
Just before he relocated to Dublin, Murphy got an acceptance letter for an IT course in Leitrim, but he turned it down in favour of a seemingly secure position with the Dublin company. Less than a year later, he is being laid off, and because he is only 10 months with Dublin Bus, the company can let him go without a redundancy package.
“I don’t think it’s fair,” he says. “I would describe it as an aggressive attack on new drivers. There is a large group of older drivers who can be easily offered redundancy packages. I joined Dublin Bus on a full-time, permanent basis. That was what attracted me to the job.”
Murphy, who is a member of the National Bus and Rail Union, voted in favour of industrial action. “I don’t think any driver wants industrial action,” he says. “We all prefer to be working, but the company has left us with no other choice.”
