BATON ROUGE, La. – The highly anticipated CATS bus driver strike kicked off this morning—sort of. While drivers planned to protest unfair working conditions en masse, only a fraction actually made it to the picket line. The reason? Most of them rely on the bus to get to work.
“I was all set to strike,” said veteran driver Carl Broussard, who asked that we not use his name to avoid any retaliation from upper management, standing at an empty bus stop. “But then I realized… how the hell am I supposed to get there?”
Stranded strikers across the city attempted to carpool, but years of steering 40-foot buses had left many of them unfamiliar with compact car handling. Others considered Uber, but peak pricing surged to $50 a ride within minutes of the strike announcement.
In response to the low turnout, CATS management offered to send a bus to pick up the stranded strikers—though it’s expected to arrive sometime next Tuesday.
