Press Release: Landslide Union Election Victories on the Same Day: Charles County School Bus Contractor & Loudoun County Transit

(Forestville, Maryland) March 8th, 2022 – Today, ATU Local 689 won two different National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections by landslides, showing that transit workers in this region are fed up with mistreatment and ready to organize and fight back.

Workers at James H. Duffy Company, a private school bus contractor for Charles County Public Schools, voted 18 to 0 in favor of joining ATU Local 689. This vote is just the beginning of ATU Local 689’s campaign to organize the underpaid and undervalued privatized school bus workers that help make the public school system possible. We have elections filed at over 15 additional school bus contractors in Charles County. We won’t rest until all school bus workers in Charles County have the right to sit down across the table from their employers and collectively bargain over issues that impact them every day.

The workers at Loudoun County Transit have been fighting the disgusting union-busting tactics of their private contractor employer Keolis Transit for over a year. Today they won their NLRB election 71 to 2. When Keolis took over the Loudoun County Transit operations and maintenance contract they refused to recognize Local 689 and then attempted to gerrymander the bargaining unit and intimidate workers in order to retroactively justify their union busting efforts. But workers at Loudoun County Transit never gave up! Today, we won an election for the entire Loudoun County Transit operation and look forward to bargaining with Keolis Transit for a fair contract that adequately compensates transit workers and recognizes how poorly they were treated over the last year.

“Companies in this region better take notice. You can either spend thousands or millions of dollars on union busting campaigns or you can use that money to take care of your workers.” said Raymond Jackson, President and Business Agent for ATU Local 689. “And for any workers at a transit company where they feel disrespected and underpaid, come meet with us, our doors are always open. We can tell you how thousands of workers just like you started at jobs just like yours but were able to improve them by unionizing.”

###

Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689 is comprised of more than 15,000 members and retirees performing occupations within the many skilled transportation crafts for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), MetroAccess, DASH, and the DC Circulator and Streetcar among others. A member of the Amalgamated Transit Union (AFL-CIO/CLC), the largest labor organization representing transit workers in the United States and Canada, Local 689 was established on January 19, 1916. For more information please visit our website at atulocal689.org.