Cardiff Bus workers strike for better pay and conditions

By Dave Reid

Unite the Union members at Cardiff Bus will be striking for three weeks from 17 August against low pay and poor working conditions. Despite providing a service throughout the Covid lockdown and being praised as frontline workers, Cardiff Bus workers, including drivers, have lost pay in real terms ever since and are paid less than the average for bus workers in the UK.

Unite members at the company are also demanding improvements in sick pay, and in working conditions which force them to walk long distances to break facilities, with breaks disrupted when buses are running late.

The implementation of bus franchising next year is also a threat to wages and conditions. Instead of nationalising bus services and returning Cardiff Bus to direct council control, the Labour-led Welsh government intends to replace the current failed system with a franchising system similar to Transport For London. That brings the danger of a free-for-all, with two-tier pay structures at Cardiff Bus and other Welsh bus companies.

• Socialist Party Wales has argued for bringing all bus services in Wales into direct public ownership, with national collective bargaining and agreed decent rates of pay.