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SEPTA’s largest union authorized a strike Sunday for the second straight year, highlighting concerns over transit safety and lack of progress on salary negotiations.
Transportation Workers Union Local 234, which represents bus, subway and trolley operators, and other support staff took the vote less than two weeks before their contract with SEPTA expires Nov. 7.
The vote does not mean workers plan to immediately walk off the job but gives union leaders the authority to call a strike if negotiations do not progress.
In a bulletin on its website posted Wednesday, the union said “SEPTA wants to give us a 0% raise” and SEPTA “will not commit to providing its employees with a safe working environment because it is too expensive.”
“For over a decade, the Union has been sounding the alarm to SEPTA about the problems with its radio communication systems — bus radios going into fallback mode, the dead zones underground, etc. — that leave employees facing potentially life-threatening incidents with no way to let SEPTA know,” the union wrote.
Previous bulletin posts highlighted the union’s concerns with safety, specifically a shooting that left three women injured on a Route G bus earlier this month and another one on a Route 60 bus.
“We are committed to engaging in good-faith negotiations,” a SEPTA spokesperson said in an email to WHYY News. “With the goal of reaching an agreement that is fair to our hard-working employees and to the customers and taxpayers who fund SEPTA.”
“A major factor in these negotiations is SEPTA’s ongoing funding crisis. With the exhaustion of federal COVID relief funds earlier this year and ridership still recovering from the pandemic, SEPTA is facing an operating budget deficit of nearly a quarter billion dollars annually,” the statement continued. “We continue to work with Governor Shapiro and legislative leaders on sustainable, long-term funding, but at this point, there is no solution in sight. This stark reality impacts these negotiations, as well as SEPTA’s ability to provide critical transportation services throughout the Philadelphia region.”