As many have said, Metro is a place rampant with favoritism. Some opportunity are afforded to others while not made available to all. If you like driving, then this is a great place for you. For many of my fellow workers, the stars have long vanished from their eyes and they are just punching the clocks. Every couple of months when there is a schedule change, I have seen some people left the company. Whether it is voluntary or not, I will never know; all I have seen is people coming and going all the time. Since the scheduling is classified by seniority, the most senior drivers get the best routes, great schedule, and good amount of hours while the rest of us faces the brunt of overcrowding routes and traffics scrapping the leftovers with about 40 ~ 41 hours; yet the pay is exactly the same whether you serve 5 passengers or 100 passengers during your work day. However, the 40 full time hour is misleading, often you have to travel to continue driving the bus on route and Metro will not pay you during that travel time. Depending on the scheduling, you might have up to an hour before you start working; that is a lot of time Metro takes from you unfairly. The line "this job is not for everybody" is always thrown about, but this is a poor excuse not to improve working conditions for your workers. The Unions are nothing to write home about either, it seems like they are just in bed with the company because the pay fells way behind the national average. Yet this is an organization that is supposed to treat everybody the same, but the senior drivers gets a special pay bump for themselves; it really shows whose benefit they have on their mind. Houston is the 4th largest city in the US, yet our pay does not reflect that. Metro bleeds driver bad, but it doesn't treat its existing work force any better. The call for overtime are frequently announced over the radio but alas, the overtime spots are only given out to groups of selected individuals. I feel like if Metro could chain us drivers to the steering wheel, they would.
