I never liked riding the bus as a kid. With its limited possibilities for adult supervision, the school bus was the venue of choice for kicking someone’s ass or exploring the more psychological expressions of adolescent torment. One day a boy my age looked at me defiantly across the aisle and set his jeans on fire. The first time I heard the word “cunt” yelled with real conviction? On a school bus. But had it not come, I would have been stranded without a ride. Which is, of course, exactly what happened to New York City’s 1.1 million public school children this January, when eight thousand bus drivers walked off the job, sparking a month-long standoff between Local Amalgamated Transit Union 1181 and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The Daily News accused drivers of “leaving kids?… and forcing their angry parents to drag them to school in taxis or the subway.” Brooklyn Ink asserted that the strike could damage the development of children with autism by interrupting the delivery of therapeutic services received at school. In an interview with the New York Times, a parent employed at a Starbucks in Midtown Manhattan vented: “I had to take a leave just for this. It’s ridiculous.” For weeks, overwhelmed families shouldered the burden of trucking their kids to school. Then five Democratic mayoral candidates wrote a letter to union members urging them to return to work. Not one of the candidates addressed Bloomberg or Education Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who had stripped a job-security provision from the unions’ contract, inciting the conflict in the first place. Both Bloomberg and Walcott had shrewdly taken to referring to the protests as “a strike against our children.”

The next day, the strike was off — another in a long line of Bloomberg’s victories against organized labor. “In the city’s entire history, the special interests have never had less power than they do today,” he commented, “and the end of this strike reflects the fact that when we say we put children first, we mean it.”

The walkout left nine out of ten bus routes inoperational, effectively shutting down a critical service overnight. It should have been politically devastating for the mayor. But instead of strengthening the union’s bargaining power, the unavoidable impact of the strike on children, particularly those with special needs, was used as a cover by the union’s actual targets: public officials and private business interests. As one Staten Island driver pointed out, the union was not asking for a pay raise or benefits; they were simply protesting for the right to return to their jobs next school year.

But ultimately it was the bus drivers, not the politicians, who were seen as selfish. That the drivers had been picketing around the clock in freezing weather and losing wages to uphold employee protections guaranteed to them since the 1970s was immaterial to parents surrendering their own time and money to transport children to and from school.

It’s inevitable. Like all of the world’s financial capitals, New York is stunningly stratified by race and class. The city’s elites live parallel to rather than among the general public, with separate social networks and institutions that insulate them from the consequences of the disastrous policies they advocate, complicating the antagonism between labor and capital. As children, Bloomberg’s own daughters attended the private K-12 Spence School on East Ninety-First Street between Fifth and Madison, in the same neighborhood where they resided. In contrast, New York City’s school choice policy of matching students to schools based on preference rather than assigning them to local districts means that some public school students travel more than 90 minutes a day to and from school. Last year, the city finally allowed students to transfer if their commute was over 75 minutes — still twice the average time spent commuting by a New York adult. The problem with the school bus drivers’ strike was that it affected the working- and middle-class families who rely on public services much more than it cost the managerial class.

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