By Michael J. Martin,
Executive Director and CEO
National Association for Pupil Transportation
Americans mostly prefer predictability in their lives. However, as we’re seeing these days, change is inevitable.
Heretofore, the pace of change was mostly gradual. These days, it’s warp speed. It seems hardly a day passes without hearing about some new technology that promises to make a huge change to our lifestyles or our work.
One that comes immediately to mind is the looming advent of self-driving (autonomous) vehicles. These are no longer the proverbial vehicles of the future, but of the very near future.
The ramifications for our industry will be profound for two reasons: 1. The predictability and defined routing of yellow school buses lends itself to automating, and 2. It would—at least according to its advocates—result in further improved safety and save taxpayer dollars.
In a recent political thought piece, “After Super Tuesday: Focus on the labor market, inequality and the future,” Minneapolis author John Crea opines about the future employment prospects of truck drivers and school bus drivers. He believes jobs for both groups will probably go away, but with a twist: truck “drivers” will vanish but there likely will be some truck “operators” still employed, working at computer stations directing fleets of delivery vehicles.
Not so for yellow school bus drivers. He believes—and I concur—they will not be completely autonomous because parents will want their children to be supervised. Drivers, he says “will be retained (and retrained) as school bus “monitors” who are aboard to maintain order and keep children safe. But “with no gain in productivity, they have a slim chance of keeping up their earnings.”
His conceptual solution? Supplementing their wages with an Earned Income Tax Credit to recognize their value.
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a federal tax credit for low- and moderate-income working people. It encourages and rewards work as well as offsets federal payroll and income taxes. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 29 states, plus the District of Columbia, have established their own EITCs to supplement the federal credit.
The EITC is designed to reward work; a worker’s EITC grows with each additional dollar of earnings until reaching the maximum value. The theory is that this creates an incentive for people to join the labor force and for low-wage workers to increase their work hours.
This incentive feature has made the EITC highly successful. Studies show that the EITC encourages large numbers of single parents to join the labor force, especially when the labor market is strong.
So, does Crea’s idea have merit? Maybe. Maybe not. But hopefully it at least makes you think about the future.
The pandemic created by the virus now known as CoVid-19 exposed the fact that we were ill-prepared for something we knew was coming, or at least should have seen coming. Let’s not let something like that happen again.
We know autonomous vehicles are coming…and jobs will be impacted negatively. So, let’s begin planning now for the transition so it’s as painless and constructive as possible. In fact, I think this planning should go hand in hand with the development of autonomous vehicles themselves, not be a subsequent economic crisis for our industry.
What do you think?