Hundreds of Metro Detroit Jews stranded at D.C. airport by 'malicious' bus drivers

[MichMan]

Hundreds of members of Detroit's Jewish community flew to Washington, D.C., to march in solidarity with Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza on Tuesday, but some of them say they had trouble participating because of what they said was a "malicious walk-off" by some bus drivers.

Local members of the Jewish Federation of Detroit and the Jewish Community Relations Council went to the country's capital to focus the national conversation on freeing the estimated 240 hostages Hamas took from Israel on Oct. 7, said David Kurzmann, senior director of community affairs at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit.

But some buses that were hired to transport "a significant number" of the groups' participants from Dulles International Airport to the site of the march, according to Kurzmann, failed to appear, which delayed and in some cases prevented their arrival at the event.

"We have learned from the bus company that this was caused by a deliberate and malicious walk-off of drivers. Fortunately, many were able to travel to the march, and we are grateful to the drivers of those buses that arrived," Kurzmann said in a Tuesday statement.


https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2023/11/14/hundreds-of-metro-detroit-jews-stranded-at-d-c-airport-by-absent-bus-drivers/71582002007/

[JohnSJ]

1. People need to be fired for this anit-Jewish garbage

[stopdiggin]

2. rather surprised that the bus company would disclosed

that this was targeted antisemitism
(isn't there a lawyer in the background screaming, "shut up, shut up, shut up!" .. ?

[MichMan]

3. Bus company probably wanted it to be understood that it was drivers acting independently and not company malfeasance.

[stopdiggin]

4. I still think I would have just gone with

"we had a walkout. our sincerest apologies."

[moniss]

5. Sounds to me like there is more to this story

than we know right now. First of all according to the article the spokesman for some of the travelers is the one saying the bus company told him something. That's different than the bus company saying something directly. Also in the article it talks about people sitting for a long time waiting to deplane. Which would not be unusual for a whole bunch of charters trying to arrive all in a short period. ATC and airport security must have been swamped with apparently people wanting buses out on the tarmac as opposed to having people go through the terminal. It also quotes a traveler as saying some people got on buses but then the drivers walked off. What was going on there? If the drivers went to the airport and something took place is different than buses not showing up. Were a bunch of people wound up after waiting for so long to deplane and then maybe hassling the drivers about getting going when the drivers may have had other instructions about which planes they were supposed to be servicing? By the sounds of it people were just willy nilly trying to get on buses and as one traveler said they were all jammed in and sitting on each other's laps. There is a legal occupancy limit for a bus and the driver is responsible for what goes on with that bus. I could see where a driver might refuse to drive or be involved. At that point a professional driver should explain to the passengers that the bus will not leave until a supervisor from the bus company sorts things out.

So there is much that is to be questioned here about what went on. But people need to be aware that trying to force or coerce a holder of a Commercial Driver's License to operate a vehicle that is not in compliance with the law regarding capacity or other factors is against the law. If that happened here then the driver(s) refusing to drive did the right thing. It may be also that once the hassles began the bus company didn't want to send even more buses to end up getting involved in some chaotic scene which this sounds like was a chaotic scene. The bus that supposedly did drive with people jammed in over capacity and people sitting on laps should have that driver disciplined by the company if in fact he knowingly operated the vehicle in an over capacity manner.