Some MetroAccess drivers worked more than 18 hours on Thanksgiving, just a week after Metro told its board of directors that it planned to crack down on long hours that lead to dangerous levels of worker fatigue. The van drivers, who shuttle around riders with disabilities for Metro’s federally mandated paratransit service, are scheduled to work 13-hour shifts, which include a one-hour break. But the work stretched far longer on the holiday as staffing stretched thin.
The timecard of one driver shows she started her shift on Thanksgiving at 7:20 a.m. and worked until 3:37 a.m. the next day. Her total work time was nearly 19 hours.
“It’s unsafe and it’s a fatality in the making,” said Wayne Baker, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1764, which represents many of the drivers. “Someone is going to get killed.”
The long hours were first reported by WJLA.
“Thanksgiving was a rare and unfortunate incident in which we had a shortage of drivers,” said Cristina Russell, a spokeswoman for MV Transportation that provides the service for Metro. “Because of this shortage we asked some drivers to voluntarily extend their shift to make sure that every MetroAccess passenger received a ride home.”
But Baker has heard from drivers that they are often given unexpected “add-on” pickups. Those trips — and the return across town — extend the day past the scheduled end of new 13-hour shifts instituted this summer. In the past, under even shorter shifts, at least 87 drivers had been filmed falling asleep while driving.
Just before Thanksgiving, Metro laid out plans on how to reduce fatigue after a report documented some rail workers logging 16-hour shifts. The agency said it planned to phase in a 14-hour limit for its rail workers. But because a contractor provides the agency’s MetroAccess service, the new Metro rules are not slated to apply to them.
MetroAccess vans don’t face federal rules that limit commercial drivers’ shifts to 10 hours because they fall just under the size cutoff for passenger vehicles, by carrying no more than seven paying riders, rather than eight.
Instead, MV has had an “informal” 15-hour limit for work shifts, said company spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, but it has just formalized the policy and extended it to all of its subcontractors because of the Thanksgiving problems and the Metro board’s attention to the issue.
Metro officials were “dismayed” to learn of the Thanksgiving problems, said agency spokesman Dan Stessel. “We are directing MV to enforce their established limits,” he said.
