At the beginning of the school year, will students stay on the side of the road? The school transport sector lacks drivers for the next school year: about 8,000 employees are missing. “It is a shortage that affects all territories, all companies,” explains Jean-Sébastien Barrault, president of the National Federation of Passenger Transport, at BFM Business. “Partly it is explained by the health crisis that has hit our sector very hard and has led a certain number of drivers to abandon other professions.”
So how to organize 15 days before the start of the school year?
“We are going to have driving staff who, in general, do not necessarily mobilize to drive,” he explains. “We are going to ask the drivers who usually drive tourist buses to do school transportation.”
A “degraded situation” that “sometimes can lead students to leave earlier,” he acknowledges.
Salary increase
Above all, it remains to relaunch the attractiveness of the profession, penalized by the split day and low wages.
Problem: Companies are committed to long-term public procurement contracts. A company that chooses to increase wages, therefore, “has no possibility of passing it on directly to its client”, underlines the head of the federation. Waiting for possible renegotiations, the sector proposes to increase the number of hours worked by employees to mechanically inflate wages.
Source: BFM TV
