School bus driver here. Depending on the district you drive for, it can be stable. At mine, we make over $30/hr and get benefits like health insurance and a small pension (after ten years on the job). However, you don’t get a lot of hours (typically 4-5 a day, although the most senior drivers can get 8+ hours a day) and generally no (or very little) work in the summers - for me, this is part of the job’s appeal. We are a union shop, which is pretty important to the situation.
The lack of stability comes from the fact that there’s a strong tendency for school districts to privatize and hand over transportation responsibilities to private bus companies, which generally use older poorly-maintained buses, and hire any creatures that seem to be alive and have CDLs to drive while not doing criminal background checks on them or testing for drugs and alcohol and paying them a lot less with no benefits. The advantage of privatization is that it ends up costing school districts more because of the much higher accident rates.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Interestingly as an European I didn’t even thought about school buses when I read the shitpost and instead a regular public transport bus was what popped into my mind.