Futures of Transit Work: Contesting Devaluation and Neoliberal Automation in Bus Transit

ABSTRACT Being a bus operator has long meant access to middle class wages, quality benefits, and union membership, forms of security increasingly rare amid growing precarity. But transit is in trouble. In the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic and decades of disinvestment, bus operators face mounting time pressure, frequent violence, and eroding job security. They are framed as inefficient, a narrative used to justify weakening their labor protections and degrading dignity on the job. We highlight the on‐the‐ground effects of this racialized devaluation through first‐hand accounts from bus operators across the U.S. and Canada. Their embodied critique of the current crisis makes visible the harms of neoliberal transformations, including emerging technological change. A driverless future is being advanced, one that would further degrade bus operators' dignity and devalue their labor. We introduce the concept of neoliberal automation to describe this trajectory and describe how it is being contested. Transit workers are rejecting automation framed by austerity and displacement, offering instead visions of a labor future centered on dignity, safety, and democratic control over technological change.