January was a bad month for Mary Maxwell. As a bus driver for TriMet’s LIFT program, which serves disabled patrons who can’t access regular transit, Maxwell had suffered through days of sexual harassment from the same passenger. Even after she filed several complaints, Maxwell says her bosses wouldn’t do anything about it. This stress was compounded by the fact Maxwell wasn’t allowed regularly scheduled breaks from her job—her grueling schedule kept her in the driver’s seat for hours without a chance to use the bathroom or seek respite from abusive clientele. The pressure built until, one afternoon, she soiled herself on the driver’s seat. It happened the next day too, and on the third day, she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Quitting was literally the only way I could get back my dignity,” Maxwell says.
Maxwell isn’t the only LIFT driver who’s felt disrespected at her job, which has her shuttling passengers for pre-scheduled trips around the city. At a recent meeting of the Portland Jobs with Justice-affiliated Workers Rights Board (WRB), several LIFT employees and passengers shared their own experiences with LIFT, a TriMet service that has been operated by a subcontractor called First Transit since 2007. Their concerns ranged from unclear scheduling and mismanagement to unsanitary working conditions and unreasonably long wait times for riders. According to WRB Chair Johanna Brenner, TriMet must “establish clear standards for paratransit service and must hold First Transit accountable for meeting these standards.” And if improvements haven’t been made by the time the First Transit contract is up for renegotiation in the next year, WRB says it’s time for TriMet to run LIFT on its own.