Anibal Apunte, center, delivers a petition to the wrong DDOT employee. (Photo by Benjamin R. Freed)
A group of current and former Capital Bikeshare employees went through with delivering a petition to the District Department of Transportation in hopes of recovering what they say are missing wages. But when the dozen or so workers arrived at the DDOT office on the second floor of the Frank D. Reeves Municipal Center at 2000 14th Street NW, they were quickly dispirited to realize they were not at the right office.
A few administrative workers kindly told the demonstrators they were at a satellite office that handles traffic operations. Terry Bellamy, DDOT’s executive director and the petition’s intended recipient, works out of a District government building at 55 M Street SE, along with the rest of the department’s brass, including the people who oversee Bikeshare.
Before piling in cars and cabs to head over to the main DDOT office, the former Bikeshare workers again made their claim that the bicycle sharing service has been stiffing its employees. While Capital Bikeshare is overseen by the governments of the jurisdictions it serves, its staff is employed by Alta Bicycle Share, a Portland, Ore.-based company that manages bike sharing systems around the United States.
The contract between DDOT and Alta, first signed in 2010 and renewed in 2012, stipulates that employees be paid federal prevailing wages. But several current and former Bikeshare employees filed a complaint earlier this year with the Labor Department, which launched an inquiry into the matter.
“I was supposed to start at $17.18 an hour,” says Anibal Apunte, who worked as a driver and later a supervisor on Bikeshare’s station re-balancing operations. “A lot of us started out at $12 or $13 with no benefits.” He also says that it took him four and a half months to start receiving benefits, though the contract states that health benefits are supposed to kick in after 25 hours of logged time.
Apunte also says he left Bikeshare after being accused of talking publicly about a labor dispute with a subordinate he had flagged for poor work performance.
While Alta and its president, Mia Birk, have said almost nothing about the wage investigation, the workers also launched a petition to collect the signatures of sympathetic Bikeshare members. Lauren Stansbury, a media consultant who helped organize the demonstration, says the petition gathered about 1,400 names.
UPDATE: Stansbury emails to tell DCist that the demonstration group made it to DDOT’s headquarters at 55 M Street SE to deliver the petition to agency administrators.
