“At first we thought we’d just pause service, but it looked like we were going to be closed a lot longer and wanted to understand the impact this would have on her business and the drivers.”Īs it happens, Mullen was part of the early planning stages of a relief effort that Audible was launching. “Nobody knew what Covid was yet, or what the impact was going to be,” he explains.

Green had been driving those shifts for three years, so when Stoudt told him that Audible was sending employees home for the foreseeable future, “I was really worried,” he says.Īudible’s Director of Facilities, Brian Mullen, was in regular communication with Gajda from the beginning. One of those drivers was Edward Green, a familiar face to Audible employees who rode the shuttle between Newark Penn Station and Audible’s headquarters every morning and evening, five days a week. Gajda’s longtime lead dispatcher and manager, Benjamin Stoudt, broke the news to the drivers, one by one. “My immediate concern was for my employees,” she says, including 33 drivers Gajda says are “like my kids.” With the slowdown in business, she was going to have to furlough many of them. Overnight, Gajda’s van business, which relied largely on shuttling commuters between the airport, train station, office buildings and campuses around Newark, fell by about 75%. Covid-19 was forcing offices and college campuses everywhere to close, sending employees and students home and slowing transportation hub traffic to a trickle.

In late March 2020, Newark native and small business owner Karen Gajda was about to do something she never thought she’d have to do.

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