NEW YORK CITY, November 28 — More than 600 members of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 demonstrated before the Sheraton Hotel on the first day of official negotiations between city transit workers and the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Local 100 president John Samuelson said there’s no midnight strike deadline on January 15 when the current contract expires.
City transit workers are directly up against Wall Street’s rulers. Bankers and wealthy investors of MTA bonds drain more than $2 billion a year directly out of the $11 billion-a-year MTA budget, forcing service cuts, layoffs and fare increases.
All the transit bosses’ attacks hit the majority black, Latino and immigrant workers and riders the hardest. Now the racist bosses want a three-year wage freeze, $6,000-a-year per worker for healthcare, and elimination of the conductor title.
The most important action transit workers can take to fight the racist bosses is to organize a rank-and-file, multi-racial group of women and men that both prepares for a strike while spreading communist ideas as the solution for workers’ problems.
The MTA’s attacks on transit workers and riders are a natural organic part of capitalism. These attacks can’t be fixed by taxing the rich, regulating the banks, improving campaign finance rules or working with a “nice” MTA boss. The entire political system, including the promotion and appointment of the MTA heads, was created by and for the rich.
Bosses’ Dictatorship Cannot Be ‘Improved’
Capitalism is not a democratic system that “needs to be improved.” It’s a bosses’ dictatorship that needs to be smashed and replaced with workers’ power. Only in a communist society can workers make transit decisions and work for the world’s working classes’ needs, with no profit, money or bosses.
The 2005 transit walkout, despite being sold out, showed that black, Latino and immigrant-led workers can bring the racist city bosses to their knees. Today hundreds of thousands of workers in city unions are looking to Local 100 to set a pattern of gains in these hard times, particularly the smaller ATU (Amalgamated Transit Union) locals that have stalled negotiations with the MTA.
The “Occupy” movements have targeted attention on Wall Street bankers and politicians that serve the rich. But a transit strike would hit the bosses where it hurts: in their wallets.
Although Samuelson did not rule out a strike — telling the NY Daily News, “I think the public support that the union did enjoy in 2005 will have grown dramatically if we were to strike in 2011” — he has made working with politicians to increase public funds for transit his main strategy for winning a decent contract. Yet for more than 20 years New York State and local lawmakers of both parties starved the MTA of tax dollars, funneled MTA revenues to Wall Street through “debt-service” schemes and continue to make public-sector workers’ strikes illegal.
Obama Freezes Wages
TWU backed Obama who, a year ago, froze wages for federal workers — the largest employer of black workers nationally with 21% of all employed black workers. This was months before attacks against public workers in Wisconsin. Samuelson says politicians like Obama, responsible for such attacks on workers, are people we can work with to gain a winning contract!
The Progressive Labor Party advocates rank-and-file strike preparations: start a campaign for personal strike savings; mobilize Local 100 members for demonstrations; and organize safety/work-to-rule slowdowns. Throughout history transit workers made gains with mass militant class struggle, even during rough economic times.
The 1980 transit strike, during a nation-wide economic downturn, lasted 11 days. Transit workers won full amnesty from the fascist no-strike Taylor law before they returned to work.
During the Great Depression and massive racist unemployment, the anti-police brutality rebellion in Harlem in March 1935 pushed city subway bosses to hire civil service titles regardless of color, winning the first mass wave of employment for black transit workers.
During the same Depression, the 1937 Brooklyn sit-down strike saw hundreds of transit workers occupy their job site at the Kent Ave. power station and won legal recognition for the then communist-led TWU in NYC.
Despite the strength of militant class struggle under capitalist rule, gains can be — and are — taken away. We are experiencing that today with attacks on public-sector unions: 1,000 layoffs, delays in our raises and the MTA’s current concession demands. Racist imperialist oil wars that only benefit the capitalist class have killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan and drained federal transit funding. The bosses’ racist unemployment and anti-immigrant terror laws target employed black, Latino and immigrant workers for cuts and super-exploitation.
To achieve victories that the bosses can’t take away, transit workers must combine militant fight-back with building a powerful, revolutionary communist PLP that can lead the working class to challenge and eventually overthrow the bosses, no matter how difficult this coming contract struggle may become.
