SAN FRANCISCO, CA, October 22 — Today, 2,400 Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train operators and station agents (Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555) and service workers (SEIU Local 1021), began returning to work, ending their four-day strike. This was the second walkout since June 30 when Governor Jerry Brown ordered a 60-day cooling-off period. The strike focused on wages, safety, seniority scheduling rights and preserving work rules. Union leaders ordered the strikers back to work before the rank-and-file knew what’s in the new contract.
Rather than bargain for a new contract and avoid a strike, the bosses used the “cooling off” period to cool off workers’ militancy and train managers to run scab trains. On the strike’s first full day, two workers who crossed the picket lines to inspect tracks were run over by a manager-operated train. The strikers were outraged that two workers were killed and they wanted to use the incident to spread the strike and made homemade signs, like “RIP Two Workers Murdered by Bosses’ Profits,” and “GM Grace Crunican Murdered Two Workers!” In the last analysis, the workers sympathized with the two dead workers even though they had scabbed on the strike.
Fearing the strikers would start picketing other area bus depots and train stations, the ATU leadership cancelled picketing for two days. They refused to strike at AC Transit, a sister local with an expired contract that serves the same area. On the third day they had their deal.
The economic crisis of 2008 and the drive to privatize mass transit have intensified the attacks on all transit workers. These are racist attacks, sharpest in the major cities where wages and benefits are better and the workforce and ridership are mainly black, Latino and women. The bankers, bosses and real estate developers make huge profits from mass transit and then want us to pay them via give-back contracts and fare hikes.
Over the last decade, tens of thousands of transit workers have suffered cuts in wages, pensions, health care and working conditions. Thousands more have lost their jobs. In 2010, Washington, DC METRO’s new hires lost retirement health insurance. In 2008, BART workers were forced to take a five-year wage freeze. Chicago Transit Authority workers were forced to substantially increase their contributions to the pension system. In San Francisco, a City Charter amendment cut pay and benefits and wiped out 40 years of vital work rules. In Alameda County, an “impartial” arbitrator imposed wage, benefit and schedule cuts in the 2010 contract. In New York City, transit workers have gone without a contract or pay increase for four years and ATU leaders abandoned striking school bus drivers and matrons last winter.
BART workers were on the cutting edge of the fightback and they’re not alone. ATU members in the Bay Area, Chicago, New York and Washington, DC have all distributed a national flyer, urging their locals to do more to support and spread the strike. This same week there were job actions by bus drivers in Detroit and NYC. Recently school bus drivers had a wildcat strike in Boston and last winter a very militant NYC school bus strike was squashed by the City, contractors and the ATU leadership that left drivers and matrons hanging.
The missing ingredient is an alternative center of leadership to enable workers to counter the pro-capitalist union mis-leaders who are wedded to a profit system that only offers growing wars, poverty and racist terror. Their job is to keep us bound by the bosses’ laws. We need anti-racist leadership that is anti-capitalist, with a revolutionary communist outlook and the goal of leading the working class to power through communist revolution. Militant class struggles must be turned into schools for communism.