Richard Mellor is a retired Afscme Local 444 member in the Bay area and he has been following and documenting the issues around the recent BART strike in San Francisco. The ATU Local 1555 represents BART workers and initially went on a 4 day strike at the beginning of July of this year when bargaining with BART management reached an impasse. Workers for Bay area transit buses, AC Transit, are also represented by the ATU although a different local (Local 192), and were in a legal strike position at the time but choose not to go out on strike in solidarity with BART workers. AC Transit used their buses and workers to provide additional transportation services in the Bay area during the 4 day strike by BART workers.
The 4 day strike was called of by the union leadership in favour of a 30 day period of negotiations with BART management in spite of the fact that BART management had previously hired the well known union buster Thomas P. Hock, the VP of labour relations at Veolia Transit, as their lead negotiator. The 30 day period did not produce any meaningful progress and BART management then called on State Governor Jerry Brown to intervene. The strike has now been postponed indefinitely by the Governor and is subject to the outcome of a board of inquiry hearing which may result in the imposition of a state mandated further 60 day cooling off period.
The strike underlines a key failure of the leadership of the trade union movement today as it faces ongoing decades long decline in union density, introduction of right to work legislation and prohibitions and restrictions on the right to strike. Mellor's analysis of the ATU's failure to bring a class based approach to the BART strike are a lesson in where rank and file activists have to start in order to reclaim their unions from labour bureaucrats and to resurrect a moribund labour movement. The following are some highlights of a longer article he wrote on the situation at BART available at the Facts For Working People blog site.
"...there are some important lessons that arise in situations like these, one of them being the class bias of the mass media. In US society there is a massive and permanent ideological war waged by the mass media that Wall Street controls aimed at obscuring and actually denying the class nature of society, and indeed, that class struggle even exists, but when workers are forced to defend our interests in the way the BART workers are presently doing, the class nature of society is laid bare for all to see.
Jerry Brown, a politician representing the interests of the bankers, hedge fund managers and other coupon clippers----in short, the US capitalist class-----claims he stepped in to this dispute to save us all hardship. If the dispute cannot be resolved in this seven days through the intervention of the board of inquiry, then “Brown is expected to make a swift decision on seeking a 60-day cooling off period.”,the San Francisco Chronicle reports this morning. Brown will ask the courts to impose this 60-day cooling off period and if the court decides that a strike “Will significantly disrupt public transportation services and will endanger the public’s health, safety and welfare.”, a strike will be illegal.
But Brown’s justification for stopping the strike at the last minute Sunday night was that the strike would, “significantly disrupt public transportation services and will endanger the public’s health, safety and welfare.”. Why would the courts reverse that? Is it likely that a strike deemed by the state through one of its major representatives a threat to our health and safety last Sunday, will be declared fine and dandy a week later or 60 days later?
We are not stupid. In our communities, Brown and other representatives of the 1% are ordering fire stations closed because we can’t afford to keep them open they say. Might this be a tad dangerous for us; put us at risk? Might closing fire stations, schools and health care facilities in a society where national health care is dismal, “..endanger the public’s health, safety and welfare.” We know it would. Brown knows it does but it is a political decision Brown and his class colleagues make as a necessary part of their agenda to put the US workers and middle class on rations. It is necessary to shift the crisis of capitalism in a global economy on to our backs and take back all the gains that have been won by working people over a century and a half of struggle. It is part of the declining influence of US capitalism on the world stage. We have to be more competitive and that means, work cheaper, faster and without unions that actually go on the offensive to oppose this strategy. Profits come before safety in capitalist society.
We only have to stop and think for a second to remind ourselves amid the mass of lies and propaganda that their claims of public safety are a smoke screen. Every American worker knows that the people in power in this country don’t give a damn about the rest of us. Everything we have in this country, every social benefit, every political advance, every material gain, has come about by doing what the BART workers are doing. The capitalists have capital, the media, the police and the courts, and the military when they need to call on troops to fire on their own kin, ( a risky business) but we have labor power. Without the ability to strike we are left to the mercy of the institutions of the 1%.
The 1% is using all their “legal” tricks to halt the possible success of a BART strike. It’s profits yes, but there is the effect on morale as well as after years of defeats and declining living standards any victory by labor over the forces of capital would inspire all of us, would show us that we can win, that we can make gains, that we can drive back this offensive and austerity agenda of the bankers, the hedge fund wasters and all the coupon clippers who plunder the wealth of society.
The US bosses actually fear the potential power of the US working class, fear that the stifling bureaucracy at the helm of the trade union movement might not be able to control their members and derail and undermine every movement from below as was done in Wisconsin, the strikes of the 1980’s and the Occupy Movement and its attempts to build strong links with organized Labor. This is what’s at stake here for them. It was to stem that power that Taft Hartley legislation was introduced after the mass strikes of the 1930’s and the huge strike wave of 1946. We have to have a mass defiance of these anti worker laws.
As is always the case the strategists atop organized Labor (and lets not kid ourselves, the bigwigs at the AFL-CIO and the CTW coalition in Washington are in on all this behind the scenes) are doing what they can to ensure that things don’t get out of hand. Our power lies in our ability to stop production and draw the rest of the working class and our communities in to this struggle. I was at a solidarity meeting for the BART workers over the weekend and when I left that meeting with 7 hours to deadline, representatives of the union representing BART train drivers and Station Agents as well as the Executive Director (Sounds a bit like a business doesn’t it) of the Union representing other staff like custodians for example, stressed that they were in strike mode. They were going to strike at midnight as management was not showing any effort to negotiate in good faith.
In fact, this is what the Executive Director of SEIU 1021 repeated on the TV news a few hours later; management was refusing to negotiate in good faith. These are two major themes that arise, the bosses won’t negotiate in good faith and we want a contract. He nor any other official had anything to say about workers needing to fight for more at the expense of the 1% or the public’s needs and how the union was fighting for more transit, free fares for seniors, half fare for the unemployed, more jobs, 24 hour trains or increased routes and transit for the disabled and how this can be paid for by the rich and ending trillion dollar wars.
He certainly never mentioned any solidarity committee and how the public could get in touch with it to join organized labor in our struggle for a better life for all. This is because the official union strategy doesn’t include an agenda for the working public so they have no intention of broadening this struggle to include the communities. The appeal to the community is merely a tactic to get some (normally well meaning leftists and some not so well meaning ones) to help organize a few rallies and such here and there to pressure the bosses to be a little less aggressive. Many seasoned leftists/activists know this but refuse to point this out so the left bureaucracy can play this game safe in knowing that the strategy will not be challenged.
The response to these two points the officials raise should be obvious: (1) the bosses never negotiate in good faith. (2) They want a contract too. The difference is what is in that contract.
This is at the heart of the matter. This particular dispute is not about the right to a contract but what’s in the contract. The problem is that the Union officialdom from all three locals immediately involved do not want to discuss this issue in depth. Like the leadership of organized Labor as a whole, they accept that some concessions have to be made, or more accurately they have no intention of doing what needs to be done to make gains, not just for the BART workers but for workers as a whole including those that have to use BART every day and who will be adversely affected by a strike.
The reality is this. We cannot counter the massive propaganda war against the BART workers in the media if the Unions aren’t fighting for those workers who depend on BART as well as those who work for BART. We have given many examples of some issues that can be raised. But not only must these issues be raised in the media, they must be raised at the negotiating table on behalf of the communities and with real rank and file community activists involved which they can be through a real solidarity support committee. I say this as when the Union hierarchy talks of linking with the community, they generally mean with leading business or religious and pro establishment figures in these communities rather than the folks at the grass root level who are serious about changing the present situation.
The bosses are serious about taking away from us as all the gains made through the great struggles that took place with the rise of the CIO in the 30’s and the Civil Rights movement. We cannot defeat them alone, no one local can stop them in isolation nor can individual communities. We have to start where we are, if in a union by building rank and file opposition caucus based on a program and strategy that demands what we need rather than what is acceptable to wall Street and a “fight to win” strategy for accomplishing these goals. In the communities we do the same and in each case we link these struggles together as well as reach out to workers internationally.
The AC Transit drivers (also in ATU but a different local) contract ends at midnight on Wednesday and they are threatening a strike if their issues are not resolved although there is no reason to think they would strike when they refused to at the time they were strongest. When BART workers struck, under the direction of the leadership, the AC Transit drivers union weakened the strike and their own member’s interests by picking up some of the slack. Only a short time before, the unity and mood between these two groups of workers was strong and there was no doubt in my mind they would have used their united power to win a better contract for all had the leadership been willing to lead. (We should not discount the role of the International leadership in these instances as they undermine any local leadership that violates the relationship they have with the bosses based on Labor peace by going on the offensive.) The leadership atop these organizations are deathly afraid of their own members.
We cannot win if we blindly obey laws that are made by politicians of the 1% in the interests of the 1%. Mass violation of the law is unavoidable if we want to stop this assault on workers and the middle class. We all want a peaceful life, but they won’t let us have a peaceful life, unless we passively agree with their agenda which is to drive us down to the wages and conditions of third world countries. They’re already on the way to doing that here in many industries especially the service sector and industries that employ women and minorities. But they have also successfully cut wages in half in auto with the help of the leadership of the UAW leadership.
If they are successful in defeating the BART workers especially if they successfully deny them the right to strike which Governor Brown is doing temporarily but is on the cards in a more permanent fashion, it will be a huge setback for all Bay Area workers. A strike is disruptive, not just for the public but for the workers involved, and it is obvious that I am critical of the how the heads of organized labor conduct these affairs as well as their role in general. But we must sift through the rubbish we hear and read in the 1%’s media and support these brothers and sisters."
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