The following is from a longer article about the BART strike by Bertha Hernandez and Frederico Fernandez titled "How NOT to lead a strike: The Story of the BART Unions, 2013.
Two people lost their lives on Saturday, October 19, 2013, owing to the criminal negligence of the BART Administration and its Board of Directors. One of the people killed — crushed to death by a wayward train car — was a BART worker. The other, killed by the same car, was a contractor who crossed the picket line to perform an inspection of the tracks. Within less than 48 hours of the incident, the BART administrators produced what they had stubbornly refused to offer for the past seven months: a tentative agreement contract for BART workers.
The end of the 2013 BART conflict does not mark the end of the struggle. We believe that the result of this ongoing fight will affect us all. For these reasons, we stand to benefit from carefully examining this strike and drawing some conclusions that will prepare us for future battles.
The Board of Directors’ strategy, as far as we can see, amounted to this: use Hock to undermine the unions, and impose a qualitative change in the balance of power between management and the workers. Hock’s modus operandi is already familiar in the transportation industry. It is a comprehensive offensive starting with imposing his own rules on the negotiations (including banning union communication with the media), while finding a convenient way to circumvent these rules himself. Then, he conducts “surface negotiations” — that is, negotiations without the intention of reaching an agreement. These lukewarm overtures make it easy to accuse union counterparts of intolerance and greed. The final stroke is a public campaign of systematic media smears, accusing workers of stubborn unreason and selling out the riders.
Negotiations for a new BART contract began in April on a sour note, when BART management hired Tom Hock as lead negotiator. A prominent business executive from Veolia corporation, a transnational company notorious for (among other dubious activities) privatizing public transportation in cities around the world, Hock had earned a reputation for effectiveness in attacking and undermining unions. As lead negotiator, he would serve BART administrators Grace Crunican (General Manager) and the BART Board of Directors.
The main goal of the managers was not just to settle on a contract that was bad for the unions, but also to politically undermine the unions in case they decide to strike, forcing them to take this already serious risk under the most hostile conditions possible. The BART administration portrays itself as advocating for the public interest, while the unions (they lament with a sad shake of the head) are privilege-hoarding, tax-vacuuming, hysterically selfish special interest groups.
Negotiations for a new BART contract began in April on a sour note, when BART management hired Tom Hock as lead negotiator. A prominent business executive from Veolia corporation, a transnational company notorious for (among other dubious activities) privatizing public transportation in cities around the world, Hock had earned a reputation for effectiveness in attacking and undermining unions. As lead negotiator, he would serve BART administrators Grace Crunican (General Manager) and the BART Board of Directors.
The main goal of the managers was not just to settle on a contract that was bad for the unions, but also to politically undermine the unions in case they decide to strike, forcing them to take this already serious risk under the most hostile conditions possible. The BART administration portrays itself as advocating for the public interest, while the unions (they lament with a sad shake of the head) are privilege-hoarding, tax-vacuuming, hysterically selfish special interest groups.
The only way the unions could have countered this political offensive would have been to come out in public with a vigorous, sustained and systematic campaign for workers’ rights against austerity. They could have presented these rights to the public as the legitimate aspirations of all workers as a class. What a wasted opportunity. Instead, the union bureaucracy showed a distinct disinterest in advancing a public debate in terms of the struggle of one class against another class. Nowhere did they outline a broader agenda of promoting more unionizing of private sector workers in order to access better pay and other hard-won gains.
Conceding and exacerbating the fragmentation of the class is consistent with most labor leaders’ orientation to keep their own struggle separate and isolated from other struggles. During the BART fight, we saw this in the failure to link with Amalgamated Transit Union 192 (Bay Area buses), who were also involved in contract negotiations and preparing for strike action in the public transport sector.
For our purposes, we’ll focus primarily on ATU 1555, because it is the union that had the greatest potential to lead a strong fight, and thus represents the gravest disappointment.
Antoinette Bryant, president of ATU 1555, is the head of a union leadership characterized by fragmentation, inconsistency and instability. The leadership of this union tends to be replaced after a few years; the current leadership of the union took over just three years ago as part of the rejection by the membership to the concessionary contract of 2009. The new president did not arrive with a leadership team capable of advancing democracy within the union, through the preparation and development of member-driven systems capable of resisting the attack by BART administrators. As we mentioned, ATU 1555 also showed a notable and discouraging disinterest in organizing solidarity and unity with other struggles.
For the present negotiations Antoinette Bryant wrote a little-disseminated opinion piece published by the San Francisco Chronicle on June 18, two weeks before the strike. The scarcely shared article contained the main talking points on the negotiations with the BART administration. Bryant denounced the heavy handed maneuvers of the BART administrators: labeling them bad-faith politicians who “instinctively play games rather than compromise,” and asking them to “put away the political agenda and address the urgent needs of this great transit system.” Despite this tough talk, Bryant never managed to best her adversaries. Throughout the whole process of negotiations, she led every failed effort to compromise, and proved all too willing to give concessions.
In addition to misjudging the power of their opponents, Bryant and the leadership of ATU 1555 also stayed curiously out of touch with their own base. The workers from ATU 1555, speaking in social and economic terms, are, as we mentioned, a relatively privileged layer of workers as compared with the prevailing wages in the Bay Area. Everybody talks about this, except of course, the leadership of the union itself. Burying their heads in the sand, they tried to avoid dealing with the implications and political challenges this represents. The multiple contradictions of their position are reflected in the fragmentation of the union leadership itself: fragmentation evident throughout the conflict, during public rallies and during the strike.
Besides the milieu around the ATU 1555 union president, there are two other distinct sectors in the union leadership: one represented by Chris Finn, Recording Secretary, and the other by Yuri Hollie, station agent representative. Both are members of the bargaining committee and the Executive Committee. Finn appeared as a union leader attempting to build connections with community organizations and other workers, and doing joint work with other BART unions in the organizing of public rallies. But the orientation to hold public rallies was short-lived: not everyone in the union leadership was on the same page. Antoinette Bryant played only a very minor role during the first public rally in August. She then short-circuited a second rally planned for October (around the re-ramping up of strike forces), only to see it half-revived via a joint effort by Finn and Hollie, who were left trying to hot-house a community-oriented strike campaign that should have been grown and nurtured over months. Such inconsistencies in public orientation thus revealed the constant and intense competition among union leaders.
For their part, both Finn and Hollie led efforts to reach out to various groups in the Left: community based organization and activists groups. But these efforts were uncoordinated and inconsistent. As a result, none of them created a real democratic structure to elicit sustained solidarity from the community, or to steadily organize the union membership to play a role in these outreach efforts. The union militancy of ATU 1555 practically dissipated after the August 1st rally as the whole leadership shifted their focus away from organizing and toward negotiations. A few short months later, ATU 1555 membership participation in the October 8th rally was a dispiriting husk of its summertime bloom.
Chris Finn, a former member of the Left Party, began his union activity as part of a left-wing caucus in ATU 1555. But you’d hardly know it, looking at the way he conducted himself in a leadership position. In the 2013 contract negotiation and strike there was little differentiation, politically, between him and union president Antoinette Bryant. Both favored the approval of the tentative agreement of Oct. 21, and neither of them (or the other union leaders) blasted Gavin Newsom when he said that a BART strike should not happen again.
Yuri Hollie, the other EC member, has been an outspoken opponent against any type of concessions in the new contract, but was ineffective in putting together actual resistance to these concessions. When the conflict escalated, she was removed from the negotiations committee by the union president. She found herself isolated and incapable of mounting her own defense because of the inconsistency of her tactics. Had she built a more solid base of workers ready and willing to strike, things might have been different.
The upcoming elections of the officers of ATU 1555 scheduled for late November have been in the background of these competing positions and differences in the leadership. The union election process started with the nomination of candidates at the regular membership meeting in November, and the election takes place in December. Sadly, this fact seemed to represent a bigger priority, in the minds of the various leaders, than the strike itself.
(UPDATE: After two rounds of voting as of January 8, 2014, ATU 1555 has not been able to elect a union President, and a third, tie-breaking vote is taking place by mail. Current President Bryant and Finn were tied at 307 votes each in the second round of the election.)
As for the other unions, SEIU 1021 represents the largest fraction of BART workers; its current leadership has been at the helm for many years and has been the veteran chief negotiators of the BART contracts. The union local represents a total of 52,000 workers in Northern California. Roxanne Sanchez, the union president, has been directly involved in the contract negotiations and played a leading role along with Josie Mooney and John Arantes (BART Chapter president) for the past 15 years. They are also a dominant force in the regional Labor Councils that they effectively immobilized during the BART confrontation.
Even the smallest of the three BART unions and historically the most conservative, AFSCME 3993, summarily deposed President Jean Hamilton Gómez when he called union members to cross the picket line of the other two unions. Now-president Patricia Schuchardt led the union to join the July BART strike and called on the members to respect the picket line of the other two unions. She also played a leading role in denouncing BART management efforts to certify train controllers in order to break the strike, and wrote warning letters to the Public Utilities Commission on this issue. Despite certain promising instincts in leadership, however, its small size and the composition of its members (mostly supervisors) limited this union’s ability to perform any kind of leadership role during the conflict.
Meanwhile, the conservative leadership of ATU 1555 has no excuse. Even after a near-unanimous vote of the two main unions, vowing to strike if necessary, ATU 1555 repeatedly blocked any attempt to create a strike fund: thus making a strike unsustainable. With this kind of myopic, unrealistic approach, the short strike is just a flashy accessory to the contract negotiations behind closed doors.
As noted at the beginning of this tale, the dramatic end of the BART strike came swiftly after the second day, when a train ran over and killed a worker and a BART contractor. Both of them were breaking the strike while doing an inspection of the tracks (a task that would normally be done by other workers).
This is the first time in the history of BART where workers have been killed in the middle of a strike. The incident itself was not a freak accident, but a predictable consequence of managerial recklessness.
In a terrible irony, this was one of the main issues the unions were demanding to address in the negotiation of the new contract. Because of these incidents, BART had already been the subject of multiple citations for safety violations by OSHA, a state regulator. BART management refused to modify the safety protocols and instead filed multiple appeals to avoid compliance. There is a predictable profit-chasing incentive at play here: BART management wants to maintain computer control over as many of its operations as possible, in order to reduce costs and maximize efficiency. Thus, they continued to patch up the flawed safety protocols instead of completely revamping operations in order to avoid more deaths. (BART is finally doing this and the “simple approval” safety protocol has been cancelled permanently after these last two deaths).
In response to the deaths of the two workers, union bureaucrats decided to call for a low-key vigil the following day, suspending all planned actions on the picket lines. This, we feel, was a big mistake. Failing to call for a mass protest against the criminal negligence of BART management was a cowardly decision masquerading as “respect” for the slain workers and their families. The union bureaucrats clearly sensed that they suddenly had an advantage, a newly strengthened position at the negotiations table, and presumably they did not want to waste it on political denunciations or calls for criminal investigation.
The California Department of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is considering bringing criminal charges, a demand raised only by AFCSME so far — not by SEIU or ATU.
The tentative agreement was submitted to a vote of SEIU 1021 and ATU 1555 and was approved by an overwhelming margin by members of both unions (88 percent of SEIU, and 85 percent of ATU). The Board of Directors naturally approved it as well. (Though Zachary Mellett, one of the most anti-labor Board Directors, vowed to oppose the new contract on the grounds that it gives too much to the workers.)
The new contract contains concessions by workers in the area of benefits and pensions, compensated by an increase in wages — but without adjusting for the rate of inflation. The contract also makes concessions in terms of labor flexibility, an old demand of the administration.
In short, it is a net loss for workers.
Antoinette Bryant, ATU 1555 union president, declared the strike a victory in an unrelated public rally. (Unsurprising, perhaps, given that leadership often claims wins in order to keep their privileged positions as union officials, but bizarre and abhorrent nevertheless.)
In our view, the contract was not a victory. It would be more accurately called an economic net loss, and politically close to a tie (in which management “scored a goal” on themselves, with their deadly and criminal oversight). More importantly it is a result that will surely have negative impacts in future labor battles in the Bay Area. For us, what matters the most is not the economic particulars, but the overall political results of the strike.
The union leadership claiming a victory is an insult to the intelligence of the workers, and sows a seed for a disastrous defeat in the future. (With successes like these, who needs losses?) It does not do anything to help workers realize how close they came to political disaster themselves. It does not explain the spectacular letdowns they suffered through their reliance on the good favors of politicians from the Democratic Party political machine.
A strike is a battle. It represents one of the highest points in the class struggle. It is the moment in which the disparity of interests between workers and employers is expressed openly and directly as a confrontation between the economic interests of workers who seek better wages and working conditions, and employers who attempt to increase profits and protect their interests as capitalists. In the case of BART workers, as public employees, the employer is the capitalist state, which is controlled by the political parties of the capitalists.
Zooming out a bit: the main reasons why public sector workers are under attack relate to shrinking state budgets, due not only to an unprecedented concentration of wealth in a small population (wealth stolen by bankers, for instance, in the foreclosure crisis), but also reflecting a long-term economic decline of the United States. Historically, the public sector grew massively in the United States over the past 50 years under more favorable economic conditions. It created a privileged layer of workers, with better wages, medical benefits and pensions as well as better working conditions and work stability. That era is coming to an end — and that is what the strike by BART workers reflects.
To fight smarter in the future, we must learn from the errors of this battle. We see how secret bargaining negotiations kept workers in the dark and dampened their organization and mobilization for a militant strike. We see how the bureaucrats used the threat of a strike as a bargaining chip, yet suppressed dissent and independent actions by the rank and file. We are weary of these same old betrayals. There is a need to break with the parties of the bosses and tirelessly cultivate the strength of the workers. Otherwise, militant strikes will go completely extinct, and concessionary contracts will overgrow every sector.
