An Injury to All

Public transit plays a pivotal role in the lives of most working people, as we use it to travel between work and home or to run errands. How public transit is developed directly affects our lives. It affects how much time and resources we must devote to travel throughout our days, and in turn how much time we sacrifice away from home, family and friends.

If a Wal-Mart employee has to wait 40 minutes from the time her shift ends to the arrival of the next bus she can catch to go home, that’s more time she won’t have to spend with kids, making dinner, reading, or just sitting in front of the television, relaxing after a tiring day on her feet. If the closest bus route to her home is 1 mile away, that’s a mile extra she’ll have to walk to get where she needs to be, usually alone and often times in the dark before sunrise or after sunset.

If the transit authority raises fares another 25-cents, that’s extra money out of the pocket of an economically strapped rider who is already funneling taxes to support transit. If a train breaks down because it hasn’t been properly maintained, that’s another tardy or occurrence at work that could cost her job.

So ultimately, any attack on the reliability and service of public transit is an attack on working class livelihood. The irony is that fare increases or service cuts are not being used to provide a backbone to transit employees, ensuring their livelihood. Their jobs are facing similar cuts. These cuts actually ensure the livelihood of the transit authority management, usually composed of local business and political elites, who rarely even use public transit for their own commutes. As detailed above, we know MARTA’s board is enjoying its tenure of rampant abuse and fraud.

This is why any struggle to bring public transit back under the democratic mandate of the communities it serves will only be victorious if it successfully builds solidarity between transit employees and community members who are both under attack. How might this solidarity be built?

This solidarity will require more than just speaking up at MARTA public hearings or writing angry letters to the board of directors. Other cities have provided examples of successful transit worker and transit rider solidarity. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, there have been fare strikes against transit authorities trying to force through service cuts, fare hikes, and employee layoffs. Fare strikes have included bus drivers allowing passengers on board without paying the bus fare and station employees allowing passengers through turnstiles without paying train fares. Perhaps the best-known transit action was the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1954 that not only boycotted that city’s Jim Crow public transit but in fact witnessed the organization of an entire alternate network of transportation from below, where community members arranged their own routes, services, and fares for as long as they could.

Municipal infrastructure is an essential backbone for the growth of the community. It should not be a service done by experts but instead should be a system created by and accountable to the citizens of our neighborhoods. Leaving our city’s infrastructure solely in the hands of managers and so-called experts has proven to be disastrous, with everyday folks and transit employees scrambling to deal with a decaying and broken system.

There’s Nothing Left to Give: Union Concessions & Building Working Class Power from Below

Despite attempts to encourage this community/transit worker solidarity to resist cutbacks, the ATU Local 732 leadership has been a partner in forcing drastic concessions down the throats of its membership. Workplace conditions for MARTA employees along with pay and benefits have seen a nosedive, mirroring service cuts.

This couldn’t be more obvious than in the union contract recently forced on MARTA employees by the Atlanta court system. Under terms of the new three-year contract, union workers will get a 2.5% pay raise this year and 1.5% increases the following two years. Nevertheless, the court granted a huge increase in the amount employees must pay to stay in a premium-level health care plan, which lets them see the doctors of their choice. Employees now have less flexibility in taking sick time under the Paid Time Off (PTO) plan in the contract. It’s also easier for MARTA to outsource its rail maintenance work, meaning fewer jobs for current employees and lower pay for the outsourced workers. The contract made no mention of negotiating who should even make these decisions, the workers who keep MARTA running or the management who don’t do jack.

Why was the contract imposed by the courts? Was it a gain for employees? Was it a concession by the union? Rank-and-file MARTA workers showed what they thought of it when they voted it down, even after union officials urged them to accept it. For over a year during the contract negotiations rank-and-file workers had to struggle against a process that largely ignored their input. This of course came from the MARTA bosses, national labor relations lawyers, “fact finders,” and county judges who ultimately settled the contract by siding with many of the terms laid out by MARTA management.

This was a repeat of similar events in 2002. The court system intervened to override the ATU vote. Doesn’t the old saying, one person one vote, still stand? Why wasn’t the vote by the union membership considered the final decision? Perhaps we should learn a thing or two from those who have chosen a more direct way to vote, such as work to rule actions, fare strikes, or sit-ins. Actions like these have historically proven that everyday folks are willing to take ownership of workplace struggles in opposition to the wishes of management and union bureaucrats who both think they know what’s best for working people.

In the vote on the contract, MARTA workers took on the ATU bureaucracy that, while publicly claiming to be sympathetic to calls for workplace resistance against the proposed cutbacks, really set to dictate the terms of struggle among the rank-and-file. Despite these maneuvers by the union bureaucracy, and calls from union President Ernie Brooks to accept management’s final offer, as it was “the best they were going to get,” rank-and-file union members rejected this stance and sought to battle another day.

This charade of fools by Local 732’s leadership, this myth that negotiations can ever be fair between management and the union is exactly what stifles our own impulses towards self-government where we decide how we will work and live. The existence of management as a class above is the obstacle to our desires to manage ourselves. That fact can never be negotiated or compromised away.

Regardless of what is granted in the contract we know that everyday people should decide for ourselves the social and economic relations of our workplaces, schools and neighborhoods. Waiting for the union officials to do it for us is a form of degradation. Merely raising the specter of economic reforms alone, improved healthcare or higher wages, is to treat working people like barnyard animals. Folks don’t stay out of work only because they want a 5-cent raise. People stay out because what they want is to control wage increases or decreases, overtime and sick time, how and when each takes place and who should receive it. “Benefits” such as these under a union contract should not be thought of as an exchange where we agree not to govern ourselves and in return be governed from above.

Is Atlanta an extraordinary case? Not quite, when one looks at the ongoing attacks on transit employees specifically, and public sector workers in general, in other cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis, New York City, and Philadelphia. MARTA officials, in their narrow push to “balance the books,” neglect the fact that public transit is made up of the collective efforts of all its employees and riders, those folks who are organically linked to the life of this service. The so-called budget crisis really reflects the crisis of MARTA and city officials as a managerial class while they attack working folks, and attempt to squeeze more profit out of the economy. It’s time we working folks, as riders and MARTA employees alike, put the squeeze on the bosses and officials.

From 2005-06, Atlanta Unity & Struggle raised the ideas of anti-racism and popular self-management as they pertain to MARTA. U&S called for:

1. Better & more service, not worse and less. No fare hikes. We are tired of being hustled paying more for less and less.

2. No lowering of MARTA employee salaries and benefits. Hire and train more transit workers to share the workload under a union contract not dividing but increasing social and economic independence of all through unity and struggle.

3. Our community must ultimately be responsible for public transportation. We must govern collectively through a MARTA Riders and Workers council ensuring, through direct democracy and direct action, all MARTA decision-making and planning is accountable to everyday people.

Notes

[1] Mahoney, Ryan. “Ex-MARTA CEO Abused Credit Cards.” Atlanta Business Chronicle. 18 August 2006. Accessible Online at: http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2006/08/21/story3.html?page=3

Pages: 1 2