The BART STRIKE: LESSONS FOR PUBLIC WORKERS
The BART strike lasted barely a week before the leadership made a tactical retreat, or was it a strategic collapse in the first place?
The BART board came in swinging and provoked the strike by engaging the non-starter union smashing Viola corporation to negotiate for them. Highly underreported, these thugs came into negotiations with a 1% offer and demands that employees kick in for medical and pensions (benefits the media won’t tell you were traded for wages in the early days of BART, at management’s insistence.)
At the end of this four year contract the BART workers find themselves behind from missing cost of living increases, some 30%, and the 1% opening position of management not only put the wage considerations too far apart, not only ignored the concerns of health and safety, but it was a slap in the face. They essentially booted BART workers out the negotiation room door and into a strike. The union had recommended a 60 day cooling off period but management had no intention of budging; not wanting to have a strike in September, they provoked it now.
Standing up for safer working conditions following the electrocution of a BART worker in the tunnel for lack of adequate lighting, as well as retrenchment of safety engineers, the BART workers in the San Francisco Bay Area took their first strike action in 15 years. After a week where the unions proved they could bring Bay Area Traffic to a standstill, a 30 day cooling off period was brokered by state mediators and the following stalemate is reported by ABC news here:
“.…”BART wants to impose, BART wants to force a contract, they want to keep us out on strike, they think the public’s going to completely turn and that’s the card they’re playing,” SEIU negotiator Pete Castelli said.
The unions claim BART is trying to break them, and seems willing to wait them out on demands for 4.5 percent per year salary increase over three years and greater safety measures throughout the system.
BART’s latest offer is 2 percent per year for four years and increased employee contributions to both health care and pension costs.”
LABOR CANNOT WIN WHILE TIED TO THE DEMOCRATS!
The ‘perfect storm’ of a labor offensive was predicted, yet failed to appear. The Alameda County Transit workers and the Oakland City workers (many in the same SEIU local 1021 as are some BART workers) who are also out of contract, had an opportunity to launch a united public workers strike with broad-based working class solidarity with a strategy to win. Considering that the sister union of SEIU 1021, SEIU 1000 representing 95,000 state workers (as well as all 11 other state worker unions) are also out of contract, with a little forethought and inter-union organizing and strategizing, the 1.5 million public workers in California could launch actions giving labor the upper hand.
To win any struggle during the imposition of the austerity, the onslaught by the 1%, it will take a union leadership based on an organized and militant rank and file which adopts a class struggle perspective of indefinite strikes, solidarity strikes, and a strategy that unites all public workers and public service end users to make the ruling class pay! To win, class struggle unions will develop and adopt transitional demands that unite the working class to achieve their immediate and long term goals, their own means of struggle, and political independence from the bosses’ political parties.
Tied as they are to the Democratic Party and the institutions of government, our unions cannot wage serious militant strikes and move them into the united strike waves, General and Political Strikes it will take to win. The unions, however, are so deeply entrenched in the capitalist Democratic Party, they are bound by a cross-class alliance making them incapable of sustaining a fight against the self-same politicians the dues dollars and phone banking help to elect.
Holding back class struggle militancy is the view perpetuated by the likes of SEIU ex-president Andy Stern, that the Democratic Party is Labor’s party! Via the transmission belt of the labor aristocracy and entrenched union bureaucracy, both individual workers and the working class as a whole are infected with bourgeois thought patterns and aspirations (false consciousness–capitalist ideology), self-blame, individualism, separation consciousness, all impeding class consciousness, perpetuating racism, misogyny, homophobia, and social-imperialist chauvinism, which combine into a reactionary backward consciousness, perpetuated by the media, the culture and the state, which limit labor’s power to mobilize the entire class to win strikes.
For an example of a template for transforming our unions into fighting organizations that can win is already being employed by CWG members and supporters: see Inter Union Organizing Committee Statement that follows and the video of an IUOC action against concessionary contracts.
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reposted from SF Chronicle w/o permission
Even though our wages have been at the center of media attention these past couple of months, it is our families and safety that most concern BART workers. I’m a proud mother of four; my oldest daughter Reyjene is going to college this fall.
I’ve worked as a systems service worker at BART for six years. I mop and scrub the floors and walls of the stations, empty the garbage and take care of any spills or unpleasant accidents on the platforms. My workday starts before the morning commute. I make about $52,000 a year. I haven’t had a raise in five years.
Under BART’s proposed contract, the average system service worker making $52,000 per year with two children would see his or her take-home pay drop by $1,900 to cover the increased charges for health care and benefits. That would be more than the raise management is offering.
And while BART wants workers like me to take a pay cut, it has given the general manager a $20,000 raise, on top of her $300,000 salary. I’m still trying to figure out what she’s done in her first six months to deserve a raise equal to almost half a year of my salary while I get a pay cut after six years of hard work.
There’s nothing glamorous about our jobs. As a result of understaffing, many of us are sent to work alone, in the dark, or without the aid of a trained electrician to work by live rails and in tunnels. These conditions have led to worker injuries and even deaths, yet BART has ignored our concerns.
At BART board meetings, workers have lined up to speak out on the dangerous conditions in the stations, tunnels and shops. But the management publicly refuses to discuss our safety concerns at the bargaining table. To this day, BART hasn’t made a single commitment to fix any of the safety problems we’ve identified. Instead, it wants to eliminate safety inspectors, the workers who make sure trains are safe to operate. And while BART says it wants to find a resolution with workers, it is paying $399,000 to Thomas Hock, its chief negotiator. Incredibly, with only two weeks left in the 30-day mediation agreement, Hock is on vacation this week. BART even has issued an online survey to retired and temporary BART employees asking them to work if a strike resumes. That doesn’t sound as if BART is preparing reasonable proposals to reach a fair agreement before Aug. 4; it sounds like its wants to drive workers to strike.
BART workers don’t want to go on strike again. We need to pay our bills and provide for our families, just like everyone else. Above all, we want to know that when we leave for work, we will make it home safe.
BART is spending a lot of your tax money to make sure we have none of that security, to cut our salaries, and make us look bad. We’re not monsters: We’re parents who work hard to provide for our families.
We need to make sure the system is working safely and reliably. Our families, communities and the whole Bay Area are relying on us to get this done and to do it right. It’s time we all called on our elected members of the BART board and demand they call Hock back from vacation and direct management to sit down and negotiate a fair contract.
Sharina Pearson, a BART system service worker, is a member of SEIU Local 1021.
