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	Workers Vanguard No. 1027	12 July 2013

Democrats Call the Shots

Union Tops Call Off BART Strike

Four days into a strike that shut down the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, the fifth-largest public rail transportation system in the country, the leaders of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555 and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021 ordered their 2,400 members back to work. The union ranks had voted by close to 100 percent to authorize strike action against BART management’s drive to gouge more out of their wages and health and pension benefits. But they were not even consulted, much less allowed to vote, on calling off their strike. Instead, they were unilaterally told to pull down their picket lines and get back on the job. Nothing had been gained, as it was announced that the massive giveback contract foisted on the unions in 2009 was to be extended for another month.

Who was really calling the shots here was California’s Democratic Party governor Jerry Brown. His Labor Secretary, Marty Morgenstern, issued the “recommendation” for ending the strike. Thanking the union tops for their compliance, Morgenstern opined, “It’s not easy to come back off a strike without a contract.” No kidding! Once again, labor’s fight has been sacrificed on the altar of the bureaucrats’ fealty to the Democratic Party, promoting as “friends of labor” politicians who no less than the Republicans are the servants of the capitalist exploiters. Union after union has gone down to defeat in the service of this shell game. The once-powerful industrial unions now represent less than 7 percent of workers in the private sector. This has cleared the way for a massive union-busting assault against public workers, who like BART workers are lyingly portrayed as living high on the hog at the taxpayers’ expense.

With BART management talking about imposing a contract on the striking workers, an SEIU 1021 leader argued: “BART wants to keep us out on strike and break us by turning the public against us.” But rather than stepping up the fight by appealing for the active solidarity of other trade unionists as well as the working people and poor who had good reason to sympathize with the strike, the bureaucrats beat a cowardly retreat.

The potential for bringing out other workers was there for the asking. The contract for some 1,500 overwhelmingly black East Bay bus drivers and mechanics at AC Transit expired the same day as the BART unions’ contract, and the union ranks had voted overwhelmingly to authorize strike action. A united strike with the BART workers would not even have meant doing anything “illegal,” the trade-union bureaucracy’s longstanding alibi for not fighting. It required nothing more than adherence to what was once a labor principle—No Contract, No Work! But the leadership of ATU Local 192, which organizes workers at AC Transit, not only kept their members on the job but gave BART bosses a helping hand by agreeing to work extra buses to take people across the Bay! BART management was counting on such assistance to undermine the strike.

There were plenty of bus drivers enraged by this dirty deal, who knew all too well that their heads are also on the chopping block. All it would have taken to shut it down was BART workers setting up picket lines at the AC Transit bus barns and other central bus terminals. But for the union tops, this would be against the rules, i.e., the strikebreaking laws of the bosses’ government. Pickets of BART drivers and station agents were dispatched to stations where scab shuttles had been organized by management—not to shut them down but to impotently appeal to riders.

Picket lines are not some kind of “moral witness” or public relations ploy. They are battle lines in the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists who derive their profits from the exploitation of labor. Their success is predicated on the consciousness and organization of the workers mobilized against their class enemy. If the BART strike had been fought on such terms, it could have ignited some real labor solidarity by other unionized transit systems, from regional buses, trains and ferries to S.F. Muni transit workers, whose current contract was imposed on them by an arbitrator after they had defiantly voted down three other sellouts. To wage such a struggle calls for a leadership that will take on the capitalists and their political parties, not bow before them and call off the fight.

The Allies and the Enemies of Labor

Throughout the strike, the bosses’ hired media pens and newscasters orchestrated a union-hating outcry against “greedy” BART workers, weeping crocodile tears for the plight of the “hard-working” public. The bureaucrats in turn stoked fears that the strike was igniting public outrage. But the “public” is not an undifferentiated mass. Sure, the well-heeled professionals employed in San Francisco’s financial district and commercial and high-tech industries let loose with a barrage of class hatred and barely concealed racist contempt for the highly integrated BART workforce. But on the other side of the “public” are workers and poor people who have lost their jobs, homes and meager social benefits in the economic disaster created by the speculative binges of the Wall Street bankers and corporate magnates. Among those suffering under the same budget-cutting ax as the BART workers, there was some real sympathy with the unions.

As V.I. Lenin, whose Bolshevik Party led the Russian working class to power in the 1917 October Revolution, wrote in “Economic and Political Strikes” (May 1912): “Whereas the liberals (and the liquidators) tell the workers: ‘You are strong when you have the sympathy of “society”,’ the Marxist tells the workers something different, namely: ‘You have the sympathy of “society” when you are strong’.” Here were unions with the social power to deal a blow against the greed of the obscenely wealthy capitalists on behalf of all labor. A hard-fought class battle, including demands addressed to the needs of the poor, black people, immigrants and others—like free mass transit and free, quality health care for all—could have won plenty of allies among the many who have been thrown under the bus by the bosses.

But the trade-union bureaucrats look for “friends” in the camp of the class enemy, including the cops who serve as the armed enforcers of capitalist rule. The BART police who shot down Oscar Grant, a young, unarmed black man, in cold blood on New Year’s Day in 2009, are embraced as “union brothers.” And their job is not just terrorizing and gunning down minority youth and others on the trains but policing the workforce for management. In the current negotiations, BART management is demanding that its cops be deployed to investigate workers for even the most minor workplace infractions, including tracking them down at their homes. BART cops are the thugs who would have been cracking heads on the picket lines had there been any violation of the bosses’ strikebreaking laws. Police, prison guards and security guards have no place in the workers movement—they are on the other side! Cops out of the unions!

The union misleaders’ embrace of the cops and subordination to the Democratic Party are born of the lie that the workers and their exploiters share common interests, a lie that is at the heart of the virtually unchallenged offensive by the capitalists and their state that has gutted the unions in this country. The leaders of the BART unions urged members to pressure the Board of Directors, arguing that since they are elected they could be pressured to take the side of the workers. In fact, the whole purpose of this board is to oversee BART on behalf of the capitalist class, not for the benefit of the workers.

For Class-Struggle Leadership!

Four years ago, the BART union leaders traded away more than $100 million in cuts to the wages, benefits and working conditions of their members. This deal was foisted on the ranks in the name of doing “their share” to bail management out of a supposed budget shortfall. With BART now forecasting a $125 million per year budget surplus for the next ten years, it was argued that the workers should be rewarded for their sacrifice.

But it doesn’t work that way. This system is based on production for profit. Increasing those profits means driving down the cost of labor and slashing even the pittance that has gone to providing for those who have been thrown on the scrapheap because they can no longer be profitably employed. Under capitalism, this is a constant and ongoing war, in “good times” as in bad. The only thing that alters that calculus is class struggle, i.e., when the workers withdraw their labor and cut off the flow of profits, mobilizing their allies behind them.

The unions are elementary defense organizations of the working class against unbridled exploitation. The purpose of union leadership should be to lead their ranks in struggle. Instead, the union bureaucrats act like labor-management consultants keeping labor “peace” while begging for a few crumbs. If the unions are to be organizations of struggle, there must be a fight against the misleaders who have tied the class interests of the workers to those of their exploiters and their political parties.

What is needed is to forge a new leadership of the unions that will arm the workers with a program of class struggle, fighting for their own interests and for the cause of black freedom, immigrant rights and the defense of all the oppressed. This in turn will be part of building a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose purpose is not only to defend the working class against the menace of its devastation but to rid the planet of the source of that scourge, capitalism itself, and the state that preserves it. In its place, a victorious workers government will found a new social order based on a planned socialist economy organized for the benefit of society as a whole.