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	Workers Vanguard No. 1056	14 November 2014

Defend Boston School Bus Union Leaders!

On November 24, Boston school bus union leader Stevan Kirschbaum will face trial on bogus felony charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, as well as trespassing. This blatant attempt at a frame-up by state authorities acting at the behest of the employer, Veolia Transportation, recently renamed Transdev, is part of a concerted effort to break the back of the drivers’ union, United Steel Workers (USW) Local 8751. Ever since the school district tapped it to start operating the bus system in July 2013, Transdev has lived up to its reputation and embarked on a union-busting campaign, from imposing new work rules and harsh discipline to cheating drivers out of pay. Now the company wants to write these new terms of exploitation into the union contract. We demand: Drop the charges against Kirschbaum!

Transdev’s assault on the union came to a head on October 8 last year when management refused to meet with Local 8751 reps and locked out the workers, who responded with pickets at all four bus yards. After bringing in police to help clear the yards, management agreed to sit down with the union. The next day, with drivers back on their routes, Transdev refused to budge in those talks. In retaliation for the brief job action, it then moved to weaken the union by firing Local 8751 grievance committee chairman Kirschbaum, vice president Steve Gillis, recording secretary Andre Francois and shop steward Garry Murchison. A fifth worker, steward Richard Lynch, was suspended but not fired. Reinstate the school bus drivers!

In an act of solidarity with their victimized brothers, Local 8751 members elected Kirschbaum and the other fired workers to the union committee negotiating a new contract with Transdev. At the conclusion of a union rally at the Freeport bus yard on the day the contract expired, June 30, the workers and their supporters went to the break room for a briefing on the contract battle. When a member of management tried to block the doorway with a table, it was allegedly shoved against her legs. This supposed assault with a “dangerous weapon” is what the Boston prosecutor is now trying to pin on Kirschbaum.

Hundreds of the heavily Haitian and Cape Verdean drivers in Local 8751 and their supporters packed a Dorchester courtroom for Kirschbaum’s pre-trial hearing on October 6, at which two charges (breaking and entering and destruction of property) were dismissed. Importantly, a number of other unions in Boston and beyond have expressed support for the “School Bus 5,” with some of these union members turning out to the court. The attacks on the poorly paid school bus drivers are representative of what the bosses have served up to labor across the country, not least in public education. The government agency overseeing the Philadelphia schools moved to junk the teachers’ contract last month; unionized school bus drivers and matrons in New York City were stripped of job protections, provoking a bitter strike in 2013 that was sold out after one month. Kirschbaum’s supporters, including the Workers World Party (WWP), are calling to pack the courtroom again on November 24. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Standing behind Transdev, the school board and city officials are gunning for Local 8751. Early last year, shortly before giving that employer control over its bus fleet, Boston Public Schools scrapped the last remnants of a busing plan first imposed in 1974 under a federal court desegregation order. The racist contempt that the city rulers have for the membership of Local 8751 is matched only by their animus toward the students in the public schools, a full 75 percent of whom are black or Latino.

In the name of cost savings, the notion of busing kids across town to achieve integration is entirely out the window, and with it the jobs of the bus drivers, whose union was forged in the struggles to integrate Boston public schools four decades ago. School bus service was ended earlier this year for eighth-graders, who were given MBTA transit passes instead, with the school board planning to extend this program to sixth- and seventh-graders. The local NAACP president denounced the cutback in bus service, expressing fears that it “will only serve to further separate our children into racially isolated schools as families opt to keep their students close to home rather than send them on the T” (Boston Globe, 18 June). Here is a graphic example of how labor rights and black rights are bound together.

The 1974 busing plan was effectively killed long ago by the one-two punch of howling racists in the streets and, later, liberals in Congress who made certain that black youth were not bused to the comparatively privileged suburban schools (see article in WV No. 921, 26 September 2008). The Spartacist League actively intervened in the Boston busing crisis, agitating for mass, integrated labor/black defense guards to protect the black children. We also called for low-rent, racially integrated public housing; for quality, integrated education for all and for the implementation of the minimal measure of busing and its extension to the suburbs. The WWP, among other reformist left groups, channeled the fight to defend busing into dead-end appeals to black Democratic Party politicians.

The labor officialdom’s embrace of the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a party of the capitalist class enemy, has paved the way to the wholesale destruction of unionized jobs nationwide. Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh, a former head of the city’s Building and Construction Trades Council elected last year with heavy union support, alibied the firings of the school bus union leaders as a “private matter.” Other Democratic politicians, most prominently black city councilman Charles Yancey, have denounced the firings. But what all these Democrats have in common is an aversion for even the slightest whiff of working-class struggle, expressed in their condemnations of Local 8751’s pickets last October 8. Revitalizing the unions as fighting organizations against the bosses must proceed independently from and in opposition to the Democrats.

The Partisan Defense Committee has written to the Suffolk County D.A. protesting the prosecution of Stevan Kirschbaum and has contributed to his defense fund. We encourage WV readers to do likewise. Donations can be sent to Friends of the School Bus 5, P.O. Box 141, Stoughton, MA 02072 or online at tinyurl.com/schoolbus4.