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	Workers Vanguard No. 983	8 July 2011

Defiant S.F. MUNI Workers Betrayed by TWU Misleaders

Arbitrator Enforces Union Busting Contract

Three times in the last year and a half, the ranks of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 250-A, whose more than 2,000 members drive the buses at San Francisco’s MUNI transit agency, defiantly voted down giveback deals negotiated by their union misleaders. Enraged that these workers, who are heavily black and include many women, refused to sacrifice jobs, wages and working conditions to bail out the city budget, a cabal of high-rolling corporate interests and Democratic Party politicians cooked up an electoral initiative, Proposition G, aimed at forcing their dictates on the union.

Passed in November 2010, the proposition eliminated a City Charter provision guaranteeing that MUNI drivers’ wages be set as the second highest in the country (a provision which itself had been enacted to preserve “labor peace”). But Prop. G’s real aim was to enforce the unchallenged domination of the MUNI bosses, including by mandating that any contract dispute be settled by binding arbitration. On July 1, a contract that the membership had voted down over two-to-one in early June was imposed by an arbitrator. Under its conditions, wages will be frozen for three years. Full-time jobs will be cut, with up to 8,000 hours of work per week assigned to part-time workers. Such say as the union had in regard to working conditions, scheduling and health and safety is gutted.

Drivers are already pushed beyond endurance, forced to scramble to meet impossible schedules, often with no breaks, and disciplined even for being ahead of schedule. Seventy percent of the equipment they operate has been cited for safety violations. Now, the enforced contract gives management a total whip hand to discipline and fire drivers. Investigations of accidents will be reduced to kangaroo-court proceedings run by the bosses, while the right to grieve their rulings is virtually obliterated. In short, the contract is a declaration of open season against the drivers by a management determined to get rid of anyone who doesn’t bow to its command.

In the first part of this year, physical assaults on drivers, a regular occurrence, increased, fueled by an orchestrated union-hating media barrage. “Greedy” MUNI workers were blamed for skyrocketing fares and service cuts by the capitalists’ hired pens, who wept crocodile tears for the plight of the poor, the aged and the disabled. Indeed, those most in need of public transportation have suffered, at the hands not of drivers but of the same forces going after the union in the name of “balancing the budget” of the capitalist state on the backs of the working people and poor.

In the face of an economic crisis brought on by the banks and corporate magnates, across the country Democrats and Republicans alike have been whipping up an outcry against public workers unions. Having bilked the public purse of billions for the “recovery” of their profits, the rulers cry that public workers are living high off the hog at taxpayers’ expense. MUNI drivers have long been on the receiving end of the class hatred and racist contempt of the petty-bourgeois professionals employed in the city’s financial, commercial and high-tech enterprises. These yuppies, many of whose stock options doubtless took a bath in the market crash, are enraged that MUNI workers, whom they despise as menials, continue to make anything approximating a decent wage.

Unionized city jobs, at MUNI in particular, are among the few that black people can get which pay relatively decent wages. The TWU’s ranks also include Asians and increasing numbers of Latinos. The union’s composition provides a vital link to the majority of MUNI riders, who are working people, heavily Latinos, Asians and blacks. To bring these forces into a fight on the side of the union, the TWU must take up the demand for free mass transit for all. With services being slashed for everyone other than the downtown business sector, the union would find plenty of allies if it fought to put more buses on the streets and expand transit service—not at the price of piling more work on the already beleaguered workforce, but by fighting to open more jobs for full-time drivers at full union pay and benefits. But to wage such a struggle means a leadership that will take on the bosses and their political parties, not bow before them to help bail the capitalist masters out of the economic disaster created by their profit system.

The “Partnership” of Labor and Capital Is a Lie!

The contract imposed on MUNI workers is a savage indictment of the trade-union bureaucracy, which promotes deadly illusions in the “neutrality” of the capitalist state, an apparatus of repression directed against the working class. It also provides a stark snapshot of the role the union tops play as labor lieutenants of the capitalist rulers in enforcing class peace. At a press conference of angry MUNI workers in June, one rightly denounced the TWU leadership for having “sided with the city against us.” But the TWU tops hardly stood alone on this one.

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle (9 June) condemning TWU Local 250-A as “the only public employees union in San Francisco that has spurned the city’s requests for givebacks, wage freezes and other measures to help close gaping budget deficits” positively cited S.F. Labor Council head Tim Paulson boasting, “I am mightily proud of every union in San Francisco that has engaged in that effort.” Paulson went on to moan that the MUNI drivers had not supported their leadership in its similar endeavors.

The “effort” Paulson was referring to is a deal cut by leaders of most city workers unions agreeing to a ballot initiative that would make their members shell out millions in pension and health care payments. In a May 30 message on his blog, Paulson promoted this deal as proof of the benefits of the bureaucrats’ partnership with the bosses and their Democratic Party representatives:

“While governors and mayors in Wisconsin, San Jose, New Jersey, Costa Mesa, and Ohio, unilaterally decide to demonize the workers who maintain our streets, clinics, firehouses and public safety—here in San Francisco the entire fabric of government, unions, and business found a way to craft a solution to the financial hole we have found ourselves in because of the very avoidable missteps on Wall Street.”

The city of San Francisco has long been a stage for the playing out of one of the great shell games of American capitalist rule, the notion that the Democratic Party is the “friend” of working people. If the Democrats may not openly “demonize” workers, it’s because they don’t need to. Unlike the Republicans, who revel in union-busting, the Democrats rely on the able assistance of their allies in the trade-union bureaucracy, who are themselves major players in the party, to peddle the snake oil of “shared sacrifice” in order to savage hard-won union gains. The same game is being played by Oakland’s Democratic mayor Jean Quan, who recently negotiated a 9 percent cut in wages and benefits with the leaders of that city’s public unions. Contrasting her administration to that of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, whose legislation stripped collective bargaining rights from public workers, Quan had earlier declared: “We will have layoffs but they will come as part of collective bargaining.”

The vendetta against the MUNI drivers, waged by successive Democratic Party administrations, goes back to the mass labor actions by S.F. city workers in defense of their unions in the 1970s. In 1974, a strike that began with SEIU city workers spread to hospitals and closed the city sewage treatment plant. At the height of these strike actions, MUNI, AC Transit and BART workers shut down all public transit in and to the city. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who at the time was head of the S.F. Board of Supervisors, responded with a ballot proposition aimed at banning all strikes by city workers.

In 1976, MUNI workers again shut down the buses for over a month in solidarity with a strike by city craft workers. These actions led to the brink of a citywide general strike, which was betrayed by the city’s union tops. In the aftermath, the Democratic Party administration under Mayor George Moscone, a much-adulated “progressive,” unleashed a barrage of anti-union propositions. The business forces backing and bankrolling these initiatives, from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association to the Committee on Jobs, have been at it ever since. Most recently, they were among those funding the 2010 referendum targeting TWU Local 250-A.

Fight for a Class-Struggle Leadership!

The 1974-76 strikes showed both the power of labor and the treachery of the union bureaucracy. From the city unions to MUNI drivers to longshore, workers understood that their strength lay in their numbers, solidarity and collective organization. Their determination and militancy was such that the Central Labor Council voted to prepare for a general strike. Militants in International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10, who were supported by Workers Vanguard, put forward a motion calling on the union to join the city workers picket lines. Their motion called to make good on ILWU president Harry Bridges’ pledge of support to city workers by shutting down all port operations and demanded an emergency mass meeting of all city labor to launch an immediate general strike. But this motion was sabotaged by the Local leadership.

The Moscone administration called the bureaucrats’ bluff and they folded, preferring defeat to unleashing the unions in an all-out battle against the city’s rulers. It wasn’t just the business unionists but so-called militants like Bridges, who had boasted that he “came in during a general strike, and it looks like I may be going out with one,” who were responsible for this defeat.

The 1934 San Francisco general strike which led to the founding of the ILWU three years later, established the city as the most militant “labor town” in the country. But this began to change with the introduction of containerized shipping. Longshore work overwhelmingly moved to the Port of Oakland, which had the storage space and rail terminal for transshipping. As blue-collar jobs moved out, corporate, real estate and financial ventures drew in a stream of largely white petty-bourgeois professionals. Working-class families who had once populated entire city neighborhoods could no longer afford to live in San Francisco. The black population had already been devastated by “urban renewal” beginning in the 1950s. Today, black people are less than 6 percent of the city’s population, half of them living in increasingly decrepit public housing.

The MUNI drivers union, with its demonstrated power, is crucial not only to a fight by all city workers unions but also to the defense of the besieged ghetto and immigrant populations. Reflecting the anger and combativity of the ranks, a series of union oppositions have appeared in TWU Local 250-A over the years.

In this round, a statement announcing a meeting of the “Strike Education Committee” of TWU Local 250-A rightly called for a “no” vote and for strike action against the slave-labor contract. After the ranks voted it down, a subsequent statement by these oppositionists offered its own solution to the budget deficit, arguing for “the proper collection and expansion of the Transit Impact Development Fee” from corporations and real estate developers.

The banks, corporations and other capitalist enterprises are sitting on mountains of cash, the ill-gotten gains of a system based on the exploitation of labor for the profits of the few. But the workers aren’t going to get their hands on this money by appealing to a government whose purpose is to defend and increase the profitability of American capitalism. Rather than preparing the workers for struggle against the capitalist class and its state, the promotion of such illusions, which are amply peddled by the trade-union bureaucracy, has prostrated the unions in the face of the one-sided class war against them.

To wage the battles necessary for their own defense and in the interests of all the oppressed, the unions must be mobilized in opposition to the capitalist state and its political parties—Democrats and Republicans alike. This requires a new leadership, not some “militant” talkers but leaders rooted in the elementary understanding that the workers have no interests in common with their exploiters. We need to build a workers party whose aim is the revolutionary overturn of the capitalist system, and the racial oppression that is built into it, and the establishment of a workers government, where those who labor rule.