Union Tops Sell Out School Bus Strike

New York City

A month-long strike by school bus drivers and matrons organized in Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1181 ended abruptly in defeat on February 15 when the ATU tops sent the strikers back to work with nothing but empty pockets and empty promises. The 8,800 workers—black, white, Latino, Caribbean and East European—kept up picket lines in the bitter winter cold to thwart Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s union-busting scheme to rob them of job protections won in their last strike, a bitterly fought three-month battle in 1979. The protections guaranteed that workers are hired according to citywide union seniority lists regardless of which bus company wins a city contract.

Bloomberg provoked the strike by putting bus contracts out for re-bid without the job protections. The city is gunning for the jobs and wages of unionized drivers and matrons, which now start at $14 and $11 respectively—and they have to rely on unemployment in the summer. In NYC, that means they’re close to poverty. When more than 100 matrons showed up for work after the strike at one cockroach outfit in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the boss told them they were fired but could be re-hired by another subsidiary if they quit the ATU. Hundreds more drivers and matrons were blocked from returning to work, as the bus companies kept scabs on the job and wrangled with the union about putting ATU members back on the buses. Many are threatened with losing their jobs at the end of the school year, with no assurance of re-hire when new contractors take over in September.

Bloomberg, the tenth-richest person in the U.S., is bludgeoning a workforce whose average wage is $35,000 per year—way below what the legal minimum wage should be. But after all this is the same guy who recently let slip at a press conference that “nobody’s sleeping on the streets” of NYC, which had even his own supporters rolling their eyes. With his mayoral “legacy” at stake as his third term draws to a close, Bloomberg sees crushing the bus workers as a pavestone toward busting the teachers and other big municipal unions—or at least leaving his successor better fixed to do so.

With the city administration playing hardball, five leading Democratic Party mayoral hopefuls, working in cahoots with the ATU leadership, intervened to end the strike by pledging to “revisit” the dispute if elected. What their statement actually promised was that a Democratic mayor would protect jobs “within the bidding process” in a way that would be “fiscally responsible for taxpayers.” This is just another formula for wage cuts, assuming that those who went on strike even keep their jobs. While the likes of Bloomberg revel in sticking it to the unions, the Democratic Party of capital wields the same knife, but with pearly whites showing. For a vivid example, workers in New York need look no further than Albany, where Governor Andrew Cuomo has gone after public-sector unions and utility workers with a vengeance. This does not stop the labor bureaucracy from touting the Democrats as “friends of labor.”

In the context of the current coast-to-coast onslaught against labor, the school bus workers showed real audacity in going out on strike. But they lacked the social weight to defeat Bloomberg on their own. It was urgently necessary to mobilize the rest of New York City labor in defense of ATU Local 1181. The popularity of the strike among working parents indicated a real basis to do this. While Bloomberg wrapped his union-busting in “concern” for special-needs students, most every parent understands that seniority-based job protections mean that such students ride buses run safely for years by the same trusted union drivers and matrons. As one striking driver told WV, “We are their parents for a few hours each day.”

We wrote at the outset of the strike: “With the city rulers putting the squeeze on working people throughout NYC, every public worker, every trade unionist and everyone who struggles to make ends meet has a stake in the outcome of the strike” (“Victory to NYC School Bus Workers Strike!” WV No. 1016, 25 January). Our article suggested:

“A good step would be for other unions, beginning with Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, the UFT [teachers] and Teamsters, to swell the ATU picket lines and help extend them to every depot gate. The school bus drivers and matrons have some 300,000 potential allies in city unions who are working without a contract or under a contract extension.”

But the ATU tops sabotaged any such action. They even had their own union mechanics crossing picket lines to maintain buses. Never enforcing solid picket lines made it easy for the city’s labor bureaucrats, who play a key role in the Democratic Party, to hang the bus workers out to dry. Buses driven by Teamsters and non-union drivers continued to roll right through picket lines during the strike. Scattered photo-op appearances by officers of Transport Workers Union Local 100 and small contingents of teachers and public school workers at a Sunday march across the Brooklyn Bridge were all the “solidarity” the city labor chiefs could muster.

Demoralized by their own union leaders, some bus workers wonder why they hit the picket lines in the first place and might question the need for a union at all. This is what the bosses want workers to think. Unions are the basic defense organization of the working class against the bosses. The problem is their miserable sell-out misleaders. If unions serve no purpose for the rank and file, then why are the capitalists so eager to destroy them? They know that union wages remain higher, union working conditions better and union jobs safer. Despite historically low union organization levels, it remains the case that many workers would give their eyeteeth to join one.

The class-collaborationist labor tops suck the fighting strength out of the unions by looking for allies in all the wrong places—particularly the labor boards, courts and politicians of the capitalist class enemy. In the course of labor’s battles against the arrogant exploiters, a new leadership must be built, based on a program of class struggle and opposition to the capitalists’ political parties and state agencies.