Chicago Transit

Mass ATU Meeting Authorizes Strike, Bureaucrats Turn Tail

Dump Binding Arbitration!

MARCH 27—Fed up with years of management abuse and attacks on their working conditions, some 2,000 members of the Chicago Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 241 turned out for a March 6 meeting and overwhelmingly authorized a strike on or after April 9. Working without a contract for most of the last six years, the bus drivers, mechanics and servicers of Local 241 want to wage a struggle against the arrogant Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) bosses. Workers leaving the meeting told WV salesmen that many waited in line for up to two hours to vote to authorize a strike even knowing that the vote was already one-sidedly in favor (although hundreds left before voting). The final count was 1,029 for and only 11 opposed.

The new Local 241 leadership under President Darrell Jefferson called for the vote in response to the CTA’s practice of “rostering.” Under this brutal scheduling method, which is in effect at two garages, many drivers work split shifts spanning more than 13 hours while getting only eight hours’ pay. “Rostering” guts seniority rights and cheats workers out of overtime pay. It is an indictment of the CTA’s wage scale that full-time transit workers can’t make ends meet without working heavy overtime. Further fueling workers’ anger are the CTA’s union-busting demands to extend part-time work to mechanics and to create a special category of part-time workers with no benefits. The CTA also seeks to make mechanics work eight years to reach top pay and to increase pension contributions from all workers.

Showing that his strike talk was just cynical posturing, Jefferson submitted the “rostering” issue to binding arbitration only eight days after the strike authorization vote. Many union members say that they support the new leadership or at least want to “give them a chance.” But Jefferson is not fundamentally different from his predecessors in Local 241, who had kicked the union contract to binding arbitration. Long a weapon in the bosses’ anti-union arsenal, binding arbitration is designed to stop strikes and leaves union members with no say in the final decision. The supposedly “impartial” arbitration boards are in reality stacked against the union. Dump binding arbitration!

The unions’ power to fight against the bosses derives from their ability to halt production and transportation, based on the workers’ strategic role in the economy. Local 241 provides a vital service, operating about one million passenger trips each weekday. A strike against the CTA would turn the Loop (downtown Chicago) into a parking lot. ATU Local 308 (rail) and the 16 craft unions at the CTA are also working without contracts. The transit unions should revive the traditional fighting labor slogan: No contract, no work!

Just as binding arbitration ties the workers’ hands in order to keep class peace, the labor officials’ support for the Democrats—and sometimes other capitalist politicians—ties the union movement to the class enemy. While the Republicans openly spit in the face of workers, black people and the mass of immigrants, the Democrats lie to labor and minorities while carrying out their attacks against working people and the poor. Even as CTA chief Frank Kruesi, a crony of Democratic Chicago mayor Richard Daley, is hammering the union, ATU and AFL-CIO officials mailed letters to Local 241 members asking them to go to the polls for the Democratic Party primary.

The union tops’ allegiance to the Democrats is a consequence of their support for a capitalist profit system that constantly seeks to drive down wages and working conditions at home and carries out imperialist wars and occupations abroad. What’s necessary in the ATU, as in the entire U.S. labor movement, is a fight for a class-struggle leadership that rejects the lie of labor-management partnership and uses the weapons of class struggle. Such a leadership must be based on the political independence of the working class. Break with the Democrats! For a workers party that fights for a workers government!

Sensing the frustration of the ATU membership with their leaders, Teamsters officials have attempted off and on for several years to raid Local 241. But the Teamsters bureaucrats, who are guided by the same class-collaborationist outlook that defines the ATU tops, are no alternative. A successful Teamsters raid would break up the relationship between ATU locals 241 and 308, which represent nearly 90 percent of unionized CTA workers. The two locals have a history of joint contract negotiations and struck the CTA together for four days in 1979. Joint action by the ATU locals can pave the way for one industrial union of all transit workers, including those in the craft unions, that fights for more full-time jobs with full benefits and seniority rights for the entire membership.

The Local 241 tops held the strike authorization vote a week after the Teamsters filed petitions claiming that they had the signatures of 3,000 CTA workers seeking a representation election. It was the Local 241 tops’ fear of losing their jobs that induced them to even pay lip service to the need for a strike. Until recently, the ATU International had deprived Local 241 members of a voice in their union and effective representation on the job by keeping the local in trusteeship for more than two years. The International sent out-of-town officials to Chicago to help oppose the Teamsters raid. Many members would be pleased if the bureaucrats had that much enthusiasm for fighting the company!

Transit workers have told WV that the question of the legality of a strike has been a hot topic in the bus barns ever since the strike authorization meeting, where Jefferson said that unlike former local leaders, he rejected the idea that transit strikes were illegal. But then Jefferson turned to binding arbitration, during which strikes are banned by state law. As we wrote last year in “Democrats Turn the Screws on Chicago Transit Workers” (WV No. 845, 1 April 2005): “The only strike that is ‘illegal’ is a strike that loses. The relationship of forces between capital and labor—not words on paper—is what determines the outcome of class struggle, and the question of working-class leadership weighs heavily in that balance.”

Workers say that some ATU officials are arguing that the Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 strike in New York City last December proves that illegal strikes don’t work. In fact, Transit workers crippled the center of finance capitalism by walking off the job in defiance of the state Taylor Law’s ban on public workers strikes. But with strikers up against both the transit bosses and the courts and cops of the capitalist state, the TWU International stabbed them in the back while the city labor tops left them out to dry. And just as the strikers were feeling their power, the Local 100 leaders demobilized the strike and sent workers back without a contract (see “Union Busting and Capitalist ‘Democracy’,” page 4, as well as the special 6 January WV supplement, “NYC Transit Strike: Union Power vs. Class Collaboration”).

A successful fight against the CTA’s union-busting attacks would be a blow against the poverty and despair of the black and Latino neighborhoods of Segregation City. Working for the CTA has long been seen as a good job in Chicago, but for years the transit bosses have ratcheted up their drive against wages and working conditions. A fighting ATU, with its largely black membership, could draw behind it the working class and poor of the inner city. Last spring’s threatened mass layoff of drivers was accompanied by plans to again slash the inadequate bus service to a number of black and Latino neighborhoods. The ATU should fight for free, quality mass transit!

The only way to put an end to the exploitation and racial oppression of this society is to put an end to the capitalist profit system itself. It is only through a workers revolution that a planned economy can be established in which the tremendous resources of this society will be placed at the service of those who labor, providing a future for generations to come. Through intervention into class and social struggle and political combat against labor’s pro-capitalist misleaders, we fight to build the multiracial workers party that is the necessary instrument for proletarian revolution.