Budget Cuts Slam Workers, Poor

Chicago: Transit Jobs Under the Ax

CHICAGO—At the direction of the Democratic Party administration of Mayor Richard Daley, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) imposed sweeping layoffs and service cuts on February 7 to close a major budget shortfall. More than 1,000 union drivers, repairmen, servicers and skilled workers—over one-tenth of the entire workforce—have already been laid off or are slated to lose their jobs in the coming week. The drastic measures include slashing 18 percent of bus service, affecting 119 of 150 routes, and 9 percent of rail service. Some one million people ride CTA buses and almost 650,000 ride the trains on an average workday. Particularly hard hit are the poorest black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, where working people are heavily dependent on mass transit to make it to their jobs. Waiting times on these routes already are the longest and the buses are the oldest.

Boss Daley, the CTA and the bourgeois press are carrying out a major media blitz to blame the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Locals 241 (bus) and 308 (rail) and 15 craft unions representing Chicago transit workers for the severity of the cuts. Union members are pilloried for refusing to swallow massive concessions: wage freezes, increased health care payments and unpaid furlough days. With the economy in shambles, the message for workers everywhere has been “sacrifice or else” as the bosses make workers pay for the capitalist economic crisis. Capitalist Democratic Party politicians, whether in the White House, the Statehouse or City Hall, together with the Republicans have gone after the unions and gutted public services used by the working class and poor.

Starting from the top, President Barack Obama forked out billions to the Wall Street bankers and engineered the bailout of the auto giants by tearing up union gains won through decades of hard struggle—with the active assistance of the venal sellouts atop the United Auto Workers. At the same time, the Obama administration has ratcheted up U.S. imperialist military operations in Afghanistan while continuing the occupation of Iraq. Layoffs, speedups, imperialist depredations abroad—these are the workings of a system of exploitation dedicated to squeezing profits for the tiny class of capitalist rulers out of the blood and sweat of those who labor.

To effectively fight the bosses’ attacks, the unions must rely on their own strength, operating with the basic understanding that the interests of capital and labor are counterposed and irreconcilable. The ATU locals have a lot of social power, with the ability to shut down mass transit in Chicago, and could spearhead a struggle for the fighting unity of all city labor. The multiracial union membership is also a living link to the dispossessed ghetto masses. In “Segregation City,” many blacks and Latinos are consigned to a life of poverty, military service or prison. A federal civil rights lawsuit filed earlier this year exposed the huge gap between funding for commuter trains from Chicago’s middle-class, white suburbs and for bus and rail service in the inner city, where people often spend hours in the darkness and frigid cold making multiple connections to get to work or school. Championing demands addressed to the needs of the poor and oppressed—from the fight for free mass transit to free, quality health care for all—would win the ATU plenty of allies.

But this class-struggle perspective could not be further from the outlook of the ATU and other trade-union tops. From their embrace of Democratic Party candidates in the just-finished Illinois primary elections to their support to Obama in 2008, the ATU bureaucrats act as what American socialist leader Daniel De Leon over a century ago called “the labor lieutenants of capital,” tying the unions to the capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. Their allegiance to the supposed “lesser evil” Democrats has facilitated the bourgeois rulers’ assaults on the American working class and poor: the dismantling of millions of heavily unionized manufacturing jobs, cuts in social programs and rampant cop terror in the ghettos and barrios. To advance its cause, labor must break with the capitalist parties—Democrat and Republican.

A comrade of the Spartacist League laid out these basic Marxist truths while intervening at a CTA public hearing on Chicago’s South Side on 3 November 2009. Turning his back to the CTA board members, our comrade declared that “the only people worth addressing here are those who are here to protest these vicious cuts.” He continued:

“Why do we continue to bleed? It’s because of the allegiance of working people and minorities to the Democratic Party. It’s the other party of war and racism, the other party of the capitalist system, the other party of the profit system, the other party of layoffs and segregation. And we should know that here in Chicago, where they have run things for 60 years. Obama in office has not changed that in the least, in fact, Obama and the Democrats went after the auto workers, they used the auto bailout to gut the union and that’s what they intend to do to the transit union, to all the public workers in the state of Illinois.”

Far from mobilizing the unions’ muscle to stop the layoffs and other attacks, the ATU bureaucrats surrendered in advance of a fight. Union leaders offered up their own “menu” of cost-cutting measures, which were rejected by the CTA. Earlier, ATU bureaucrats had filed a grievance demanding that part-time and temporary workers be laid off first. Local 308 president Robert Kelly said in a statement: “The ATU locals always understood, unfortunately, that our members would be laid off and our dispute was only about using seniority with the CTA to determine who would be laid off first.” According to Medill Reports (3 December 2009), this sentiment was echoed by Kelly’s counterpart in Local 241, Darrell Jefferson: “If anyone is gonna go, it has to be part-timers.” Predictably, an arbitrator in short order tossed out the union grievance on February 3, paving the way for the layoffs to begin four days later.

The union must defend seniority rights, while at the same time fighting for equal pay for equal work with no second-class union membership. In the face of mass layoffs, what is posed is a fight for jobs for all—for a shorter workweek with full-time pay and benefits for everyone.

Even if the grievance had won, it would have represented no victory. Under the watch of the ATU misleaders over the years, Chicago transit workers have been subjected to one “divide and conquer” scheme after another, including the introduction of part-time work and wage tiers. Two years ago, the union bureaucrats helped roll out an “apprentice” program where ex-convicts are hired for a limited time as servicers at paltry wages with no benefits, while having to pay full union dues but getting no union rights or protections (see “Down With Racist, Anti-Union ‘Ex-Offender Apprentice’ Scheme!” WV No. 923, 24 October 2008). A further barrier to unity in struggle is the division of transit workers into two separate ATU locals and multiple craft unions. The bosses want to drive a wedge into the workforce so they can more easily roll back the wages and working conditions of all union members.

Jefferson has announced plans to ask Local 241 members to strictly follow CTA operating rules if negotiations to reverse the service cuts continue to stall. Instead of a united mobilization, he is proposing a voluntary job action that would make it much easier for the company to victimize individual workers. For the ATU tops such tactics are a means to avoid hard class struggle, but some workers—and the CTA—are taking it seriously enough. The transit bosses are poised to file anti-union injunctions in the event of any perceived work “slowdown” and already have moved to fire one bus operator who distributed a flyer encouraging her co-workers to refuse to work overtime. Local 241 is defending this union activist by relying once again on arbitration, which places the fate of the union and its members in the hands of a “third party” who is in reality on the side of the class enemy. As an elementary act of solidarity, it is crucial for transit unions, and the rest of city labor, to fight against all CTA reprisals.

In raising the prospect of a slowdown, the ATU bureaucrats want nothing more than the opportunity to tinker with the terms of “sacrifice.” This is shown by their lash-up with Democratic Party front man Jesse Jackson Sr., who at a press conference at his Rainbow PUSH Coalition headquarters on February 13 said, “There will either be fair negotiations, or they’ll be slow roll or no roll.” “Fair negotiations” simply means “fair” layoffs or concessions. If labor struggle does break out, Jackson, who postures as a friend of labor and blacks in order to better serve the bosses, will be there to douse the flames. In 2000, a union official brought Jackson into L.A. during a convulsive transit strike, where he set about preaching “reconciliation” to the striking workers so that the local Democrats could ram through a giveback contract deal.

Now, more than two weeks after the bulk of the layoffs, Jefferson is threatening, through the press, to call a strike vote at the next union meeting on March 1. Jefferson is walking a tightrope between the anger of the union ranks and his loyalty to the Democratic Party. Many in ATU Local 241 well remember that when 2,000 workers came to a mass union meeting and authorized a strike in March 2006, Jefferson squandered the members’ desire to act in defense of the union and quickly submitted his membership’s future to binding arbitration.

Following massive job losses in construction and manufacturing, as the New York Times headlined, “Most U.S. Union Members Are Working for the Government, New Data Shows” (22 January). The bosses are now gunning for the public sector unions. Daley has already forced most city unions to accept unpaid furlough days, and those that did not were hit with layoffs and reduced hours. The unemployment rate in Chicago has spiked over 10 percent. Economic times are tough. But it is necessary to fight; not fighting will only assure greater misery in the future. The solid six-day transit strike in Philadelphia last November held off the worst of an offensive by the transit bosses and local Democrats, although the union misleaders gave ground on the key issue of pensions.

The ATU bureaucrats sell the lie that effective labor action, including strikes, is impossible or illegal. During an earlier CTA “doomsday” budget crisis in 2007, these misleaders helped foist a rotten binding arbitration contract on the workforce, burying the union’s strike weapon. In fact, the unions were built through class struggle, often in defiance of bourgeois law and the capitalist state—the cops, courts and military—that enforces it. The way forward lies in replacing the bureaucrats with a class-struggle leadership in the unions.

In the lead-up to the February 7 cuts, there were rallies outside CTA headquarters on January 18 and 20. ATU officials participated in the January 20 rally with only a token presence of workers. The earlier rally was organized by a host of reformist “socialist” groups—including the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Socialist Alternative (SAlt), and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and its front groups “NoCTAcuts.org” and ANSWER Chicago. The strategy presented at both rallies was the same: pressuring the racist capitalist rulers for a few more crumbs for working people.

Along these lines, the PSL rolled out a variation of their usual slogan of “Money for jobs, not for war” while other leftist fakers (ISO, SAlt) endorsed the January 18 demonstration, which included the call to “Tax the rich, not working people.” The aim of such reformist pipe dreams is to conceal the reality that the bourgeois state and its political representatives exist to defend capitalist rule and profit, not to provide for the well-being of the downtrodden.

Like the trade-union bureaucrats, whom they serve as water boys, the reformists determine their politics by what is “practical” under capitalism. In their drive for ever-greater profits, the capitalist rulers have looted the wealth of this country, sabotaged its vital infrastructure and unleashed the catastrophe of joblessness. The capitalist system deserves to perish. As our comrade at the November 3 public hearing observed, until the working class takes control of the resources of this society, “we are not going to have a just and rational society.” He concluded: “And in order to get there, we’ve got to have a workers party to fight against this capitalist system, a workers party to fight for a workers government.”