Workers Vanguard No. 1016	25 January 2013

Victory to NYC School Bus Workers Strike!

JANUARY 22—The 8,800 school bus drivers and matrons of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1181 hit the picket lines at depots around New York City last Wednesday in their first strike since 1979. The pickets are braving freezing weather to defend the Employee Protection Provisions (EPP) won in that hard-bitten 12-week battle. Over the last two years, billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg has sought to shred the EPP, which provides a measure of job security for the workforce by requiring the private bus companies chartered by the city to hire according to seniority. Even as Bloomberg rails against supposedly illegal “job guarantees that the union just can’t have,” he has solicited new bids for bus service without the EPP in an unvarnished attempt to bust the union. 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.

The mayor’s union-busting scheme is said to aim to cut the city’s “irrational” busing costs and comes wrapped in “concern” for special-needs and other students. The real extent of this concern was on display when Bloomberg was shutting down public schools and slashing millions from education programs. For all the howling against the strike in the bourgeois media, it is popular among many parents, who entrust their children to the care of these dedicated workers every weekday and blame the effects of the walkout on the city. The wages of the ATU membership, which represents a cross-section of the city—black, white, Latino, Caribbean and East European—average only $35,000 a year, a figure that City Hall wants to slash. In the process, the mayor is hoping to set a precedent for ripping up union contracts and getting away with it in NYC, a historic labor stronghold.

The city’s assault on the education workforce extends to some 75,000 members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Together with Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo, Bloomberg is hell-bent on gutting seniority rights by imposing an evaluation system that would allow it to dismiss “ineffective” teachers. The Obama administration has intervened in this dispute—by threatening to withhold $700 million from the state if some such scheme is not soon in place. Indeed, the White House has led a nationwide war against teachers unions, marked by an expansion of non-union charter schools, longer workdays and raises keyed to student test scores. Obama himself endorsed the mass firing of all 93 teachers in a Rhode Island town because they resisted such “reforms.” Seeing no profit in educating black and Latino urban youth or others they deem superfluous, the racist capitalist rulers have driven U.S. public schools into ruin and then held the teachers unions responsible.

Bloomberg appears to be taking his cue from the 1979 strike, and the union would do well to borrow a page from its own history, too. Back then, the vicious, labor-hating Democratic mayor Ed Koch provoked a strike by seeking to eliminate job protections for the bus drivers and matrons. When Koch’s school chancellor put the service contract out to bid for the first time in eight years, many bids came in from low-wage, non-union companies. Abetted by the editors of the city’s tabloid press, hizzoner used children dependent on bus transport as pawns in his union-busting game. A large fraction of them also had special needs, which Koch tried to wield as a cudgel against the strikers. As we noted at the time:

“Many unions, faced with tear-jerking stories of home-bound wheelchair-confined children, would have buckled under. But the Amalgamated Transit Union Locals 1181 and 1061 refused to budge....

“When a number of the offending cabs [used to transport students] were subsequently found with their windshields broken and tires slashed, New York’s war of the crippled children was on.”

— “Is There Anything Koch Won’t Do?” (WV No. 226, 2 March 1979)

The Koch administration went on to commandeer chauffeured city vehicles and prison vans from Rikers Island to replace the garaged buses. But the union answered every move by the city with hard-nosed class struggle. Picket lines remained solid, and other scab vehicles ended up just like the taxis. Strikes were breaking out across the city, giving the bosses and their mayor plenty to worry about—sanitation workers refused to cross picket lines of apartment house workers, striking tugboat crews kept boats at bay, and picketing Teamsters milk drivers left the milk to be dumped down the drain. Having wasted $10 million trying to break the strike, the city finally buckled, and the ATU won the EPP.

The same kind of boots-on-the-ground labor solidarity would go a long way toward beating back the union-busters today. A good step would be for other unions, beginning with Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, the UFT 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. The president of Teamsters Local 854, which also organizes bus workers, has pledged to honor picket lines. At the same time, buses driven by Teamsters, as well as non-union drivers, have kept on rolling, pointing to the need for mass pickets to keep all buses locked up tight. If the ATU is defeated, it is only a matter of time before the city takes it to the Teamsters. The two unions should have a common contract expiration date to facilitate joint class struggle.

The lineup against Local 1181, the largest ATU local in the nation, includes not only City Hall and the bus companies but also Democratic Party politicians and the courts, cops and labor boards of the class enemy. Union officials representing NYC public workers, from the subways to the classroom, would like nothing better than to elect a “friend of labor” Democrat to replace Bloomberg later this year. But the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are a party of capital. Among the favored Democratic mayoral candidates is NYC Comptroller John Liu, who last week issued an official statement defending the EPP. But last year Liu approved new school bus contracts covering pre-kindergarten children without the EPP after Cuomo had vetoed a bill, at Bloomberg’s urging, that would have mandated its inclusion.

A 2011 New York State court ruling opened the door to this rollback of the EPP and gave the mayor a club to wield against the union. The bosses’ state—including the courts and cops—is an instrument of coercion that safeguards their interests. To date, the NYPD has arrested at least two ATU supporters, including a striker who tried to block a departing scab bus in the Bronx, underscoring that the cops are strikebreakers, not “workers in uniform.” It is crucial for labor to rally to the defense of any arrested striker.

Meanwhile, the bus companies have turned to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to put an end to the strike. Time and again, whether composed mainly of Democratic or Republican appointees, the NLRB has stepped in to demobilize labor struggle. When longshoremen fought an attempt by the EGT grain exporter to introduce scab labor at a new terminal in Longview, Washington, in 2011, the NLRB filed an injunction to stop “aggressive picketing” and later sought massive fines against the union. Last year, Local 1181 fended off an earlier unfair labor practices case brought by the city. Yet the labor tops would have trade unionists believe that Obama’s NLRB can be made to work for them.

By the same token, the union bureaucrats bow before the supposed good will and omnipotence of the capitalist state and the labor law it enforces. A case in point is the Taylor Law, which forbids New York State public employees from using their strike weapon. Out of labor’s struggles, a new leadership must emerge that is independent of all capitalist parties and committed to the policy of class struggle. Victory to the school bus workers strike!