The Workers Didn’t Unite and MTA Won : By keeping silent about fare hikes, the unions lost bus-riding working people as allies.

The MTA strike was a tragic example of a labor movement in free-fall, with union goals no more lofty than “keeping our jobs,” no strategy to transform union self-interest into a community concern and a return to work on management’s terms. The strike was provoked by an MTA board dominated by the privatizing, union-busting agendas of Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, with the support of alleged liberals and advocates for working people.

Management’s short-term objectives were to paint union workers as overpaid featherbedders and to divert more bus lines to the lower-wage privateer, Foothill Transit. The long-term goal is to turn the MTA into a $3 billion-a-year dispenser of contracts to private firms and to turn Los Angeles into an even lower-wage company town in which everything--from bus contracts to the library to the airport--is for sale to the corporate rich.

This naked class interest was clothed in moralizing about “saving the taxpayers’ money” by a board that routinely costs the public hundreds of millions a year with costly rail projects built by their campaign contributors and business partners.

The board’s privatization strategy demanded an ideological response from the transit unions, arguing that an expanded public sector can subsidize beneficial goals, from higher wages that create an upward pull on wage rates for all workers to lower bus fares that increase working people’s mobility and disposable income. But that assumes that the unions embrace the rudiments of class struggle, whereas at the MTA and throughout the country, it is only the wealthy who understand class and struggle.

Just before the strike, the MTA board handed the unions a golden opportunity by raising bus fares and eliminating bus passes for working people. Since the MTA’s ads argued that $18 an hour for a worker was somewhere between a misdemeanor and a felony, the unions could have taken a stand against the fare increases and allied with an overwhelmingly Latino, black and Asian bus ridership that earns an average of less than $15,000 a year. Instead, the unions were virtually silent, a calculated decision to avoid further antagonizing the MTA board.

Imagine our dilemma on the first day of the strike as more than 50 activists from the Strategy Center’s Bus Riders Union tried to explain “labor solidarity” to stranded riders who asked how we could support the unions after they had sold out the passengers. We replied that we could not abandon the fight for the principle of no contracting out.

But the unions were not fighting for the principle; their contracts already allowed it. The real “fight” was over 26 privatized bus lines versus 13 and how many mechanics’ jobs would be affected. Worse, the contract establishes a chilling precedent in which graffiti removal from buses can be done “by governmental agencies such as a youth project, probation or sentencing program or court referral.” Why didn’t the unions portray the specter of the MTA subcontracting to the sheriff to replace $15-an-hour graffiti removers with court-remanded work gangs--perhaps followed by mechanics and, someday, bus drivers?

Even the union’s “victory” in getting the MTA to rehire the 63 mechanics laid off just before the strike is Pyrrhic. The MTA agreed to hire back those mechanics by July, 1996, when the attrition rate for the almost 1,900 mechanics will be far higher. Meanwhile, the strike will permanently reduce ridership by at least 5%, and the September fare hikes will reduce ridership by another 7%. By not working with transit-advocacy groups against the fare increases, the unions have essentially granted the MTA a license for a spiraling reduction of ridership and work force.

The final balance sheet: a two-tiered wage system in which new hires come in at 80% of past wages, 13 newly contracted-out bus lines, court remanded workers cleaning the buses and reduced bus ridership and union jobs. It’s a major victory for the MTA board; a painful defeat for labor.

The Bus Riders’ Union is trying to reverse the proposed $1.35 fare and replace it with a permanent 50-cent fare and $20-per-month bus pass. (The 50-cent fare was enacted temporarily by the MTA during the strike.) A 50-cent fare would dramatically increase bus ridership, generate new jobs for union members and provide better access to jobs for the working class. Will the MTA workers learn from the strike and embrace a labor/community strategy for the entire working class? Or will they regress to narrow craft unionism while Riordan and Co. are planning the next round of privatization?