Bus Strike: Get It Over

Aserious, countywide employee walkout ended Wednesday, just hours after it began, with a nudge from Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony.

The city’s transit system remains idle in the 28th day of a determined walkout by Metropolitan Transportation Authority drivers and mechanics. There are good reasons for these opposite results, but no good reason for the MTA strike to continue.

The MTA’s power struggle with the drivers and mechanics unions is being conducted on the backs of bus riders, whose lives have been disrupted by lost jobs and missed school days. The damage is there and growing daily, but it is felt by the majority of the population only as slower rush-hour traffic as more cars crowd the roads.

The most powerful single figure in this impasse is Mayor Richard Riordan, who has said he has little sympathy for the drivers and set the tone for a hard-line position. The second big political player in this drama is the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, all of whom sit on the 13-member MTA board. The five members--Michael Antonovich, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Don Knabe, Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky--have been more than happy to let the lame duck Mayor Riordan absorb the greatest political heat. The supervisors stood in unison against the strikers until Thursday, when Molina expressed discomfort with the MTA’s “final offer.” Her unease is no doubt fueled by the fact that her constituents are among the most likely to be affected by the prolonged bus strike. The third big player is United Transportation Union leader James Williams, who also has taken a hard line but is facing pressure from weary strikers. All of these factors combine to encourage compromise. The stubborn parties in the MTA strike need to seek a federal mediator, something the ubiquitous cardinal was asking the reluctant United Transportation Union to do Thursday.

The countywide strike fizzled mostly because the union saw that its members were far from united, and there was no strike fund to pay even minimal benefits while members walked the picket line. The MTA unions, by contrast, have funds and a successful strike history over several decades.

The county supervisors, in the case of the county employees, can go back to the table and reach a fair compromise with workers that it has no political reason to alienate. It should be a straightforward negotiation. The MTA strike is more complicated, tangled with issues of job security and raw power in a city fragmented by geography, class and race. Now, with the MTA’s decision to appeal directly to the unions’ members to accept its last offer, the union might soften its objection to federal mediation.

With the right arguments from the right people, and the help of a mediator, the MTA dispute can be brought back to the bargaining table and to a fair end. Why, instead, has this injustice to nearly half a million riders been allowed to drift on?