Union Leader Grows Into High-Profile Role

Dressed in a color-coordinated dark- and light-blue bus driver’s uniform, Ruby Holmes, a single mother and bus driver for 17 years, rushed up to strike leader James A. Williams and gave him a big hug.

“Thank you,” she said, moments after Williams gave an impassioned speech at a City Hall rally.

The hug went beyond the dollars and cents issues at stake in the bus and rail operators’ strike against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, now in its fifth week.

The strike is about a middle-class lifestyle that Holmes and other drivers say is at risk, one that is crucially important to many African Americans. That’s why the Rev. Jesse Jackson and a group of black ministers have joined the effort to bring peace to the MTA.

Williams, a 60-year-old former bus driver who was raised in rural Louisiana, is a strong and outspoken protector of that lifestyle. Private and guarded with the news media, he is a gifted public speaker who comes alive in front of large union assemblies, capable of shoring up strikers’ flagging confidence and working them into foot-stomping, fist-pumping defiance.

“I love him,” said Holmes, who is raising four children and commutes between Los Angeles and her home in San Bernardino. “He is a father to us all because he is looking out for everyone, not just himself.”

Negotiators for the MTA see Williams differently.

The tactics of Williams and his staff have infuriated negotiators for the transit agency.

On several occasions, he has abruptly gotten up and walked out of meetings. He has sometimes seemed unprepared, his critics say, and at other times acted peeved that he wasn’t getting proper respect.

Two weeks and two walkouts into the strike, Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky complained: “We cannot even get the union to tell us what they want. . . . We cannot negotiate with ourselves.”

At one key point in negotiations, Williams had a public break with Neil Silver, president of the MTA mechanics’ Amalgamated Transit Union.

Silver, who had asked his union members to return to their MTA jobs, accused Williams of turning his back on the mechanics by not urging the drivers to do the same thing. Later, Silver did an about-face, reaffirming support for the strike by Williams’ union, but hard feelings remain.

But controversy is a new thing for Williams.

He served a lengthy apprenticeship under longtime UTU leader Earl Clark, then stepped out from the staff role to become general chairman of UTU’s Los Angeles unit when his mentor died in 1996.

Faced with what members of his union say was his first test, Williams helped forge an agreement that averted a strike.

Now the quiet, reserved Williams is being thrust into one public fight after another. And he finds himself being treated like a movie star by UTU members, who trail in his wake at rallies begging for autographs or a moment to take a photograph.

Week by week, Williams seems to have grown into the role of a high-profile labor leader.

Reticent around the news media at first, he is still reserved but seems more comfortable standing in front of a live television camera.

“He is a natural,” said longtime drivers’ union spokesman Goldy Norton, commenting on Williams’ trial by fire in the current strike.

Norton, who has worked for the union for 41 years and has known Williams for nearly 30 years, fits the mold of the tight-lipped labor insider. Getting more than a couple of sentences out of him at any one time can be a chore. When the strike began, Williams made Norton seem positively verbose.

Now, Williams almost seems to like the limelight.

“Once he learned how to deal with the media, he became very comfortable,” Norton said.

Williams says it has come easy to him because he is talking about a consuming passion.

“I am really a highly publicized bus operator who came from the trenches, who understands the plight of bus operators, who understands what it is to ride buses. So it comes easy to me to talk to people about the whole thing,” Williams said, stopping to chat before a rally at the Los Angeles Convention Center that drew 2,500 to 3,000 bus and rail operators.

The “whole thing,” in Williams’ case, also means knowing how to deal with the MTA. This is the seventh strike or walkout he has been involved in over the last 28 years.

Born in Ruston, La., Williams comes from what he describes as “poor, humble people.” His mother was a maid, his father a lumberjack. Williams moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, and began driving a bus for the old Southern California Rapid Transit District in 1966.

In the early 1970s, he began moving into union work full-time under Clark’s tutelage. He had a chance at a top job with the UTU’s international union a few years ago, but that would have meant moving to the headquarters in Cleveland, and he turned it down.

These days, he lives in San Bernardino County with his wife, Chantay, and two children, 12 and 16.

Doing Right Goes Beyond Contract

During bargaining talks and at rallies, Williams is impeccably dressed. He keeps his gray hair cut short and has a thin mustache. Though he doesn’t often show it, the strain of the long strike wears on him, his wife said.

“He is a very strong man,” Chantay Williams said. “But in his own way, I can see where he is struggling, a lot. He wants to do right for everybody, and it is just hard.”

Doing right means far more than working out a pay increase in the new contract. It means remembering what it is like to sit in a bad bus seat for 8 or 10 hours, and what that can do to a driver’s back. It means searching for the intent in each line of the contract and knowing how that can translate into fewer full-time, middle-class jobs for his drivers and more low-paid part-time drivers. It means weighing protection of his members’ jobs against the suffering by people dependent on buses to get to school, doctor’s offices and jobs.

“If anyone in this room thinks that I go home at night and sleep, you are mistaken,” he said at a news conference. “I think about the people who didn’t get to dialysis today. I think about the people who have no food because they couldn’t get to the grocery store.”

He has a strong identification with drivers, too.

Talking about his bus-driving days, Williams said, “I worked everything in South Los Angeles you could work. I’ve been robbed, shot at, hit, spat upon--you name it. So when you talk about a bus driver, you are talking about me. When you talk about what happens to bus operators, you are talking about me.”

At rallies, Williams hits a responsive chord with drivers. He likes to say only a driver knows what it is like to drive a bus. Drivers nod their heads approvingly.

Holmes, who fought through the crowd at Los Angeles City Hall last Friday to hug Williams, said she needed the confidence boost he gave.

There are times, she said, when “you start to get a little weak on faith” thinking about the strike.

“But being here today is like I got a supercharge,” she said. “I’m right back where I was the first day. I trust James Williams. I think he is going to hold onto our jobs, I really do.”

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MTA TALKS CONTINUE: Drivers union chief hopes buses run by Monday. B3