Jackson Kept Hope Alive in Negotiations

As elected officials, news reporters, transit agency policy wonks and others teetered on the verge of exhaustion after a marathon 24-hour negotiating session early Tuesday morning, the Rev. Jesse Jackson literally ran from room to room in the Pasadena Hilton, pulled by his faith that a settlement in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 32-day strike was within reach.

“I felt it would be irresponsible to walk out with less than victory,” Jackson said.

At 6 a.m., it looked as if he was the only one who thought that.

Talks between leaders of the MTA and the union representing 4,400 striking drivers were on the verge of collapse. The distrust and anger that had led to a bitter impasse hung in the air like a stale odor. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, frustrated, said he had a speech to give at 7 a.m., and if there was no agreement, he was leaving.

An hour later, everyone was all smiles. Riordan, Jackson and other participants were standing in front of television cameras announcing they had a deal.

Everyone gave Jackson credit for cementing it.

“He pushed everybody,” Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, chairwoman of the MTA board, said. “He told us, ‘You’ve got to get this over with.’ ”

The epiphany had come minutes before.

That was when James Williams, leader of the bus drivers union, walked into a negotiating room and told Riordan, “Mayor, you are a tough foe. The strike is over. It’s time for the buses to roll,’ ” Jackson recalled.

“That was a glorious moment,” Jackson said.

Interrupting a campaign swing for Vice President Al Gore to jump into the middle of the bitter transit strike, Jackson emerged Tuesday as the person who held the warring parties together long enough to forge an agreement.

For weeks, as the impasse between the MTA and UTU dragged on and deepened, one name after another was floated as a possible mediator in the dispute. Gov. Gray Davis, Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony all put up candidates.

One by one, the proposed mediators either fell by the wayside or tried and failed to forge a settlement.

Jackson himself said he had twice offered Riordan his help.Both times, the mayor declined.

“He said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,” Jackson said, recounting his first conversation with the mayor several weeks ago. At the time, the mayor was optimistic that a settlement was possible. The second call, set up by county Federation of Labor leader Miguel Contreras, got another rejection, this time as Riordan told Jackson he was trying to get a federal mediator.

Although Jackson in recent years has traveled the globe, hopping from one hot spot to another in the role of peacemaker, he carried a lot of baggage into the Pasadena Hilton.

For one thing, he has none of the neutrality considered so important to mediators.

The Chicago-based minister has spent the past months campaigning so hard for Democratic candidates that he couldn’t even let a post-strike radio interview go by without getting off a few shots at Republicans.

Jackson also was clearly on the side of the drivers, invited through the intervention of Contreras, Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), a candidate for mayor, and Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), who has been a supporter of Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition since the 1980s.

Jackson, in fact, had been touring Appalachia with Jim Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, and other labor leaders when he was contacted by Contreras, with whom he had worked on the janitors’ strike. Contreras urged him to come to Los Angeles in time for a rally at City Hall last Friday morning.

There, Riordan and Jackson spoke again. This time, the mayor said Jackson was welcome at the talks. With union leaders agreeing to cover the expenses of Jackson and his staff, his intervention began in earnest.

But with negotiations already close to the breaking point, some wondered whether he was the kind of conciliator the talks needed.

By all accounts, he was.

Working around the clock, holding the parties together with his plea that “we are too close to give up,” Jackson proved tireless, physically shuttling between parties too deeply at odds to occupy the same room until there was an agreement.

As it turned out, even Jackson’s celebrity turned out to be a bridge-building tool.

From the beginning, he made it clear to both sides that if either went back on its word or walked out of the talks, he would use his access to the media as a bully pulpit to inform the world of their backsliding.

“The difference between me and a federal mediator, the low-profile type, is that I have a profile, a point of view, just as the contentious parties do,” Jackson said in an interview Tuesday. “If one party or the other is stonewalling, I am fully capable of interpreting to the world what they are doing. No group has the right to walk away with so much public service at stake.”

Jackson managed to get both Riordan and union leader Williams to accompany him to a Rainbow/PUSH Coalition fund-raiser at the Beverly Hilton on Sunday night, also a celebration of Jackson’s 59th birthday.

Then, on Monday night, Jackson reminded the negotiators of his reputation as someone who can get things done by inviting three U.S. soldiers he had helped bring back from Yugoslavia last year to dinner at the Pasadena Hilton. The soldiers had been captured and held by Serbian forces for more than a month before Jackson and an interfaith delegation secured their release. At the hotel, Jackson introduced them to both union and MTA leaders.

Jackson said the bitterness and anger of the MTA strike were similar to what he encountered during a Chicago firefighters strike in 1980. At the time, he said, both sides urged him to stay out, noting that others had tried to end the strike and failed. Jackson said he told them, “Just give me a chance to fail.”

After what he said was 48 hours nonstop negotiations, he helped them forge an agreement.

Jackson knew several of the participants in the MTA dispute, none better than Supervisor Burke. He and she had worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, and have stayed close since. Jackson was on the balcony with King in Memphis when the civil rights leader was assassinated during his own intervention in a labor dispute involving sanitation workers.

When Jackson became involved in the negotiations in Pasadena last Friday, the two sides were in agreement on 75% of the issues, which he equated to being 25 yards from the goal line on a 100-yard football field. He said he kept pushing for the goal line, telling the two sides they could not look back.

Finally, after Jackson had shuttled offers and counteroffers back and forth countless times, he signaled a final deal by slapping a reporter’s hand in a hotel hallway, while exclaiming:

“Touchdown!”