The Great Train Robbery: Bosses Destroying Transit Jobs, Service

“Public-Transit Passengers Face Rough Ride.”  This is the happy New Year message from the Wall St Journal (WSJ) (Jan. 2, 2010). As spokesperson for the big financial capitalists like Goldman Saks, Bank of America, and Citibank, the WSJ only confirms what we transit workers already know about the destruction of transit jobs and service in our own particular cities.

Here are some Facts:

$8.4 billion of the $787 billion federal stimulus package or 1% went to mass transit; while most of the $787 billions went to bail out Wall St.

The cost of riding public transit rose at a 17.8% annual rate in the six months ending in November. San Francisco’s Bay Area
Rapid Transit increase will be 27% in Jan. 2010. Those on the economic margins will have to choose between giving up necessities or staying home.

Budget deficit: NY, $383 million, Chicago, $300 million, S.F., $129 million.

3.8% fall in riders over the whole year; rising to a 6.1% drop during October, November and December. Some cities estimate ridership could fall as much as 10%.

What Is Behind The Facts About The Crisis In Mass Transit?

Finance capital and the big corporations which own property in every Center City in Urban USA caused the revenue and funding crisis as they refuse to pay for the value that a mass transit infrastructure adds to property and businesses in urban areas. They support the most regressive tax for transit, a “Sales Tax” which hits the poorest the hardest and shrinks in periods of economic bust. 

 Financial Capital has made billions in profits off loans, public bonds, and financial schemes (like leases, buy-backs) used to pay for transit infrastructure.  Like everything in capitalism, transit must be profitable for some boss if it is to develop. Workers needing mass transit, its value as a “green” alternative, and transit workers providing an important social service are not reason enough for it to exist in an economic system that is based upon profit over human need.  

The funding crisis is a result of U.S. imperialism and the budget priority for wars around the world to control resources like oil.

The capitalist class is dismantling jobs in the public sector like transit (teachers, medical workers, etc.) much as they did after the 1970’s in the industrial, manufacturing sectors of auto, steel, textile, etc.  They cannot outsource transit jobs, but they have a consistent policy of part-timing, speeding up schedules, called “efficiencies,” outsourcing to non-union, or subcontracting to cut labor costs.

At the same time politicians and the corporate-owned mass media try to mobilize the working-class tax payers against their class brothers and sisters in the public sector. This is a divide-and-conquer strategy. In S.F., politicians characterized a legal provision that provides partial payment for dependent medical care as a “Year-end Bonus;” this spread in the media as a thinly-veiled attempt to link transit workers with bankers and fat cat Wall Street bonuses. 

The impact of this crisis is heaviest on the poorest riders, the disability community, black and Latino neighborhoods, the elderly, students, and transit workers (who themselves are predominately black and Latino), immigrant, single parents and sections of the working class that saw transit as a way to maintain a family and life in this economy. In New York City, subsidies passes for the mostly black and Latino students who commute to public schools are on the chopping block — another example of the rulers’ institutional racism.

Ridership is down due to unemployment -— a product of capitalism in crisis.

To understand what is really happening in transit, passengers and transit workers need a communist analysis of capitalism which explains the source of these attacks and helps develop class consciousness: knowing which side of the fence we’re on and who’s there with us.  Mass transit moves people and goods; the vascular system of world capitalism.  Transit workers have tremendous potential power to disrupt the smooth operation of the profit system.

Even though, Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) and Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) top leadership have encouraged and negotiated concessions, transit workers have the potential to step up and fight back.  Groups of workers, with some communist ideas, like “make the bosses take the losses,” have refused to accept that the working class must pay for the transit crisis. 

Transit workers need unity with passengers to oppose fare hikes and service cuts.  Work slowdowns, mass meetings over schedule cuts, newsletters to riders and drivers, rank-and-file caucuses, participation in Union elections and demonstrations with other pubic workers can organize the opposition to the racist fare hikes and attacks on transit workers that the bosses need to finance their expanding oil wars. 

PLP members are immersed in these daily battles, as reported in CHALLENGE, but as long as the profit system remains in place, with financial capitalists running the show, mass transit will not be run to satisfy workers’ needs. Communists organize now to develop collectivity, knowledge of how capitalism works, and class consciousness.  These are some modest steps towards a revolutionary movement, eventually a class war, to get rid of the Wall St parasites.