NEW YORK CITY, March 4 — Over 3,000 transit workers and nearly a thousand students protested in front of an MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) hearing to oppose a wave of MTA’s proposed racist cuts. The agency claims an $800 million budget deficit and is demanding student payments for metrocards, layoffs and a possible fare hike in 2011. It also appealed a legally-binding arbitration award for city bus and subway workers, denying raises for six months.
The MTA runs commuter rails through the mainly white suburbs but these cuts are concentrated in the city where transit workers, students and riders are overwhelmingly black, Latino and immigrant.
Capitalism is the source of these racist attacks against the working class, not greed or mismanagement. The MTA budget woes stem from billions paid to the bankers in “debt service,” nearly one-fourth of the MTA’s budget. The bosses’ dictatorship guarantees that all these payments are legal requirements under New York State law. Legally, bondholders are paid before all other expenses and MTA agreements require that fares be sufficient “to cover all debt service” (mta.info).
But TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100 leaders blamed mainly Mayor Bloomberg for the cuts and promoted “good politicians” who want to use federal stimulus dollars to avoid them. One union speaker led a chant “Bail us out,” using the bank and General Motors bailouts to show what the MTA needs. He completely ignored that bailouts led to tens of thousands of autoworkers and homeowners — disproportionably black, Latino and immigrant — losing jobs, wages and property.
PLP organized many students and teachers to march from a protest against education cuts to the rally against transit cuts. From inside and outside the hearing we maintained the need for workers to rely on, and ally with, students and other workers, not on
politicians or pro-boss union leaders, the class enemy.
Local 100’s message focused on station agents, one of two main titles facing layoffs, as being “first responders to terrorism,” hoping to appeal to politicians’ “anti-terrorist” platforms. In signs, speeches and flyers, PLP members pointed out that the “war on terror” and transit cuts are different parts of the same war on the international working class and that politicians are leading these attacks.
At one point thousands of workers chanted “Let them in!” when cops blocked students from entering the Local 100 rally.
Police prevented chanting groups from entering the hearings, which moved forward as scheduled with little organized action inside. But more is needed to oppose the bosses.
Self-critically, PLP could have done more to give the bosses a taste of the disruption the latter plan to give transit riders and workers. We know MTA, state and city bosses have already made their decision and want to use hearings and demonstrations to give the illusion of “democracy.” But the movement against budget cuts present opportunities.
PLP can unite workers and students in actions that confront the bosses and expose the state as the class dictatorship it really is. Victory means building PLP to raise militancy in the class struggle and organize against capitalism. That’s the only way to ensure such demonstrations don’t just blow off steam, but serve as a small example of the tremendous class struggle needed to fight and win communist revolution