NEW YORK CITY, May 4 — More than a thousand angry transit workers surprised both Transportation Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 leaders and cops when they broke out of police pens at a Local 100 rally and marched to Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) headquarters, blocking traffic along the 15-block walk.
These militant marchers had plenty to be upset about. In recent weeks tragedy and devastation have hit City transit workers:
• On April 27, track foreman Jimmy Knell fell on an unprotected energized third rail in a rain-soaked area, killing him;
• The next day train operator Domenick Occhiogrosso, 50, collapsed and died of a heart attack operating the G train;
• Nearly 1,500 MTA employees, mainly station agents and bus operators, received layoff notices in early May. A court injunction postponed them until the MTA holds public hearings but the Authority announced it plans to lay off some workers anyway. (The judge-ordered hearings are an opportunity to give the bosses a taste of workers’ power.)
These deaths and layoffs follow transit service cuts and MTA threats against student Metrocards and transit-worker raises. Capitalism — a racist system that kills and screws workers for money — spawns all these attacks.
The MTA budget gap stems from billions paid in profits to bankers in “debt service,” nearly one-fourth of the MTA’s budget. The bosses’ dictatorship guarantees that all these payments are legal requirements under NY State law. The bosses’ law says the MTA must pay bondholders before all other expenses and MTA agreements require that fares be sufficient “to cover all debt service.”
Still further, the MTA’s service cuts, fair hikes and attacks on transit workers are concentrated in the city, where workers and riders are overwhelming black, Latino and immigrant, even though the MTA also runs commuter rails through mostly white suburbs.
This racist drive for bank profits, historically always present in the City’s mass transit, contributes to a national workplace death rate for transit workers higher than the national death rate of coal miners!
Workplace stress likely contributed to heart disease that fatally struck Occhiogrosso.
Two track workers also died of heart attacks on the job within the past year.
Knells, although a low-level supervisor, was working long hours for the same reason most workers do, overtime pay. When he died he was rumored to have been on the job for over 23 hours, seven more than the maximum limit.
For management, safety rules are used to blame the worker after something happens. These rules are hardly ever enforced due to union-management deals that ensure productivity, and lower costs at the expense of workers’ safety on the job. But every life and job loss is a challenge that we must answer with militant class struggle.
Workers who are ready to break laws and unite with working-class students and riders are on the right track. But Local 100 president John Samuelson, supposedly a “militant,” arrived at the May 4th breakaway rally at MTA headquarters soon after it started and announced, “We came here, we said what we had to say. Let’s go home.”
One shocked worker blurted out, “What?!” Samuelson replied, “What? You want to stay here all night?” Workers can do without that kind of “leadership.” Workers, students and riders must unite to expose the unsafe conditions that threaten us all.
But more militancy alone isn’t enough. In fighting for safer conditions and jobs. We need to forge unity between workers, students and soldiers that will one day overthrow the bosses in revolution and build a communist society free of racist class exploitation.
The 1,500 layoffs of unionized workers are already the second wave of transit job cuts, following buyout offers for 600 non-union administrative employees. Local 100 heads want the new MTA boss Jay Walder fired and urge politicians and the MTA to use federal stimulus money to fill budget gaps. But capitalist competition, not individual bosses or mis-management, forces the MTA’s bosses to maximize debt service payments for banks.
Increased military and economic rivalry between imperialists — the world’s most powerful capitalist nations — is forcing bosses worldwide to exploit “their” workers harder than their competitors. U.S. bosses’ strategy to maintain supremacy against rival powers impels banks and politicians to squeeze private revenue from public agencies and forces racist unemployment onto the working class. Only a worker-run communist revolution can bury this profit system.