NEW YORK CITY, May 24 — Transit workers, students and other riders are under attack from MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) bosses:
• They’re cutting train and bus service;
• They laid off 250 station agents in early May despite a court injunction to delay layoffs until the MTA holds public hearings;
• They’ve announced over 3,000 more transit worker layoffs; and 600 non-union administrative employees have already received buyout offers;
• They’re threatening to eliminate student Metro Cards (free fare cards)
• They’re threatening to eliminate workers’ raises;
• Their CEO Jay Walder and the bosses’ media have labeled transit workers’ hard-won benefits of overtime pay and sick days as “abuse.”
Blatant Racism
These layoffs, service cuts and smears are particularly racist because they’re concentrated on city transit workers, riders and students who are overwhelmingly black, Latino and immigrant. And they’re added to racist unemployment, officially already 19% among the city’s black men, nearly twice the “official” overall city 9.8% unemployment rate. In contrast, Mayor Bloomberg guaranteed no layoffs this fiscal year for cops, mainly white, who defend the capitalist rulers’ laws and exploitation.
Fighting Back
Angry workers want more action than the TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100’s court suit that delayed some layoffs. Besides daily afternoon protests in front of MTA boss Walder’s residence at 105 Duane Street in Manhattan, more than 1,000 militant transit workers broke out of police pens at a May 4 union rally to march and demonstrate at MTA headquarters 15 blocks away. Workers ready to break rules and unite with working-class students and riders are on the right track. But more militancy alone isn’t enough.
At the root of the problem is the capitalist system that drives bosses to kill and exploit workers for profits. Rivalry between imperialists in the world’s most powerful capitalist nations is forcing bosses globally to exploit “their” own workers more viciously than their competitors. In NYC this competition drives banks and politicians to squeeze nearly one-fourth of the MTA’s budget for profits through “debt service” paid to wealthy bondholders, amounting to $2 billion interest per year.
The MTA’s new Chief Financial Officer is none other than the ex-Bear Stearns banker, Robert Foran. He helped create the MTA’s current budget “gap” when he engineered a deal to more than double the MTA’s debt in 2000 (“Private Promoter for Transit Debt,” NY Times, 5/1/2000).
Ultimate Solution: Revolution
The bosses will run the show until the working class buries their racist profit system with communist revolution. The Progressive Labor Party aims to up the ante in the class struggle, forging unity among workers, students and soldiers to eventually overthrow the capitalists and build a communist society free of racist class exploitation.
One obstacle to this goal is the conditioning of many workers by politicians, union honchos and bosses to accept these “leaders” as the “lesser evil.” That is, the layoffs, service cuts or fare hikes always turn out to be less than the bosses first announce, giving the politicians and union hacks the opening to say they “fought as hard as we could” and claim “victory” for holding off the worst cuts.
We’re encouraged to deal individually with whatever crap rolls downhill. But it’s all a scam designed to keep us from taking mass collective actions like picketing, slowdowns, physical confrontations and strikes to shut the city down. None of these actions guarantee workers will win their reform demands. But, along with a communist outlook, they can help create the mass fighting communist movement here and worldwide needed to win workers’ power. Then workers won’t have to ask bosses for a damn thing because we’ll be running the show