Transit Workers’ Power Can Cripple Bosses’ Profits

SAN FRANCISCO — The U.S. capitalist class is competing for domination and control of energy, basic resources and cheap labor worldwide. Meanwhile, they own trillions of capital (money) which they refuse to invest until they’re guaranteed the higher rate of profit resulting from the devastating cuts in the cost of labor. Mass transit, roads and bridges are falling apart, workers are unemployed, and yet there is “no money for infrastructure.”
Monopoly of power and money determines the policies of local government agencies like the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Authority (SFMTA) governing the city’s mass transit and its political apparatus. This is the driving force behind the attacks on the whole working class, both public and private sectors. The capitalist class uses its control of the social, political, police, courts and mass media apparatus to rule and make the working class pay for its rule through taxes, interest on public debt, credit and low wages). Communists call this the state apparatus. The local Mayor and SFMTA implement these attacks.
Transit Worker Power Can Halt City
Globally, transit workers have the power to bring capitalism’s daily functioning to a screeching halt. This is the irreconcilable conflict between transit workers’ and riders’ needs on the one hand and the MTA budget-cutting dictated by the downtown big businesses (i.e., capitalism). This conflict produced an explosion on June 2 when two-thirds of MUNI operators called in sick, crippling normal business and profits. (See above article.)
Populations and production are more concentrated in congested urban areas. Therefore, transit workers are a vital link in the profit chain of the big corporations, finance capitalists like banks, and big retail. SFMUNI alone moves over 700,000 people a day in a city with a population of 826,000. SF Muni’s infrastructure helps make San Francisco the “Gateway to the East.”
In addition, transit labor indirectly produces profits for real estate owners. It’s estimated that SF MUNI adds up to $35/per square foot to rental or sale prices of downtown commercial property. Big buildings have no value if no one can get to them.
The same corporate/financial groups also control the state apparatus. In transit here, their mass media, their electoral process and their court system have not only attacked Muni operators’ wages and working conditions but have reinforced institutional racism.  A series of take-away contracts and arbitration has destroyed work rules and benefits won over the past 40 years. Inaction of Transit Workers Union Local 250a leadership has sealed the deal.
For example, a media campaign financed by two billionaires — recipients of big tax breaks — put so-called pension reform (i.e., cuts) on the ballot spreading lies that “transit workers are overpaid” and “fail to provide on time, reliable transit”; that “bloated pensions are bankrupting the Pension Fund and endangering SF’s financial health.”
A group of the SF’s wealthy 1% used the ballot initiative process to pass Proposition G, installing arbitration with no right to strike. It guaranteed that the MTA can cut labor costs because it represents “the public interest” and removed all past practice precedents.
The press was full of thinly veiled racial profiling to fan the flames against the mainly black, Latino and immigrant workforce. The ruling class is trying to force this vital group of workers to work for less and to isolate and marginalize them in order to undermine their potential power.
Again, a sickout led by the rank and file has now shown a way to challenge the deal.