burke's law my ass septa sucks from the top

 progs need a brain wash every month or so 
cause to be useful 
to the rest of us 
   they have to regenerate their specialness

one varient 
their laughable 
fucking sense 
of a mountain top 
above the  dust and fog
                    view
of   the klass struggle  

Even back when my political sensibilities were more party-line progressive than they are now, I was always uneasy about the expectation that any given action by a labor union mandatorily demanded unquestioning support. 

Partly that’s the consequence of growing up with a father who represented management in labor disputes. Not just my father’s views on things, but also some of his concrete experiences (like the time that someone showily broke into his office and messed up papers during one negotiation, to ’send a message’), were persuasive to me as a young adult that there was a morally complex terrain involved in modern unionism, that any given strike or labor action required independent assessment rather than reflexive endorsement. Heck, even my dad thought some strikes were legitimate, and that unions were an important institution. Near the end of his life, he was sometimes bothered, in fact, by the waning of the union movement: my sense was that he preferred arbitration with many union leaders to some of the kinds of workplace litigation he was increasingly involved in. I once saw a videotape he did for non-union workplaces about how to handle drives to unionize, and he went well beyond explaining what their legal obligations were: the first and last thing he said, I recall, was that any employer who thought that a lack of a union was a license to squeeze his employees was going to get a union and he was going to deserve every consequence that followed from that. 

So, for example, the proposition that Wal-Mart employees need collective representation that aggressively stands up for their interests strikes me as unquestionable. The only solution for predatory employment practices in cases where workers have few if any alternative sources of employment and woefully unfair terms of labor is unionization. You have to have a legally protected right to unionize or to bargain collectively in a free society, and some strikes or labor actions deserve the general endorsement of a public, even when those strikes inconvenience us. 

That support is for me, and I think it ought to be for anyone, given only on a case-by-case basis. Some strikes I simply can’t work up any support for. It’s hard for me, like almost everyone else in the Philadelphia area, to feel any real support or warmth for the striking mass transit workers who have crippled transportation this week. It doesn’t affect me personally, though it has increased my wife’s commuting times due to the big spike in cars on the road. However, this is a very public event: it completely changes and complicates the landscape of daily life for a large number of people in the metropolitan area, most especially poorer Philadelphians who are dependent on bus transport and schoolchildren in the city who use vouchers to travel on public transportation to get to school. Moreover, if the union gets even some of what it is asking for in health care benefits, the cost of that is going to come out of the pockets of transport riders in some fashion or another. A strike against a private business is one thing: in a way, you can usually just avoid engaging it altogether, work with some other business for the time being. This is different.

The union involved doesn’t seem to recognize the difference, and in failing to do so, neatly explains the eclipse of the modern labor movement in America. They’ve made no meaningful effort to speak to the public in advance of the strike, to prepare the ground, no attempt to explain or frame their actions in that arena. They’ve acted in a way that has huge public consequences with almost no sense of engagement with that public, and this particular union has done that quite a few times in the last decade. The general public are treated largely as spectators with their noses pressed to the glass, watching some private tableau unfold inside a distant interior. This is equally true for the managers on the other side of the negotiations, of course, but that’s the problem. People expect them to be inscrutable, distant and self-interested (even though they are also public servants); they have a different expectation of labor. Labor’s decline began in the United States almost as soon as it won legitimacy as a public institution, as soon as the right to organize was enshrined (and also obstructed) by statute, precisely because of a consistent inability to articulate its actions through an alliance with some larger general interest. That accelerated in the late 1970s and early 1980s; now many unions don’t even bother to try to pretend that the public consequences of their labor actions are worth more than a cursory address, or maintain incorrectly that the public interest is best addressed not at the site of particular actions, but instead through general political engagement at the level of national and state elections. (There are very important and exciting exceptions to this, but that’s just it: they’re exceptions.) 

As long as unions seem too inwardly self-interested, anybody who has a cultural ethos that values labor in terms beyond the contractual and financial, who has a sense of professional pride and commonsensical tolerance for small-scale workplace injustices, who sees their labor in relation to some larger obligation (a sensibility that spans across social class in the United States) is likely to feel uneasy with contemporary unionism. As long as unions seem as obsessed with bureaucratic over-regulation of workplace obligations as any middle-manager straight out of “The Office”, as eager to return all their members to some mediocre mean of on-the-job effort, or as uninterested in the long-term viability of the institutions for which they labor as stock-price obsessed CEOs, they’re going to turn off many potential members. Yes, these are all caricatures, exaggerated by the news media, but I suspect many people in their working lives have encountered a few vividly personal examples as well as telling public anecdotes that verify the caricatures in some respect. 

Certainly that’s what’s happening in Philadelphia now. Most people would probably be annoyed by the strike no matter what the union did, but it would help to see that the union is at least trying to care about the consequences. 

-----------------------------


SEPTA Strike
It's time to trade tired souls for tired feet 

by Fabricio Rodriguez
October 11, 2005
Young Philly Politics
http://youngphillypolitics.com/node/269

SEPTA workers have an uphill battle building public
support for there fight to win a good contract. Over
the past nine months I have talked about this fight
with thousands of people in Philadelphia and my pleas
for support have been meet with replies of 'we have to
pay for health care, they should too' and 'SEPTA has
terrible customer service, the workers are over paid
and don't deserve our support.' Surprisingly, these
sentiment have most often been heard from
'progressives' and from many working-class
Philadelphians. These responses, however, are
uninformed, oversimplified and lack a broader strategic
prospective of what progressives should be fighting
for.

SEPTA management is not asking for reasonable health
care compromises. A closer look at what SEPTA has asked
for it is clear that they aim at giving workers a bad
deal and hope to break the union. SEPTA claims that
these drastic cuts stem from lingering financial
difficulties. It is true that our growing transit
system needs a sustainable and dedicated funding
source. However, what SEPTA and most of the press has
failed to mention is the fact that SEPTA has become a
holding tank and handout job for the politically
connected. This lumbering bureaucracy has nearly one
manager for every worker! If something needs to be cut,
we should look closely at slimming down General Manager
Faye Moore's burgeoning staff first.

SEPTA workers have made sacrifices. In fact, the first
health care compromises came in 1989 when SEPTA workers
began returning the Cost of Living Agreement to defray
the rising costs of health care. SEPTA workers pay for
all of their prescription, dental and vision and 30% of
their medical for the first two years and for every
doctor visit (co-pay) and prescriptions after the first
two years. In contrast, SEPTA management (remember,
there is nearly one manager for every worker), get 100%
health care coverage from day one. SEPTA workers have
forgone any raises for two years. These savings have
played a big role in keeping the system solvent.
Management raises, however--you can guess what the
answer is. Additionally, SEPTA workers have given up
any sick pay for the most common, short term
sicknesses. This concession was made to help meet
rising health care costs for the workers. Any illness
that keeps a workers off the job for three days or less
are paid for by the workers themselves up to six days
per year. Management gets full sick pay from day one.
This health care giveback alone has saved SEPTA
millions of dollars per year. SEPTA has not only
proposed 20% premium increase but also 20% cuts to the
benefit. They are asking for a 40% give back and cuts
from both ends of the workers health care. SEPTA
workers have made big and reasonable sacrifices for
there good health care but this is not just about these
benefits. SEPTA management wants much more.

The list of demands that SEPTA has put on the table
belie more than dollar and cent practicality. SEPTA is
asking workers to give up maternity leave, some
vacation time, earned and sick days and all weekly
overtime. Perhaps the most revealing demands have to do
with the welfare and the strength of the union itself.
TWU has proven over the passed few decades that it is a
strong union with a high level of solidarity among its
workers. The last strike in 1998 last for forty days
with virtually no scabbing and strike breaking. SEPTA
wants to put an end to decades of effective trade
unionism by one of our cities most diverse unions.
SEPTA is demanding that unions give back the ability to
collect Authority Dues to represent workers and that
unions concede SEPTA authority to subcontract work.
SEPTA wants to strip the unions from having any say in
lay-offs. What reason would any member have to stay in
the union with a pay cut, a huge chunk missing from
their health care and no job protection? SEPTA
management wants to break this union.

Beyond the plain questions of fairness there is the
question of what progressives will sacrifice if this
fight is one that we sit out. TWU Local 234 is a union
that is closely connected with our communities. Most of
the SEPTA drivers are African American and live with
the neighborhoods of Philadelphia. These workers are
pumping untold millions of dollars to diverse
neighborhoods outside of Center City. This fact,
accounts for the callous disregard for their situation
from many liberals. These working people are people
whom most of Philadelphia's liberal, white
establishment rarely encounter. TWU Local 234 is
engaged in the community and in local left politics
despite the isolated myopia of much of Philly's web-
based politicos.

TWU mobilizes its members for community events,
activities and politics in the communities that the
members are based. In the course of building community
support with TWU Local 234, the members of Jobs with
Justice have been asked to go everywhere but downtown
by union leadership. TWU members mobilized for Seth
Williams in north and west Philadelphia, realms that
are often all but invisible from the blogosphere. If
this union loses ground and strength in this contract
fight, the Philadelphia progressive movement will
suffer a hit to one of its most organized, grassroots
and neighborhood based allies. The need for the
advocacy for a good contract on the part of the
Philadelphia 'left' goes beyond these short-term
reasons, however.

The longest standing committee in Jobs with Justice is
our Health Care Action Committee. This committee is
dedicated to mobilizing for strategic wins that build a
broad based constituency for universal health care
(UHC). In our experience, one of the biggest flaw with
the universal health care movement is that it is based
on big ideas and lacks any strategy for winning. Jobs
with Justice has mapped out two broad strategies for
moving toward UHC: 1) make UHC struggle real and
locally relevant 2) stop cost shifting. Jobs with
Justice believes that in order to make the big,
technical ideas of (UHC) relevant our actions must be
paired with local struggles in which working people can
win something and in which we build a long term
constituency for comprehensive health care reform. If
we cannot make UHC relevant to working people, UHC will
never be a realistic goal. In practical terms, that
means holding our ground on health care, especially for
large employers. While we develop this constituency we
have to make sure that the sector of society which has
power and the means to make UHC a reality (corporations
and large employers) are forced to feel the pinch of
the healthcare crisis. As long as employers are able to
patch over the problem of a crumbling health care
system by shifting rising costs onto workers, we will
move further and further from reform. By the same
token, when we hold ground on health care and
administrators and shareholders see it come out of
profits, we push those with power in our society toward
making a change for the better.

Philadelphia progressives should stand with these
workers because it is just, important to strengthening
progressive politics in Philadelphia, TWU Local 234 are
huge economic force in many of Philadelphia's most
underserved communities and because it is strategically
important for transit and health care reform. Nearly 50
years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a group of
largely African-American workers have declared that
they have given enough and are poised and ready to, as
Martin Luther King Jr. said, 'substitute tired feet for
tired souls, and walk the streets.' Progressives and
workers should be ready to march in solidarity with
them. This fight is also about building and supporting
the grassroots, neighborhood based, diverse
institutions important to the progressive community.
Like in Montgomery in 1955 we should recall the
sentiments of Martin Luther King Jr., 'In all our
actions we must stick together. Unity is the great need
of the hour, and if we are united we can get many of
the things that we not only desire but which we justly
deserve.'

Fabricio Rodriguez is the Director of Philadelphia Jobs
with Justice a coalition of 53 labor unions, community
groups, faith and student organizations. Jobs with
Justice is dedicated to winning workers' right and
social and economic justice by using the principles of
solidarity, reciprocity, militancy and direct action.