public transit workers

By Paul Atkin - Greener Jobs Alliance, August 4, 2022

TSSA calls for public transport fares to be slashed – let’s all do the same!

In a sharply worded blog on the TSSA web site, General Secretary Manuel Cortes notes that we have to deal with

two crises running in parallel – the climate … heating up at an unprecedented rate leading to increased extreme weather disasters and …an ever-deepening Tory cost of living crisis, inflation and costs are up, but wages are stagnant

and calls for a sharp cut in public transport fares to reduce costs, fossil fuel use and pollution. 

By Amy Thomson - StreetBblog SF, August 3, 2022

Transit Operators Are the Backbone to Our Region’s Infrastructure. It’s Time We Act Like It.

On her day off last week, one bus driver* took time away from her daughters to tell me about her shift the night before. As regular riders boarded, she was sure to tell each of them that she was on vacation tomorrow and her shift had not yet been covered. In other words, don’t expect this bus to show up.

Transit operators are an integral part of making California affordable. Transportation is the second-highest expense after housing, and driving is both the most expensive transportation option and a top source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Giving Californians frequent, reliable, and accessible transportation alternatives is only possible with transit operators, but there’s a national shortage. A new report by the Transit Center outlines the crisis, finding that 117 transit agencies cut service due to worker shortages, with bus operator positions hardest hit.

LA Metro and the SFMTA are reducing service to manage staffing shortages. Reduced service and staff leaves riders stranded or delayed — which disproportionately affects BIPOC residents who make up a majority of transit ridership. Frequency also attracts riders. When VTA increased its service last fall, more frequent routes saw higher ridership increases.

I spoke with operators who work for Bay Area transit agencies who are working longer shifts, missing time with their families, and dealing with angry customers after missed buses. Here’s how they would solve the staffing crisis and make the job more attractive:

By staff - Land Workers' Alliance, July 27, 2022

The Landworkers’ Alliance wishes to send a message of solidarity to the 40,000 members of the Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport (RMT) taking strike action today.

The workers taking this action include guards, signallers, maintenance and catering staff who are striking against a multipronged attack on their working conditions by Network Rail and the 14 Train Operating Companies. These including proposed £2bn of cuts to the rail system which will result in 2,500 fewer maintenance staff and 625,000 fewer hours of maintenance, the closure of 1,000 ticket offices, and an 8% pay rise over two years at a time when the RPI rate of inflation is already running at 11.4%. The RMT is striking against policies that threaten to make the railways less safe and less viable as a system of transport, when the extreme heatwaves of last week have foregrounded the necessity of transitioning to a transport system based on public provision rather than private vehicles.

This comes as likely Prime Minister-to-be Liz Truss pledges to restrict the fundamental right of rail workers to strike, and the introduction of new legislation that will allow companies to hire agency workers to replace strikers. These proposals will make it harder for everyone to defend themselves from companies who care more about their rates of profit than their workers and the people using their service.

These cuts also come shortly after the Train Operating Companies turned a £600m profit. In 2020, the Rolling Stock Companies, who own the trains, paid out almost £1bn in dividends to their shareholders. We recognise the similarities between the relationship that the Train Operating Companies have with the rail system and its workforce to the relationship that industrial agribusiness has with the food system. It is an extractive relationship that seeks to take as much value out of the system as possible, with little care for the damage that this practice does to the railways and the people that work them.

As a union of landworkers, peasants and small farmers, we try to place ourselves in the traditions of the wider labour movement. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were famously deported to Australia in 1834 for breaking the Combination Laws that prevented workers from forming trade unions, were agricultural workers themselves. We also recognise the essential role that the fight for better wages and working conditions plays in the struggle for a better food system. For too long cheap, mass- produced food has been used by successive government as an alternative to social policies that would increase incomes for working people. Only through the maintenance of an industrial food system, whose true costs of environmental destruction and superexploitation of agricultural workers are not reflected in their price at the supermarket, can a system that continually seeks to reduce wages sustain itself.

In light of this, we encourage our members to attend the RMT’s picket lines at their local stations. You can find details of the locations and times of these picket lines on the RMT’s website. If you can make it to a picket line, we encourage you to wear LWA merch and bring LWA banners to show our solidarity, and to share your photos on social media by tagging @LandworkersUK on Twitter, or @landworkersalliance on Instagram.

By Chris Van Eyken, et, al - Transit Center, July 20, 2022

A national bus operator shortfall is wreaking havoc at transit agencies. In a February 2022 APTA (American Public Transportation Association) survey of 117 transit agencies of all sizes, 71% reported that they have either had to cut service or delay service increases because of worker shortfalls. In the same survey, more than nine in ten public transit agencies stated that they are having difficulty hiring new employees. And nearly two-thirds of transit agencies indicated that they are having difficulty retaining employees. 

Bus drivers are indispensable people that provide an essential service, but in most U.S. cities, their working conditions and compensation don’t recognize their value. TransitCenter’s new report, “Bus Operators in Crisis,” details the challenges American operators are facing, and offers solutions that transit agencies can take to solve issues locally. It also proposes steps that states and the federal government can take to support transit agencies in this effort.

A key cause of difficulties recruiting and retaining new workers is the steady deterioration of one of transit’s most essential jobs. The pay has not kept pace with the skyrocketing cost of living in cities across the country. At the same time, the job has become more difficult. Operator assaults have increased, rigid scheduling requirements make it difficult for junior operators with child or eldercare responsibilities, and a lack of access to restrooms on route and break rooms at depots exacts a health toll. The transit industry is losing these workers to delivery services and trucking companies, which often offer workers more flexibility and higher pay. 

To tackle operator shortfalls, “Bus Operators in Crisis” makes the case that the transit industry must make driving a bus a good job, a job with dignity, a job that is respected, well compensated, and rewarding. Operators are the backbone of the transit industry, and deserve better pay, more flexibility, and safer working conditions. They also deserve paths for advancement within agencies, and the opportunity to have their voices heard. 

The report lays out eight recommendations for how agencies can improve job quality for operators. It also issues recommendations for how state governments can help alleviate the shortfall by increasing the labor pool, and how the USDOT and Secretary Buttigieg can use the power of the federal government to call greater attention to the crisis.

The necessary work of decreasing transportation emissions and closing transit access gaps simply isn’t going to be possible without operators to drive our nation’s buses. While the operator shortfall problem is multifaceted, many of the solutions are well within agency control. Agencies must begin taking steps now to develop a stable, healthy, and supported 21st-century workforce. “Bus Operators in Crisis” charts a path towards a prosperous and dignified future for these essential workers. 

Read the report (Link).

By Matthew Hull - Bright Green, July 3, 2022

A quiet revolution is underway. Across two weeks and through three days of industrial action by the RMT trade union, the British public may have rediscovered what it feels like to take the side of organised workers against a recalcitrant UK government.

Amid soaring bills and prices, and with the Tory government steadfastly refusing to put people’s lives before profits, it is easy to understand why sympathy for striking workers is growing.

Of course it would be easy to overstate this case. Trade unionism never left these shores, and the power of militant unions like the RMT has been built up over years of hard organising work.

Equally, it would be presumptuous in the extreme to argue that one still-ongoing dispute could undo decades of neoliberal policies designed to mute and muzzle trade unions.

Nevertheless, something is taking hold. Polls revealed that striking railway workers have the undisputed support of a majority of people in the UK, should they opt for further industrial action. What’s more, that support has grown with every media performance by the RMT’s general secretary Mick Lynch, whose directness and refusal to pander to the nonsense so typical of broadcast media has proved a winning combination.

This progress is precious, and it is our responsibility as trade unionists and the broader Left to preserve and expand it.

For Greens and environmentalists, the response to the RMT strikes so far has an additional, special resonance.

In June, hundreds of environmental justice campaigners joined RMT members on picket lines, raised money for their national dispute fund, and made their public support for the strikes impossible to ignore. This included many Greens across England and Wales, led by the party’s Trade Union Group. The Greens were the only UK parliamentary party to be unambiguously supportive of the RMT’s actions.

Defending and expanding national and municipal railway networks is centrally important to winning a just transition to a zero-carbon economy. Without massively increasing our capacity to move around using collective and sustainable modes of transport, the work of the environmental justice movement is over before it has begun.

In this process, protecting jobs and improving the pay, conditions and security of workers on our railways is key. There can be no just and fair transition to a zero-carbon world without worker empowerment.

Environmental justice campaigners and Greens should take this insight and apply it to workers’ struggles across all
sectors.

By Jeremy Brecher - Labor Network for Sustainability, July 2022

People are acting at the local and state level to create jobs, reduce greenhouse gas pollution, and equalize transportation by expanding and electrifying public transit, electrifying cars and trucks, and making it safe to walk and bike. It’s a crucial part of building the Green New Deal from Below.

More than a quarter of greenhouse gases [GHGs) emitted in the US come from transportation – more than from electricity or any other source.[1] Pollution from vehicles causes a significant excess in disease and death in poor communities. Lack of transportation helps keep people in poor communities poor.

Proposals for a Green New Deal include many ways to reduce the climate, health, and inequality effects of a GHG-intensive transportation system. “Transit Oriented Development” (TOD), “smart growth,” and other forms of metropolitan planning reduce climate-and-health threatening emissions while providing more equal access to transportation. Switching from private vehicles to public transit reduces GHG emissions by more than half and substantially reduces the pollution that causes asthma and other devastating health effects in poor communities. Changing from fossil fuel to electric vehicles also greatly reduces emissions. Expanded public transit fights poverty and inequality by providing improved access to good jobs. And expansion of transit itself almost always creates a substantial number of good, often union jobs. Every $1 billion invested in public transit creates more than 50,000 jobs.[2]

Plans for a Green New Deal generally include substantial federal resources to help transform our transportation system.[3] The 2021 “bipartisan” Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided $20 billion over the next five years for transit projects. But meanwhile, efforts at the community, local, and state level have already started creating jobs reducing transportation pollution – models of what we have called a Green New Deal from Below.[4]

These Green New Deal from Below programs are often characterized by multiple objectives – for example, protecting the global climate, improving local health, providing jobs, and countering inequality. And they often pursue concrete ways to realize multiple goals, such as “transit-oriented development” that builds housing near transit to simultaneously shift travel from cars to public transit and to expand access to jobs and urban amenities for people in low-income communities.

By Roger Silverman - Facts for Working People, June 28, 2022

A new mood is sweeping Britain. The magnificent TUC march last week marked the re-entry of the working class back to the forefront of British history. A wave of protest has begun, with strikes of railways, airport ground staff, communications workers, nurses, GPs, even barristers…

Britain is ruled by a regime which drunkenly staggers from one hollow theatrical gesture to the next – “getting Brexit done” (at punitive cost), tearing up the Northern Ireland protocol, blocking all legal routes to asylum, deporting migrants to Rwanda, scrapping the Human Rights Act … and now hoping to smash a resurgent trade union resistance and tame the work force.

An all-out class war is on the cards. Legislation is in the pipeline allowing the wholesale use of agency workers – scabs – to break strikes – something that even Thatcher had never dared. Johnson and his faction of the ruling class are consciously plotting an all-out confrontation. A general strike is in the air – a deliberate provocation, just as in 1926.

It’s a fatal miscalculation. Then the ruling class could mobilise a mass strikebreaking force of jolly jingoistic volunteers to wave the flag and keep Britannia moving. Where will they find such an army now? Then they could recruit from a pool of professionals, middle class and youth. Today the “middle class” – previously privileged strata, but now squeezed by the monopolies or driven into opposition – are now among the most militant strikers. And the youth are overwhelmingly in rebellion.

While Johnson & Co. are desperately gambling on whipping up commuter resentment, a clear 58% today – almost two-thirds – support the RMT strike.

The working class is regathering its forces. It may be diminished in industrial concentration, but it is regaining cohesion. Society is becoming not less but MORE proletarianised.

By Paul Atkin and Tahir Latif - Greener Jobs Alliance, June 23, 2022