NEW YORK CITY, October 28 — Hundreds of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 workers are marching across the Brooklyn Bridge today. They are protesting the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) decision to appeal a legally-binding arbitration award granted in August. Some workers also organized slowdowns on October 14, a union-labeled “Day of Outrage.”

Slowdowns and other on-the-job actions are workers’ best responses to these attacks. But the political direction of militancy matters as much as the militancy itself. Reforms under capitalism can be taken away. For lasting progress, workers need to overthrow the bosses and build a communist society where workers hold power and work for need, not profit.

Many transit workers who were fined for the illegal 2005 strike are furious that the MTA is challenging workers for following the arbitration law. Protest signs read, “What part of binding don’t you get?”

The award is based on the cops’ and firefighters’ contracts, whose majority white workforces got better deals than transit. But the city’s racist rulers chose to attack transit’s mainly black and Latino workforce.

The boss’s laws enforce the will of the capitalist ruling class. The Taylor law was a reform “victory” that allowed municipal unions to organize after the 1966 transit strike. But the bosses used it to punish transit workers in the aftermath of the 1980 and 2005 strikes. The bosses’ laws serve their needs, and arbitration is binding only when it favors them.

The August award they’re fighting gave workers an 11% pay raise over three years, and reduced the healthcare contribution to 1.5% from 1.53%. But the 2006 arbitration award, received after the strike, punished workers and so went unchallenged by the bosses.

What Next?

More slowdowns and demonstrations are needed but rank-and-file workers, not union misleaders, or politicians like Bill Thompson, John Liu, and Bill De Blasio, must lead fight-backs. Local 100’s two main factions are trying to direct workers’ anger only at Mayor Bloomberg, for backing the MTA board’s racist decision, but all politicians serve the capitalist class. Following them will lead to similar deals that deceive and attack workers.

Lasting victory means building the Progressive Labor Party to raise the ante of class struggle and organize against capitalism. That’s the only way to ensure that the militant action of October 14 was not just blowing off steam, but serves as a small example of the tremendous class struggle needed to unite for communist victory. J

The MTA — Wall Street’s ATM

The bosses want the city’s workers to resent “greedy” transit workers for their above-average contract. The real greedy ones are MTA bosses and Wall Street banks that made transit generate millions in bank profits.

As Track Equipment Maintainer Kevin Maloney explained in a letter to the civil-service newspaper The Chief (10/9), the real cause of the MTA’s budget woes is “debt service,” not
“out-of-control” labor costs.

Fifty-five percent of the MTA’s funds are paid by riders. To fill the budget gap created by a lack of government funding, the MTA colluded with major banks to borrow money in the form of bonds. Now two billion dollars, nearly 20% of the MTA’s 2009 budget, is going to “debt service” — paying the interest on those bonds. This is the fastest growing part of the MTA’s deficit (Straphangers Campaign).

The liberal Drum Major Institute reported (4/9), “Between 2003 and 2008, debt payments and non-labor expenses grew by 45 percent and 40 percent, respectively, whereas labor costs grew by 16 percent. Debt payments are expected to grow another 51 percent by 2012 — a financially unsustainable trend.”