Transit Union Head: Future Depends on Organizing Riders 

By Josh Eidelson

Monday Jul 9, 2012 

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/13502/atu_larry_hanley_amalgamated_transit_union_organizing_bus_riders_drivers_wi/

A nightshift bus driver checks his bus before his
route. A year and a half ago, the Amalgamated Transit
Union began shifting resources into organizing
coalitions with transit riders to support public
transit.   (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Following labor’s loss in Wisconsin’s recall, the
leader of the nation's largest transit union says
building coalitions with riders, not organizing more
drivers, is the top priority for his union’s future. 
Interviewed at last month’s Netroots Nation conference,
Amalgamated Transit Union President Larry Hanley said
that Wisconsinites’ willingness to keep their
union-busting governor in office demonstrates the
urgent need to change the relationship between public
workers and the American public.  “No matter how much
money we put into electoral politics,” said Hanley, “if
we can’t change the attitudes of people…we’ll lose. 
It’s just a matter of when and how hard.”

“I think Wisconsin shows,” says Hanley, “that at this
moment in time, the right wing and the billionaires who
support them have been successful in convincing a
significant minority of working people that their
interests are tied to falling wages in the public
sector.”  Hanley adds that Walker’s re-election
demonstrates politicians’ success in framing unions as
a “special interest,” and “saying there are working
people, and then there’s organized labor.”  Hanley
noted he was particularly surprised by polls showing a
substantial minority of union households backing
Walker.  “We have to – starting with our own members –
make sure that people understand that we’re all in this
together, we’re not all in this alone…it’s going to be
a long process.”

ATU represents over 190,000 workers in the US and
Canada.  The majority are public workers, although the
majority of ATU’s contracts are with private companies
like Greyhound.  A year and a half ago, ATU began
shifting resources into organizing coalitions with
transit riders to support public transit.  With the
policy resource center Good Jobs First, ATU has held
two rider organizing “boot camps” for activists and
union leaders from 95 cities.  Last month, those
efforts entered a new phase with the launch of
Americans for Transit, a new national organization
backed by ATU and GJF.  Hanley chairs Americans for
Transit’s Board; GJF Executive Director Greg LeRoy is
its secretary-treasurer.  They tapped Andrew Austin,
the former field director of Washington State’s
Transportation Choices Coalition, as the organization’s
founding executive director.

Austin highlights his group’s success in getting a King
County, WA Republican councilmember to back a tax
increase in order to stave off a 20% service cut.  He
says aggressive turnout efforts, including leafleting
on buses, paid off when riders formed a line “almost a
mile out the door” to attend the first hearing on the
issue. “The story in all the major media switched from
about King County Council wants to raise your $20 car
tabs to pissed-off bus riders angry about losing
service…the story never went back.”

While some major cities have well-established permanent
riders’ organizations, Austin says in “a lot of places
there’s just no sustained effort.”  Unlike bike riders,
Austin says that for most bus riders, “it’s just what
they do…they don’t identify themselves as that, so
that’s one of the challenges.”  Austin adds that, “The
transit union can’t succeed if there’s not a grassroots
movement for transit and transit riders and transit
advocates across the country...Most drivers are working
class or poor people, so I think there’s a natural
solidarity there.”  But he says absent organizing,
anecdotes about outrageous union benefits can still get
traction.

The context is austerity.  ATU and GJF note that in the
recession, ridership has reached its highest level in
decades, just as 85% of transit agencies have raised
fares, cut service, or borrowed money.  Hanley sees a
dual threat: proposals to balance budgets by slashing
service, and calls to cut workers’ benefits so service
can be saved.  Hanley says local politicians “create a
fiction in which only the people who depend upon the
service and the people who depend upon the service for
jobs are the players, and they take out all the other
taxpayers from the discussion.”  As Mike Elk reported,
among the budget alternatives pushed by ATU and its
allies is a call for banks to renegotiate interest rate
swaps deals signed with cities early in the financial
crisis.

Hanley charges that in order to "cleave the working
class,"  Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel “lied” about the
drivers’ union contract, portraying the ten minutes
provided for drivers to inspect their vehicles at the
beginning of their shifts as an indulgent paid “coffee
break.”  He says Emanuel’s willingness to mislead the
public shows that the “very powerful” see the
importance of allying themselves with transit riders,
and his union has to do the same.

Hanley says that with “about 100 riders for every
member” of ATU, the union needs “to get, first of all,
our members talking to the riders in a more political
sense than they have been.  I mean everyone says good
morning and good night, but there’s not much more going
on in most places.”

If the coalition effort is successful, says Hanley,
raising transit fares will eventually become
politically dangerous in the same way that raising
taxes is today.  Attempts to cut service will be met by
“an organized lobby screaming and saying we need better
transit. Don’t build the bridge to nowhere—build the
bus to someplace.”  He adds, “we want our pastors to
see us as allies, and we know when that happens, then
people like Rahm can’t come in and say, ‘Oh, they make
too much money.’”

ATU’s new focus comes with a cost: a shift of resources
away from organizing more drivers—public sector or
private—into the union.  While ATU has continued to do
some new worker organizing, Hanley says, “I could go
out and organize 100,000 people and spend a fortune
trying to get them contracts, but what am I doing to
change the overall picture by doing that?  Not
enough…we’re on a trajectory that has to be turned
around too quickly.”

Hanley argues that the US labor movement has been too
slow in responding to intensifying threats, and too
quick to offer concessions: “My view is you’re feeding
jelly beans to the bear, because at some point, you’re
going to say no, I’m not going to feed the bear
anymore—I ran out of jelly beans.  And then you’re
going to have a fight.  So the question is when do you
have the fight?” That said, notes Hanley, “sometimes
you do make concessions, you have to.”

Hanley says conservatives have been successful at
isolating public workers by “promoting jealousy over
unity” and exploiting “racial messages…just like Ronald
Reagan, ‘welfare queens.’”  The subtext, says Hanley,
is “those are benefits for other people, not for us.” 
But he draws hope from recent local referenda in which
voters have chosen to raise their taxes in order to
fund transit—including in Wisconsin.

Hanley contrasts the current atmosphere of resentment
with the attitudes he saw on September 11, 2011: “It
was like the first time in my whole career where I
thought that average people really understood the value
of government services, and the fact that when the bell
rings, our guys are the ones that go in. And the idea
that a few years later, there’s this sweeping attack,
saying the people who did that aren’t entitled to
pensions, aren’t entitled to healthcare, make too much
money, it’s just amazing to me.  It’s [an] amazing
turnaround in the public framing of how our society
works.”

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