BUS UNION PUTS BRAKES ON IMPROVED SERVICE; CONTRACT WITH MTA FAILS TO FURTHER DRIVE FOR 1ST-CLASS L.A. TRANSPORTATION.

Byline: Kikanza Ramsey and Ted Robertson

IN the past four years, we have spent thousands of hours organizing bus riders to fight for their right to have a seat on a bus that comes on time with affordable fares, and explaining to them that the MTA board, not the bus driver, is the correct outlet for their horrifying experience.

But after three years of trying to organize transit workers and their union representatives into a labor-community movement for a first-class bus system, it is getting harder and harder to offer support to the drivers' United Transportation Union, when it does not seem to see the strategic value in uniting with the bus riders in a struggle against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's attempts to defund the bus system.

With its 29 cent yearly wage increase for veteran drivers and new benefits for part-timers, the ratification of the UTU-MTA contract may seem to have stopped the bleeding. But other provisions only help the MTA sustain massive long-term hemorrhaging in the bus system.

Reducing subsidies on bus lines that already are underfunded; sanctioning further privatization for new lines; and a low wage-no benefits tier for incoming drivers are detrimental for passengers and workers alike. All new regular full-time drivers will be hired at between $10 and $11 an hour (almost half the salary of veteran drivers).

A self-privatization MTA-UTU joint venture called the Business Development Operating Facility allows the MTA to hire workers on existing lines at $10 an hour and with fewer benefits. Any new lines are subject to bids by either this operating facility or private companies, like ATE, Laidlaw or Ryder, who are now responsible for the inferior service on some routes.

This is an attempt to make the MTA more competitive with private companies, but it simply leaves the passengers and workers with the same devastating effects of privatization; lets the MTA off the hook; and gets the union more membership dues.

Maybe this is what the drivers union felt it had to settle for in the face of a company willing to slice service and close union divisions even when there is no strike. But, please, don't say that reduced wages and benefits for incoming workers and more privatization is good for passengers because we will now get more service. We never asked for workers to accept lower wages so we could get more buses, and we have always been adamantly against privatization.

We don't believe those are the only choices. And we offered the drivers another choice - to fight for redistribution of public transportation money away from the rail system so we could have both new clean-fuel buses and drivers with good salaries.

The drivers' settlement fits squarely into the MTA's plan to continue building a two-tiered multibillion-dollar rail system serving 26,000 daily riders at the expense of 350,000 daily bus riders.

The contract accepts the MTA's premise that the only way to run the bus system and put more buses on the street is on the cheap, while moving full steam ahead to keep the rail program on track.

In comparison to the paltry $20 million that the MTA claims this contract will save them, the agency is begging, borrowing and stealing almost half a billion dollars this year from federal, state and local public tax money to forge ahead with rail projects.

This blatant corporate greed is bringing the agency to the brink of destruction and is the basis for charges of civil rights violations brought forth by the Los Angeles-based Labor/Community Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union. At $300 million per mile, one mile of the Red Line will pay for 1,000 compressed natural gas buses and a moratorium on the $1.4 billion Pasadena Blue Line will assure that high-paying union jobs with good benefits are a non-negotiable cost of operating a first-class bus system.

The Labor/Community Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union's federal Civil Rights Consent Decree, signed by the MTA in October of 1996, offers drivers and other transit workers the chance to help implement a contract that has the potential to force the MTA to spend upward of a billion dollars on the bus system.

The decree mandates the MTA to: maintain the fare reduction for two years; purchase 102 new buses (above those already scheduled for replacement); purchase new buses to reduce overcrowding (to a level of no more than eight people without a seat in five years - with the first deadline Dec. 31, where no more than 14 people can be without a seat); and add new routes using a minimum of 50 new buses in communities throughout L.A. County.

We are calling for an immediate purchase of 902 new compressed-natural-gas buses in the fleet (a nearly 60 percent increase). Voting down one motion after another to purchase new buses, claiming that clean-fuel, compressed-natural-gas buses are not cost-effective, and ushering in a contract for workers that claims it will pay for more buses by turning the MTA into a low-wage employer are all ways that the the MTA is undermining the court's intention to begin remedying years of unequal subsidies suffered by bus riders.

While we are fed up at the moment, we encourage the rumblings of a few rank-and-file drivers' organizing efforts for union democracy, improved conditions on the bus, and an end to privatization.

We are looking forward to the day when Los Angeles bus drivers will get up enough courage, working-class consciousness, and organizing skills to build a movement that models the New York-based Hell on Wheels, or Mexico City's SUTAUR 100 - transit worker movements that are organizing with passengers to resist privatization and demand substantial improvements of their bus systems.

Until that time, bus riders will have to continue leading the fight for riders and drivers.