Tom Wetzel is a member of Workers Solidarity Alliance, posted on http://nefac.net/CaliTransit For the older big cities in North America, public transit is critical to their daily functioning. Organizing among workers and riders on public transit has a strategic importance.
Buses, light rail cars and subway trains attract a diverse working class ridership. Workers in small factories, department stores, hospitals, and restaurants are thrown together on the bus. We encounter retirees going to a doctor's appointment, the unemployed, working class students going to classes at a community college, people of all colors and nationalities, immigrants and native-born. Organizing among transit riders allows the organizers to interact with a broad spectrum of the working class population.
Transportation is how people glue together the various fragments of their lives spent in different locations. If transit workers were to strike, it could bring a large city to a halt. This gives the large workforce of a transit system a strategic position in the local economy.
Public transit subsidies were a major gain achieved by the working class in the '60s/'70s era. This became a component of the "social wage" — benefits working people receive through government programs.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, public transit was a capitalist industry. Even when government agencies took over transit systems, they still operated them like a business. For example, the fares paid by riders on the bus system in Los Angeles paid all of the operating costs as recently as 1970. Today, the proportion of expenses paid by fares varies from a high of 42 percent in New York City, to 26 percent in Los Angeles, and only 12 percent in San Jose.(1)
The present Great Recession has greatly ramped up the fiscal crisis of the state which has been developing in the USA since the late '70s. The result has been increasing attacks on the public transit component of the social wage, through service cuts and fare hikes.
