NYC school bus drivers to strike

[Le Socialiste]

Seeing a lot of the same old "selfish workers putting our children at risk" rhetoric from Bloomberg, the NYT, et al.


New York City school bus drivers are likely to go on strike on Wednesday, as negotiations between their union and city officials have failed to reach an agreement ensuring worker protections as the city puts some school busing contracts up for bid:

The dispute erupted last month when the Education Department announced that it would accept competitive bids for transporting 22,500 special-needs children, who require special services. The contracts would cover 1,100 bus routes, about a sixth of the city’s total.

Most galling for drivers and the union, the new contracts, among other things, would omit longstanding job security provisions requiring new companies to hire veteran bus drivers by order of seniority and at the same pay rate. The protections were put into effect in 1979 after a 13-week walkout. There have been no strikes since.

Officials, including Mr. Walcott and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, have argued that a 2011 ruling by the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, prohibited the city from including the protective provisions in new contracts. The union has said the ruling applied only to contracts for busing prekindergarten students.

City officials, led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, are using rhetoric familiar to those who followed the Chicago teachers' strike; school bus drivers are selfish and don't care about children, as evidenced by the fact that they're fighting for job protections. Bloomberg points to the fact that New York pays more per student for busing than does Los Angeles, but doesn't talk as much about the fact that gas prices, rent and homeownership, and other basic expenses are higher in New York than Los Angeles. New York's school busing costs may or may not be too high, but Bloomberg is hardly a reasonable source of information.

New York City after-school drama teacher Molly Knefel writes that the prospect of replacing longtime drivers for special needs students in particular matters:

"... because how we treat those who care for certain children reflects how we value those children. It creates a system in which workers entrusted to be responsible for a child's safety are utterly replaceable in the name of protecting the bottom line. Bus drivers and matrons greet children in the morning and return them home in the afternoon and students with disabilities require specific knowledge, care and attention. Routine and stability are important to all children, but especially so to certain populations of special-needs children, including those with autism or emotional/behavioral disorders."

Knefel also points out that Bloomberg's policies closing many neighborhood schools and promoting a "choice" system in which students travel far from their homes to attend school has heightened the city's reliance on the bus drivers who are now under attack by the Bloomberg administration.

If the drivers do go on strike, the city has a plan to provide students with MetroCards for public transit access or to reimburse transportation costs for students who don't have access to public transit.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/14/1178938/-New-York-City-school-bus-drivers-plan-to-strike-Wednesday

[ckaihatsu]

If the drivers do go on strike, the city has a plan to provide students with MetroCards for public transit access or to reimburse transportation costs for students who don't have access to public transit.


This part is obviously problematic and needs to be addressed politically.

It even makes me think that this could be the sub-issue that's at the core of the strategic offensive -- who-from-the-public-could-*possibly*-be-against-special-needs-kids-getting-to-school -- ??

[Thelonious]

The coverage by the mainstream media (New York Times, NY Post, etc.) on this strike is horrendous. A neighbor of mine is a striking NYC school bus driver. His kids are affected by the strike in more ways than one and I have invited his family to have their meals with my family until the strike is over. Although we are not in the same union (I am a bridge painter) I have gotten involved as much as I can and fully support these workers in their struggle against Billionaire Bloomberg and his miserable underlings.

http://socialistworker.org/2013/01/23/nyc-strikers-wont-back-down

[Dabrowski]

http://www.internationalist.org/internationalistlogo.png
January 2013






Stop Union-Buster Bloomberg! NLRB: Hands Off!

n


School Bus Drivers’ Strike:
Mobilize NYC Labor to Win! (http://www.internationalist.org/nycschoolbusdriversstrike1301.html)



http://www.internationalist.org/nycschoolbusdriversstrikeb1301.jpg


Picket line at Atlantic Express yard in Ridgewood, Queens on Day One of the strike, January 16. (Internationalist photo)





JANUARY 21 – New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is on a union-busting binge. The tycoon who proclaimed himself the “education mayor” is determined to eliminate any vestige of job security for any and all workers in the city’s school system. First in line on the mayor’s hit list are the 8,100 drivers and matrons of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, who were forced out on strike last week. Next up are the teachers who are being threatened with massive cuts and layoffs in an attempt to blackmail them into accepting management “evaluations” that will put thousands of veteran educators’ jobs at risk.


http://www.internationalist.org/nycschoolbusdriversstrikec1301.jpg
Day Nine of the school bus drivers strike, January 24, at Ridgewood. 12° and going strong, determined to do what it takes. (Internationalist photo)

Union-buster Bloomberg must be stopped, and we have the power to do it. But the school bus drivers today and teachers tomorrow can’t do it on their own. We are facing powerful enemies: the Republican mayor is backed up by the Democrats in the State House and the White House, and the Wall Street fat cats who finance them. The capitalist politicians will use their cops and courts against us: the bus companies are already asking for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to issue a back-to-work order. But if we act together, the working class can turn the bosses’ anti-labor laws into worthless scraps of paper.

To win it is necessary to bring out city workers’ unions, backed by parents, students and supporters in a massive mobilization against union-busting to SHUT THE CITY DOWN. As an Internationalist Group sign at the picket line in Ridgewood warned: “Remember, they’re coming after you next.” The attack on school bus drivers is the same union-busting policy as the assault on the bargaining rights of teachers and public workers by Republican governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin in 2011, and by the Republican legislature and governor of Michigan last December – and it’s taking place in overwhelmingly Democratic New York City, the most unionized city in the country. This is a fight for all labor – an injury to one is an injury to all!

Since the beginning of the year, the billionaire mayor and his schools chancellor flunkey Dennis Walcott have been vituperating against NYC’s school bus drivers, pushing them into a strike over the city’s decision to eliminate “Employee Protection Provisions” (EPPs) from contracts being let out for bids. If this is not blocked by workers’ action it means that thousands of largely black and Latino drivers and matrons of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181 with years of experience in safely transporting school children (many of them special needs students) stand to lose their jobs, pensions and health care as non-union companies hire inexperienced workers at far lower wages.

So with their backs to the wall, on Wednesday, January 16 bus drivers and matrons walked out. On the picket lines that miserable rainy morning strikers expressed grim determination to stick it out and do whatever it takes to prevail. Many repeated over and over that they had no choice: it was strike or lose their livelihoods without a peep of resistance. The city rulers geared up their propaganda machine, spewing out a stream of union-bashing invective. Drivers (who earn about $22 an hour after years on the job) were accused of holding the city and school kids hostage, essentially comparing them to terrorists. The rabid labor haters at the New York Post (17 January) published a screaming headline denouncing the strikers as “Bustards.”


http://www.internationalist.org/nycschoolbusdriversstrikea1301.jpg



School bus drivers’ strike is a fight for all working people. Internationalist Group, Class Struggle Education Workers and CUNY Internationalist Clubs have brought teachers, taxi workers, construction workers, restaurant workers and others to the picket lines day after day. (Internationalist photo)



The next day, Bloomberg and the United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew announced that there was “no deal” over teacher evaluations. The UFT tops were prepared to sell out the members’ job security. They had already accepted the principle of tying teacher evals to student test scores. Not only is this “junk science” – for all their elaborate formulas, the evaluations are utterly arbitrary – this makes educators scapegoats for poverty, racism, and the wrecking job that the privatizers have already done on the public schools. The union tops were finalizing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Department of Education. But Bloomberg shot it down, because it wouldn’t let him “fire bad teachers” at will.

The union bureaucracy’s capitulation was not enough for Bloomberg: he demanded total surrender. Someone should inform this would-be slave master and his minion Walcott that slavery was formally abolished in the U.S. a century and a half ago, and New York schools are not a plantation. Karl Marx referred to the capitalist system of “free labor” as wage slavery, and Boss Bloomberg, the richest man in NYC (estimated worth, $22 billion) doesn’t recognize that “his” wage slaves have any rights that a capitalist must respect. The mayor is out to slash wages of black and Latino bus drivers who make $35,000 a year, when he easily drops that much on his week-end jaunts in his private jet to Bermuda (and bought his third term for a cool $102 million).

But it’s not just Bloomberg that school bus drivers and teachers are up against. For years now the mayor and both Democrats and Republicans have been trying to wreck public schools in the name of “educational reform.” With the backing of hedge fund billionaires, they close hundreds of schools and replace them with publicly funded, privately run non-union “charter schools.” The push for charters and test-linked teacher evals is not about improving education, it’s about union-busting. Whatever their squabbles, the partner parties of U.S. capitalism are united in the drive to privatize public education (a $7 trillion market) and gut union rights. And the drive is spearheaded by Democratic president Barack Obama and NY governor Andrew Cuomo, whom many teachers and union members voted for.

Now they are closing in for the kill, and the school bus drivers are in the crosshairs of the gun control mayor. But by going after teachers and drivers simultaneously, Bloomberg is launching a war on two fronts, which any military strategist will tell you is a risky proposition. This makes it clear that he is targeting the unions, forget all his Madison Avenue flimflam about “Children First.” The children directly affected in the first two contracts up for bidding are special education students, many of whom are vulnerable to bullying. Parents put their trust in the experienced driver, but what does this matter to a mayor whose trademark is bullying? As an Internationalist Group sign asked, “Would You Entrust Your Child to the Lowest Bidder?


http://www.internationalist.org/bloombergkellyguns1210.jpg
King Bloomberg and “Mr. Stop and Frisk,” top cop Kelly. They want gun control for everyone but the police, the enforcers of capitalist “law and order.” (Daily News)


The supremely arrogant Bloomberg doesn’t give a damn about the hoi polloi (the common people). He can be defeated, but that requires a leadership that is prepared to fight, and not by the bosses’ rules. The UFT leadership hides behind New York’s anti-strike Taylor Law as an excuse to cave in. Defying that anti-labor legislation would give Mulgrew & Co. a collective heart attack: their real estate investment in 52 Broadway could be in jeopardy! Now bus drivers may be faced with an NLRB injunction under the “slave labor” Taft-Hartley Act. ATU 1181 picket captains have told us, “we don’t cave for anyone.” Good, because if union leaders are not prepared to defy them, laws in this country ban just about every effective tactic of labor struggle.

So far, the ATU picket lines have been solid, and two-thirds of the school bus routes have been shut down (almost all the others are by non-union companies). But the city is threatening to use “replacement workers” – scabs – as drivers. Teamsters Local 854, which represents some drivers and matrons, is not striking, but says its members will not cross picket lines. Yet in some cases, there are union workers inside the struck facilities. Now is that time to make clear that picket lines mean don’t cross – period! And to back that up by building solid, mass picket lines that no one dares cross. To do that will require the support of hundreds and thousands of unionists and defenders of labor rights. Our rights are on the line!

Unions in the U.S. and elsewhere are hamstrung by a labor officialdom that is beholden to capitalist legality and the capitalist parties. It is outrageous and suicidal that millions of working people are led to vote for ruling-class politicians who then attack the unions and labor rights. Or who go along with racist educational policies, like school closings and admissions to “gifted and talented” programs and elite high schools in NYC. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the New York City Council by 46 to 5: they could stop Bloomberg in his tracks if they wanted to. But they don’t, because they represent the same class interests. We call on labor militants and defenders of the oppressed to build a workers party that fights for a workers government.

The Internationalist Group, the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York and Class Struggle Education Workers have come out to the school bus drivers’ and matrons’ picket lines since Day One of the strike. CSEW member and UFT delegate Marjorie Stamberg has fought to get the teachers union to come out actively in support of the ATU 1181 strike, putting forward a motion for a mass rally at the last delegate assembly, which was not put to a vote even though it had wide support. Our construction workers, restaurant workers, taxi drivers, teachers and students “walk the walk” as well as “talk the talk,” because we know that this is a key battle for all working people. Strikers have welcomed our support, but much more is needed.

We urge all supporters of workers’ rights to show solidarity by coming out regularly join the school bus drivers’ on strike, and to demand a massive mobilization in the streets of black, Latino, Asian and working-class New York to BUST THE UNION-BUSTERS! ■

A forum on the struggle to stop teacher eval union-busting and to mobilize NYC labor to win the school bus drivers’ strike will be held by Class Struggle Education Workers on Friday, January 25, 4:30 p.m., at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street in Manhattan), Room 5414. We urge you to come out and bring your friends and co-workers to discuss the issues posed by this key battle for labor and civil rights.

Class Struggle Education Workers: Bring Out NYC (http://edworkersunite.blogspot.com/2013/01/mobilize-nyc-labor-to-support-school.html)Labor to Support School Bus Drivers Strike (http://edworkersunite.blogspot.com/2013/01/mobilize-nyc-labor-to-support-school.html) (20 January 2013)

Internationalist video: Scenes from the NYC School Bus Drivers Strike, January 2013 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF4qGQoQSOo) (24 January 2013)
CSEW: “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All”


Marjorie Stamberg, a delegate of the United Federation of Teachers and member of Class Struggle Education Workers, spoke out in defense of the school bus drivers on the first morning of the strike, as broadcast by NBC Channel 4 TV in New York:

“Bloomberg is trying to break the school bus drivers union just like he’s trying to bust our union, the UFT. So I have to say, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’ We have to stand together, and these bus drivers and matrons are just the greatest, the way they take care of our kids and keep them safe. And I just want to say to the parents out there, would you like to entrust the care of your child to the lowest bidder? No. We believe that the experience and the knowledge and the training of our wonderful school bus drivers, that we have to preserve that.”

To contact the League for the Fourth International or its sections, send an e-mail to: [email protected]

cF4qGQoQSOo

[ckaihatsu]

---





On Tuesday, private school bus companies contracted to the New York City Department of Education (DOE) sought to break the two-week strike of 8,800 drivers, matrons (children’s attendants), and mechanics by using scabs to cross the picket line. The Staten Island Bus Company sent out 68 school buses from its yard on Meredith Avenue, allegedly driving 59 of the 113 routes that the DOE has contracted to it.

The buses were driven by members of another non-striking union, United Service Workers Local 355, accompanied by other drivers who had been hastily trained to serve as scab matrons. The matrons at the company are members of Amalgamated Transit Union 1181, which represents the 8,800 strikers.




The trade unions seek to divide the working class in the city. Not only in Staten Island, but also at other school bus companies, they are telling their members to cross the drivers’ picket lines.

Striker Jesse Matais at a garage in Astoria, Queens, told the WSWS: “Teamsters 854 and Laborers Local 91 organize school bus drivers also, but they are still working. They are scabs. These unions stood shoulder to shoulder with us at the rally at the beginning of the strike. They said they would stand with us and support us during the strike. They ordered their workers to drive despite our picket lines. What kind of union is that?”




Companies bring in scabs in New York school bus drivers’ strike

http://wsws.org/en/articles/2013/01/30/nybu-j30.html

[Dabrowski]

(The WSWS/SEP quoted above are racist scabs who are spreading bourgeois anti-union propaganda. The union, that is, the members, are straining to unite the bus workers, against resistance from the pro-capitalist class traitor union bureaucracy. Unlike the WSWS scabs, genuine socialists defend the workers' unions in this fight.)

See attached front page from The Internationalist supplement that was distributed at yesterday's labor rally in support of the strike.

From the introduction:

FEBRUARY 7 – Finally! New York City labor leaders have called for a “Union Unity March and Rally” for Sunday, February 10 to support the striking school bus drivers and matrons of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181. It’s about time! With signs on the picket lines, in leaflets, in a motion at the United Federation of Teachers delegate assembly and at a forum with bus drivers, parents and representatives of the ATU and Transport Workers Union Local 100, we in the Internationalist Group and Class Struggle Education Workers have been calling since the strike began three weeks ago for a massive mobilization of city unions to stop Mayor Bloomberg’s union-busting.

Let’s be clear: the billionaire mayor has declared war on any and all unions. The ATU is just first on the list. If he prevails here, next up will be the UFT, then TWU, DC 37 and on down the line. Bloomberg will do anything he can get away with: he’s already cynically using special education students as pawns in his war. He will not “bargain in good faith” no matter how much union tops beseech him. And he has an army of cops at his disposal, as well as courts and a maze of anti-labor laws. To bust Bloomberg’s union-busting we need to bring out a superior force, that of the entire New York working class and its allies, independent of the capitalist politicians.

Sunday’s march across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall is sponsored by the UFT, TWU, 1199, 32BJ, the NYC Central Labor Council and NY state AFL-CIO. With that kind of backing, they could bring out tens of thousands of protesters, enough to really occupy Wall Street and shut down the center of international finance capital. But it’s no accident it’s being called on a weekend instead of a regular workday. The demonstration is clearly intended as a show of sympathy for the strikers rather than deploying labor’s power to actually win the strike.

Moreover, the sponsors include the Democratic Party in various guises (the City Council Progressive Caucus, Working Families Party, NY Communities for Change). Yet the Democrats from Obama and Cuomo on down are in the forefront of the assault on education unions. And as we have pointed out, Democrats have an overwhelming majority on the City Council – they could force the mayor’s hand any number of ways. Instead, the strategy of the union leaderships is to wait out Bloomberg’s final term in hopes that a Democratic successor elected in November would be more “labor-friendly.” In the meantime, they figure, that could mean taking some losses. But it would be the courageous bus strikers, not the bureaucrats, who take the hit.

To win, the school bus strike should be escalated, with an elected strike committee and mass pickets to stop all school buses, including non-striking Teamsters Local 584. We Internationalists have tried to do our bit, joining the lines of the largely immigrant, heavily black and Latino drivers and matrons virtually every day since January 16. “Together we’re strong,” just as strikers have been chanting on the picket lines, and we have the power – “union power.” Now’s the time to use that power to shut the city down!

[Dabrowski]

Listen to the ATU 1181 strike song by Honey Boy and Honey Girl. (http://soundcloud.com/kevin-eitzmann/atu-strike-song)

[Dabrowski]

NYC School Bus Strike: A Test for the Left
[Part of a longer article now on-line at the Internationalist Group website (http://www.internationalist.org/nycschoolbusstrikebetrayed1302.html)]



http://www.internationalist.org/atuinternationalista130210.jpg


The NYC school bus strike was also a test for the left which claims to support the cause of labor. The Internationalist Group, Class Struggle Education Workers and CUNY Internationalist Clubs were active in support of the strikers from the start. We leafleted and went in groups to picket lines almost daily in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. The CSEW held a forum on the strike in late January where striking drivers and affected parents spoke along with representatives of ATU Local 1181, TWU Local 100 and the IG. We distributed thousands of copies of a strike supplement to The Internationalist and marched in a contingent over the Brooklyn Bridge on February 10. Our focus throughout was on mobilizing the power of NYC workers in action, because it was clear from the outset that bus drivers and matrons couldn’t win on their own.

For the most part, however, not only did NYC unions not bring out their hundreds of thousands of members, most socialist groups were also AWOL, nowhere to be seen.

Teachers were the most directly affected by the strike, and the UFT leadership predictably cold-shouldered the strikers, despite repeated efforts by a delegate who is active in the CSEW to get the union to act. But the reformist opposition inside the UFT also did next to nothing. The International Socialist Organization published an account, “A Bitter Setback for NYC School Bus Drivers” (Socialist Worker, 19 February), which was breathtaking in its sheer arrogance. The article stated, “It’s unfortunate that Local 1181 didn’t reach out to the Movement Of Rank-and-file Educators (MORE) within the UFT.” A typical response of would-be bureaucrats: We didn’t do anything because no one asked us to.

But on top of the arrogance we get mendacity, which is a fancy word for lying. The article states: “MORE was eventually able to push the UFT to publicly support the bus workers in the strike’s waning days....” Nonsense. MORE didn’t put the heat on the UFT tops. Some phone calls to UFT officials don’t amount to anything (we did that too, but also went to the executive board and put forward a motion in the delegate assembly calling for a mass rally). Aside from a token presence of a few caucus members who acted honorably, MORE was MIA. Barely a handful of its supporters showed up at the February 10 march, and in the one case where MORE put out a call to join the picket line at the DOE, almost none of them even bothered to show up.

The Progressive Labor Party, to its credit, did show up on the picket lines with some students on several occasions. Naturally, PL did it in their Stalinist fashion, ordering students not to take copies of The Internationalist and making them give them back. Challenge (13 February) also crudely removed “Internationalist Group” from a sign in its front page photo. You can’t teach old Stalnists new tricks. Even as Challenge poses as a “revolutionary communist” newspaper, it has nothing in common with Lenin’s Pravda, which means “truth.” PL’s opportunist twists and turns can be mind-boggling, calling to “actively participate in Obama’s campaign” only to turn around and label his policies “fascism.” They figure no one will remember.

Workers World Party’s intervention in the strike was mainly in supporting Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST), and bringing supporters from the Boston school bus drivers union (USW Local 8751) to a February 2 caravan and rally at Zerega Avenue in the Bronx. A wrap-up article, “Lessons of the NYC school bus strike: Was it worth it?” (Workers World, 7 March) is basically an apology for the ATU leadership, with a pro forma criticism of the Democrats, saying that the whole experience “lays the basis for the next stage of the struggle.” This kind of sugar-coating can only disorient strikers who are seeking to lay the basis for winning next time by understanding what went wrong this time.

On the other hand, the World Socialist Web Site of the Socialist Equality Party positively encourages and feeds on demoralization as a result of the defeat of the strike. The SEP is a dubious outfit of anti-union, reformist political bandits. Dubious, because its main leader is the owner of a non-union (scab) printing plant in Michigan. Anti-union, because they actively try to get workers to leave unions, and side with employers in telling workers not to vote for unions in representation elections. Reformists because they pretend that that the aim of a workers government should be “ending the rule of the financial oligarchy and the reorganization of economic life to meet human needs, not private profit” (WSWS, 18 February). What’s needed is not simply “reorganizing economic life” to sideline the bankers but a socialist revolution.

The SEP writes (WSWS, 23 February) that in this strike, “The union itself was fighting for interests that were separate and hostile to those of ordinary workers.” This is a fundamental falsehood. Like the media and the union leaders themselves, they equate the union with the bureaucracy that sits atop it and feeds off it. Yet the basis of the union is the membership, and the ranks of drivers and matrons were out there on the picket line desperately fighting for their interests. When they chanted “ATU 1181” they were referring to themselves. The union tops reflected different interests and a different agenda not in calling the strike but in calling it off.

The labor bureaucracy, what American socialist Daniel DeLeon called the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class,” is a contradictory layer that seeks to act as a buffer between the bosses and the workers. They support the capitalist parties and imperialist wars. The bureaucrats are an obstacle to workers’ struggle, which must be swept out in order to win; the bosses are the enemy. Failing to understand this crucial difference would spell defeat for workers. The task that faces us is not to get rid of the unions, but to oust the bureaucrats, break with the Democrats and all capitalist parties, and build a class-struggle leadership fighting for a workers party on a program for a genuine workers government that can put an end to the capitalist system of war, racism and poverty and open the road to a socialist society of abundance for all.

[TheRedAnarchist23]

We have transport strikes in Portugal in almost every week, but nobody cares.

[Le Socialiste]

We have transport strikes in Portugal in almost every week, but nobody cares.

Well, large strikes like these aren't quite as commonplace in the U.S. as they might be in Portugal, I'm afraid. In any event, the union's leadership suspended the strike a couple weeks ago...

[LOLseph Stalin]

We have transport strikes in Portugal in almost every week, but nobody cares.

It seems teachers go on strike here at least every few years. I remember there was one strike when I was in high school. I ended up being out of school for about two weeks. I think it was about the usual stuff, teachers being under-paid and such. Of course that is sentiment I can back entirely because teachers are paid so little compared to many other professions.

[Harry Clement Perkins]

Here is a personal perspective on the strike.

We have a special needs child who has been served by these workers for several years. They come to my house every day to pick him up. The matrons and porters are all immigrants and they are exceptionally polite, careful, dedicated and grossly underpaid.

The drivers are conscientious, just as caring and just as underpaid. They will call if they are going to be late and they protect the children. They drive carefully. All seem to like what they do.

When our son was in preschool, we had the non-unionized private sector equivalents. They were comparatively shoddy, largely disinterested and occasionally dangerous. I am sure they were paid even less and had few, if any, benefits.

The strike was difficult for us, requiring much more time and effort to get him to school. But no way in hell was he riding with scabs.

One cannot post on a message board the fate that should befall the Honorable Mayor and the other members of his class.

[Harry Clement Perkins]

I have a personal perspective I can share.

Our son is a special needs child who has been transported to school in his wheelchair by these matrons, porters and drivers for several years They are cheerful, considerate, careful and grossly underpaid at $11-14 per hour. They are immigrants with dignity who like their work. We were happy to see their return, as few appreciate the job they do.

When he was in preschool, we saw what using nonunion equivalent workers meant. They were less well trained and on at least one occasion, dangerous. Undoubtedly, they were even less well paid and had fewer benefits.

It was a struggle to get him to school during the strike, but not because of the workers. They were simply trying to cling to their barely living wage. The upper class and their middle class/professional class allies caused this dispute. And they will never have to pay for it.