Possible BART worker strike looming

[HoboHomesteader]

BART is a regional light rail system for the San Francisco Bay area, transporting all of the working class folx and people of color from the periphery into san francisco, to work in a city they can no longer afford to live in.

The BART workers union is currently in negotiations with management and have post poned any possible strike until after the weekend.

If this goes down it will be interesting to see what happens. there is A LOT of history with local radicals and the BART system.

[HoboHomesteader]

the negotiations btwn workers and management continues, conceivably there could a strike anyday, but everyday they announce that there will not be a strike tomorrow. I have heard talk about possible solidarity strikes with AC transit workers, not sure the muni is involved...

[Sea]

SAN FRANCISCO — Commuters here spent much of Friday scrambling for buses, ferries and car pools after transit workers for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system walked off the job for the second time in three months.
Vast traffic jams clogged the Bay Bridge on Friday evening, and long lines of weary homeward-bound passengers waited at San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal. “I’m pretty livid,” said Teirra Chatman, 21, a home-care worker who was two hours into a four-hour commute from her job in South San Francisco to her home in the East Bay suburb of Antioch. “They’re already paid enough,” she said about the transit workers.
Jennifer Munoz, 26, a designer, was more sympathetic. “I think it’s important for workers’ rights,” she said. “It’s inconvenient for the masses. I hope it’s for a greater good.”
The transit system, known as BART, is the area’s main commuter railroad, carrying 400,000 passengers daily between the East Bay and San Francisco.
For the last week — since a 60-day cooling off period ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown ended on Oct. 10 — negotiators for BART and the transit workers’ two largest unions had been working long hours trying to resolve their differences. But late Thursday afternoon, union leaders and BART managers, their frustration evident, emerged bleary-eyed from 28 straight hours of negotiation to say they had failed to reach a deal. George H. Cohen, head of the federal mediation service who flew in on Monday, said there was nothing more that mediators could do.
“I’m surprised and sorry to be standing here tonight,” Pete Castelli, executive director of the Service Employees International Union 1021, said Thursday evening. “In all my years in the labor movement, I’ve never seen an employer drive negotiations that were this close to a deal into a strike.”
The service employees’ union and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 together represent 2,400 train operators, station agents, mechanics, clerical workers and other employees of the transit system. Mr. Castelli and other union representatives said the unions had compromised on pensions and health care and were close to an agreement on wages. But the talks broke down, they said, over how to handle disputes over work rules, including shift lengths and overtime. An offer to refer those issues to an arbitrator whose decision would be binding was turned down by management, the union leaders said.
On Friday, BART negotiators said that they were open to arbitration, but that it would have to involve the entire contract package and not just the work rules — something the union has not agreed to. BART managers have said they want flexibility in changing procedures without having to get permission from the unions for each change.
Tom Radulovich, the president of BART’s board of directors, said on Thursday that its negotiating team was “very, very surprised” when talks broke down. “There is no need for them to strike,” he said.
Early Friday evening, union leaders called a news conference to present a plan they said could end the strike in hours. But a BART spokesman said the union’s proposal was “essentially a repeat of what was given at the bargaining table before the union leaders walked away” and called a strike.
About a dozen rank-and-file BART employees walked the West Oakland BART station’s perimeter on Friday morning, holding signs reading “On Strike: Workers and Riders Deserve Better.” But many commuters expressed anger and confusion.
“I thought things were going well, and then suddenly boom, we have another strike,” said Aaliyah Yusuf, 29, who usually rides BART from Oakland to her job as an administrative assistant at Adobe in San Francisco.
Malia Wollan contributed reporting from Oakland, Calif., and Carol Pogash from San Francisco.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 18, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the union for which Pete Castelli serves as executive director. It is Service Employees International Union 1021, not 1025.

They're on strike now. http://uboachan.net/yn/src/1360549093445.gifhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/us/bart-labor-dispute-san-francisco-commute.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

[HoboHomesteader]

Nobody can get to work in a timely manner!!!!!

[HoboHomesteader]

holy shit, earlier today a manager acting as scab labor killed two engineers on a track when he was moving a train. So whilst on strike, management kills workers due to incompetence. So this is looking really serious, talk of picket blockades of AC transit busses going across the bay into san francisco, a port blockage planned for monday by the independent truckers union.

at the very least the strike will be prolonged because of this.

[HoboHomesteader]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>New audio: Automated BART dispatch erroneously said no personnel on track; 2 fatally struck 50 minutes later - <a href="https://t.co/EuQmzekWtK">https://t.co/EuQmzekWtK</a></p>&mdash; Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) <a href="https://twitter.com/MatthewKeysLive/statuses/391710130560958465">October 19, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

[HoboHomesteader]

huffingtonpost . com /2013/10/19/bart-workers-killed_n_4129718.html?utm_hp_ref=tw


WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- WALNUT CREEK, Calif. (AP) — Police from the San Francisco Bay Area's rapid transit system say two employees performing maintenance have been struck and killed by a train.
Saturday afternoon's accident on a track in Walnut Creek comes amid a strike by Bay Area Rapid Transit workers that has shut the system down. But some trains were being moved by managers.
It was unclear how the 1:45 p.m. accident occurred. BART Deputy Police Chief Ben Fairow confirmed the deaths to the Contra Costa Times . The newspaper said there are two tarps on the tracks about 150 yards apart.
BART officials said in a statement that they would release more information later Saturday.
BART management and union officials have been at an impasse over contract negotiations since Thursday.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Yeah, Bart management also seems to have attempted to cover it up by claiming that it was being run by computer. I wouldn't be surprised if they were illegally training people rather than the train running for maintainence reasons as they claim.

The ironic-sick part of this is how the local media (the propaganda has been thick) has been smugly complaining that the union's claims about safety issues are bullshit pretext for worker greed and how all the operators should be fired and the system automated.

Scabs kill. I hope if anything positive can come from this, public opinion will swing the other way and the union-busting bravado in the media will defensively ratchet down and or fall on deaf ears.

[HoboHomesteader]

I listened to the audio, which i attempted to embed above but i guess the forum doesn't support it. u can hear the automated voice claim tracks are clear.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I listened to the audio, which i attempted to embed above but i guess the forum doesn't support it. u can hear the automated voice claim tracks are clear.Really? The audio I heard had the dispatcher saying the speed and then suddenly yelling "Slow, slow, STOP STOP!". It seems like they wouldn't be telling them to slow if it was an automated run, but I'm not sure how that works and different articles I've read have been saying some silightly different things.

EDIT: here's the link with the audio and I'll post the transcript below:

http://walnutcreek.patch.com/groups/police-and-fire/p/hear-an-audio-recording-of-fatal-bart-accident



:06 Central dispatch woman's voice: ...We're going into the track next to the blockhead. We'll slow you when we get close to couple up to a car...
:17 Central dispatch woman's voice: Keep coming, keep coming, keep coming, 50 feet, keep coming, keep coming, keep coming, keep coming, keep coming, 25 feet, keep coming, keep coming, 15 feet, keep coming, keep coming, keep coming (repeats multiple times) 10 feet, keep coming..
:40 Central dispatch woman's voice: Slow down, slow down, slow down. Stop, stop. Stop! (Emphatically.)

:49 Train operator's voice (calmly): I'll stop.
:51 Central dispatch man's voice: Train 963 I have routing at C53 C54 cancelled. Let me know when you're ready to proceed ahead after your break.
:59: Unintelligible yell. Metallic screeching.
1:03 Train operator man's voice (calmly): BART emergency, BART emergency. Central Train 963, we just struck some individuals at approximately 16 decimal two on the C1 track.
1:35 Train operator man's voice: Central be advised it may be BART employees.


Also if people want a small taste of some of the propaganda that's been spewed out here, then take a look at this piece from the SF Chron which green-washes union-busting:

http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/diaz/article/In-transit-first-Bay-Area-strikes-shouldn-t-be-4907422.php



Yet all of these hard-fought, well-intentioned efforts become futile if BART or AC Transit (http://www.sfgate.com/?controllerName=search&action=search&channel=opinion%2Fdiaz&search=1&inlineLink=1&query=%22AC+Transit%22) - the pillars of a promise of a transit-first policy - become disabled by natural or human forces.

Suddenly, the very people who bought into this sustainable vision are left with no way to get from here to there.

They deserve better.

They deserve assurances from the progressive politicians who are telling them they don't really need a car that policymakers will do everything within their power to ensure the trains and buses will run as promised.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Well now there's been an off the record report that the Bart system was training managers to act as scabs.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Insider-BART-training-for-strike-when-2-killed-4912280.php

I read the comments so you don't have to: Yuppie idiots still blame the union and are trying to say it's their fault that management (wants to break the union and) ran trains during the strike.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Looks like the negotiation has led to an agreement today. I'm guessing that the BART system realized it wouldn't be able to go ahead with a prolonged strike with managers running trains after they ended up killing people. The media's been portraying the negotiations as if the union was refusing to negotiate when it's been the other way around and management felt they could break the back of the union because they'd been so sucessful in their PR. I wish the union negotiators had been as hard-assed as the media made them out to be, but it doesn't seem that they were from the outside... mostly they look like they may have been able to negate attacks by management, not win much extra (whereas the media makes it seem like a big cash windfall for workers).

But a win on this could also help some of the other local struggles coming up. I'm not sure at all if the 2 people killed by the train had any effect on public sentiment. In 40 years only 5 other workers have been killed on BART so having 2 killed on the second day of the system trying to use managers to do that job is pretty damning and if they had to die, I wish it would make a bigger impact in discrediting the union-busting propaganda that's been so thick out here from Internet Tycoons to Democratic politicians to the media.

Anecdotally while most of the discussions online and in social media have parroted the anti-union arguments (inflating average saleries, mocking and diminishing the workers... right wingers were calling the workers "G.E.D.s" and "drop-outs" along with the usual "Thugs" and "Mooches") today I saw on Facebook that NPR (I didn't even know I had "liked" their page because I hate NPR) posted an anti-union news item and there was a huge backlash. It could be the demographic and maybe I underestimate pro-union sentiment among the NPR liberal crowd, but it could also be that there was a shift in pro-union sentiment feeling more justified after workers said that manager-run trians was a disaster waiting to happen... and then it happened.

The funniest thing was in all the pro-union backlash to the comment, one of the few "fire them all" people was a self-proclaimed libertarian... a pretty inconsistant libertrarian if they listen to NPR. Then again, NPR is more Neoliberal Public Raido, than actual Public Radio (not to mention, obviously pretty awful ideologically).

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Yeah, Bart management also seems to have attempted to cover it up by claiming that it was being run by computer. I wouldn't be surprised if they were illegally training people rather than the train running for maintainence reasons as they claim.

The ironic-sick part of this is how the local media (the propaganda has been thick) has been smugly complaining that the union's claims about safety issues are bullshit pretext for worker greed and how all the operators should be fired and the system automated.

Scabs kill. I hope if anything positive can come from this, public opinion will swing the other way and the union-busting bravado in the media will defensively ratchet down and or fall on deaf ears.

90% of the US media is owned by 5 Corporations. It's quite clear that even heavily dissatisfied workers have virtually no chance of building a "class consciousness" if our class does not manage to build its own mass organs of media.

[Jimmie Higgins]

90% of the US media is owned by 5 Corporations. It's quite clear that even heavily dissatisfied workers have virtually no chance of building a "class consciousness" if our class does not manage to build its own mass organs of media.

I don't expect the media to be on our side though how they report on things can varry due to outside pressures... and in this case there was more than just the normal level of union-bashing imo. It was a relativly agressive (or at least very confident) shot across the bow of the whole Bay Area working class: we will crush this high-profile point of production strike so "don't you dare try anthing yourselves either because we will replace you and the public will support us". I mean the founder of Twitter was joking about sicking dogs on the workers (while laughing like Mr. Burns most likely).

My point in that argument was less about media union-bashing in general, but in the ways that they specifically had anti-worker and anti-union talking points and repeated arguments that were 100% refuted in the most horrible way.

The strike itself wasn't a resounding victory for workers, it looks like the union negotiated a stale-mate basically. There are still concessions and the gains are mainly just make up for deficits made by concessions elsewhere or in the last few years by the union. But it wasn't a victory for the local eliete either and because of the horrible accident, at least among people who are already somewhat pro-worker, the local media and elietes have exposed their ugly face a little and I hope folks feel less defensive and more justified about standing up for better conditions in the upcoming labor fights.

[HoboHomesteader]

Really? The audio I heard had the dispatcher saying the speed and then suddenly yelling "Slow, slow, STOP STOP!"

from embed that doesn't work above

soundcloud . com/producermatthew/automated-bart-announcement

[HoboHomesteader]

a bart train caught fire in Oneida (?) yesterday...:glare: