Boston bus drivers attack wage freeze and layoff demands

In his “State of the City” address on Jan. 13, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino declared that solving the city’s economic crisis, including a projected $140 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2010, requires that municipal workers accept a wage freeze to save 900 service workers from termination. He warned of inevitable layoffs and massive cuts to vital services, even if the city’s 17,000 union workers were to agree to hand their meager raises back to city coffers.

USW Local 8751 picket captains’ meeting, June 30, 2008. WW photo: Frank Neisser

The city chief executive’s threat was aimed at a much broader target than the highest paid middle managers at city hall. Its target stretched beyond the 3,000 teachers, the city’s biggest bargaining unit; firefighters and custodians, who’ve been without a contract for years; clerical and health workers; parks, transportation, streets and waste workers; librarians and community center staffers; and school bus monitors who, paid a flat rate for each bus trip, make less than the legal minimum wage. All of these have taken concessions in recent years as local columnists rail against their “no longer affordable” benefits.

Cheered on by the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, mouthpiece of Boston’s businesses, Menino also directed his frigid message at some of the most militant representatives of private-sector workers in the city.

Minutes after what the Boston Globe described as scattered applause from the mayor’s “grim faced supporters,” School Superintendent Caron Johnson faxed the mayor’s threat to Frantz Mendes, president of the 800-strong Boston School Bus Drivers’ union, United Steel Workers Local 8751.

Four months earlier the drivers had secured a three-year contract that wrested significant gains from British-owned First Student, Inc., the biggest private-sector school and interstate bus company in the United States. Months of picketing, rallies, community organizing and strike preparation had enabled the local to turn back the national concessionary tide, winning long-term disability benefits; enhanced vision, retirement, wage and bonus agreements; groundbreaking language to curtail global positioning system abuse; as well as no concessions, no reduction in forces and 10 new jobs for the union’s largely Haitian, Cape Verdean and African-American family.

The mayor’s attack on Local 8751— whose members provide the means for safe, quality, desegregated education, fulfilling a 1974 federal court victory of the city’s Black and Latin@ communities—provides a welcome smokescreen for First Student, to which he had handed a $6 million dollar signing bonus in 2008 based on the corporation’s monopoly domination of the market.

Local 8751’s leadership immediately kicked into battle mode, reaching out to the union’s political allies like City Councilor Chuck Turner, the Greater Boston Labor Council and the Steel Workers national union. The local called for reconstituting the powerful city-wide coalition that took on the city and the Democratic National Convention to win contracts for nearly all 41 city unions and the school bus drivers in 2004.

On Jan. 15, Local 8751 President Frantz Mendes and stewards from all four work yards joined 41 other unions in Mayor Menino’s Eagle Room, where his finance director and labor relations head presented a flim-flam of slides and pie charts laying out their position that the workers and community services must be cut to save the city’s treasury. The mayor promised fewer layoffs to those who cooperate and the brunt of terminations to those who didn’t.

Local 8751 representatives took the floor to charge Menino with illegal interference in private collective bargaining, an unfair labor practice defined by the Wagner Act of 1935. They elicited the only ovation of the meeting, demanding a freeze on debt payments to the banks—by far the lion’s share of the budget shortfall. They offered the clear alternative of going after the real estate developers, as well as the universities and hospitals—which report millions of dollars in profits, collectively own more than half of the city’s land and devour millions in city services, but pay little to nothing in taxes as “nonprofit organizations.”

They called on those assembled to meet to plan a fight back in the spirit of the longtime labor movement slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all!”

When the mayor abruptly closed the meeting, Local 8751 stewards distributed a notice addressed to the mayor, First Student, the press, and all unionists wanting to join in a fight back. Entitled “Wage freeze & layoffs—we say ‘No way!’ Make the bankers and corporations pay!” the statement, available at www.bostonschoolbusunion.org, reads in part:

“Tuesday night’s ‘State of the City’ speech by Mayor Menino was a dream come true for ... the bankers and corporate representatives who came ... to cheer their mayor on. Not once did Menino mention the mortgage swindlers, the debt predators, the stocks, bonds and hedge fund schemers, the billion dollar golden parachutes and tax freeloaders whose unbridled profiteering has caused the current unprecedented economic crisis.

“Instead, the mayor has outrageously called on union leaders to help him bust their own members’ hard-earned labor agreements, whose meager wages and disappearing benefits today cause Boston’s working women and men to choose between trying to stop criminal foreclosures and evictions, staving off the brutal cold, paying for skyrocketing health insurance, or properly feeding their families.”

The statement concluded: “On the 80th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth, it is time to rekindle the flame of the movement for economic justice—uniting labor and the communities in the fight to fund his historic dream! The entire labor movement and all who support justice must stand in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in city unions.”

Gillis is vice-president of USW Local 8751.