New York City School Bus Strike

The strike by nearly 9,000 New York City school bus drivers, matrons and mechanics, now its fourth week, has won widespread sympathy among working people, who are glad to see a section of workers finally standing up to the city’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

But the strike is in grave danger, and with it, the jobs, wages and pensions of the workers. The response of the Amalgamated Transit Union, the New York Central Labor Council and the AFL-CIO to the ruling by the National Labor Relations Board upholding the legality of the strike is to redouble their efforts to call it off.

Their only condition is that Mayor Bloomberg gives them the fig leaf of a “cooling-off period” and negotiations to conceal what would be an abject capitulation and betrayal of the workers. The strikers would return to work having obtained no commitment of any kind from the city or the bus companies to maintain the Employee Protection Provisions (EPP) that ensures job security.

The shutdown of the strike would be a disastrous defeat for all city workers. It would only encourage Bloomberg and the financial powers he speaks for to accelerate their attacks on city workers. The main concern of the ATU and other city unions is to keep the school bus strike from developing into a broader movement of the working class that would upset their relations with the city’s political and corporate establishment.

School bus workers can prevail in their struggle only if they break the stranglehold of the unions and fight for the full industrial and political mobilization of the working class in opposition to the political establishment, the two big business parties, and the Wall Street oligarchs they represent.