Stateside: Calloo! Callay! O, frabjous day!

What a day this has been! What a rare mood I’m in! Why, it’s almost like living in the land of the people with spines! This afternoon, Bay Area Rapid Transit train operators announced they’ll be going out on strike at midnight on Monday. Yippee!

I learned of the strike via an email from the Oakland Mayor’s press office as I was travelling home on the bus after work this evening. The reaction of the two passengers sitting near me was this: Commuter 1: They’re not running the trains? There’ll be no scab labor? [Me: No. There’ll be no trains running.] Good! Commuter 2: The buses will be crowded.

Yes, indeedy, they will, they will. And the surface streets will be jammed with traffic trying to get onto the equally jammed freeways. But it’s a small price to pay for someone actually standing up for themselves against the blundering stupidity of the BART board, whose popularity as an elected body is equal if not less than that of the California legislature and the Governor combined. (And both of those are in negative territory.)

Of course, there are those who say the train operators get paid way more than anyone else does and they’re just being greedy. I have to admit that I’ve nodded my head in agreement with that opinion before today, but now that the Amalgamated Transit Union is standing up for itself, I’m with the ATU 100 percent.

I’d have been disappointed if they’d backed down, especially because they hold two trump cards: 1) it is nearly the end of the summer school holidays, and 2) in just a couple of weeks—at Labor Weekend—the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco will be shut down for five days while an engineering feat of much magnificence will take place as part of building its new eastern span. BART was going to be running trains around the clock.

Besides, this is not 1997, which is when the last BART strike took place, so this will be a real-world test of all the claims that people have been making about the Internet “revolution.” People can work from home. They can go online at 511.org and join a carpool. They can get live traffic conditions on their cellphone in their car, and adjust their route accordingly.

Oh, God! Who am I kidding? The Internet isn’t THAT magic. It’ll be gridlock. The buses I take to work will be crowded and I’ll have to leave an hour earlier to get there. But… at least it’s summer so it will still be light at both ends of the day.

The people I feel sorry for are the workers who usually take BART in the very early hours of the morning when there are no buses running. And I’m sorry for the people stuck in traffic. Except for those people stuck in traffic who drive every day to work, just to park their car and then drive home again at the end of the day. If they’d just taken public transit in the first place, BART wouldn’t be in the financial hole it’s in.

The BART board just might be surprised at how much support the strike has despite the inconvenience it is going to cause. While the board tries to convince us that the ATU is being selfish and hurting the local economy and not facing up to the realities of the financial meltdown, there are thousands of us workers out here who are saying it’s about time somebody stood up for themselves in the face of forced pay cuts, cuts in benefits, and impending job losses. Not to mention all the newly unemployed who got the short end of the stick thanks to the incompetence of people in government agencies--federal, state, and local—who are paid much larger sums of money out of our taxes than the train operators are.

ATU, you’ve made my day!

--Kia kaha (stand strong)—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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