WASHINGTON, DC, September 23 - “If we don’t get it, Shut it down!” Over 100 workers demanded that the DC government keep their promises to the Circulator bus operators in ATU Local 689. The DC government is closing the Circulator, and Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends urged our fellow workers to fight back by relying on their power over production. Relying on vicious budget-slashing Mayor Muriel Bowser or the slimy complicit City Council is a losing strategy. Two City Council members—Charles Allen and Brianne Nadeau—had the nerve to speak to the workers offering fantasy promises they’ll never keep when the Circulator is shut down on September 30. They both voted to approve Bowser’s budget that wiped out the $40 million needed to pay for keeping Circulator routes! This racist attack will severely harm the Circulator's mainly Black workers and reduce transit access for D.C's majority Black worker population as well.
A PLP member, a past president of Local 689, roused the crowd when he detailed the politicians’ history of racist lies and callous disregard of workers’ lives. These politicians, as do all politicians, serve the capitalists. Their job is to fool us into believing that some of them serve the working class. It’s all part of their electoral charade. Instead PLP members discussed job actions, strikes, and the need for communist revolution as they distributed CHALLENGE newspapers to protesters.
Mayor supports real estate profiteers as workers suffer
The history of the Circulator dates back to 2001 and broken promises by then-mayor Anthony Williams, the gentrifying real estate developers’ best friend. Williams had advocated for downtown bus routes to be part of the public transit agency (WMATA, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Association) but then contracted the routes out to his class brother First Transit, a private company, later replaced by another contractor, RAPT Dev. The transit workers struggled with low pay and horrid working conditions but were organized by a PLP-led campaign into ATU 1764 in 2005. Still, as a small union local, it had little leverage until it was brought into ATU 689, the larger regional union, three years ago.
PLP has had the back of Circulator drivers in strikes and battles for a fair contract. Comrades active in the ATU helped organize pre-strike rallies and marches for the 2022 strike and have been leading strike efforts in the greater Metro transit system for decades (see CHALLENGE 5/18/22). Now the workers’ demand is that all the laid-off Circulator drivers be rehired by WMATA. The politicians are mouthing promises and offering a totally inadequate $8-9 million to keep some workers on the new routes as they phase out the system.
Transit workers will win
As long as the capitalist bosses run society there is no such thing as a fair contract. We just have to keep fighting. But Metro workers do have the power to shut down the city as they did for six days in 1978 with communist leadership. The Circulator struggle shows, though, however much we win, the bosses stand ready to snatch it back at a moment’s notice, always taking their financial crises out of the hides of workers. The bosses have a contradiction to face: on one hand, they will cut transit jobs to preserve their stolen profits. On the other hand, they need transit workers to bring other workers to and from their jobs to have their labor exploited (though workers need transit for other uses as well). Therefore this is an attack on transit workers and the ridership!
It’s time for transit workers to help build a revolutionary force to end the reign of the bosses and their politicians. Join the tried and tested Progressive Labor Party!
