Oct 18 BART Strike Resumes

With the rising of the gorgeous October full moon, labor stands up once again at our major Bay Area train system, BART, at 12:01 A.M. October 18, 2013. The entire workingclass rises in unison, hand in hand, with the BART workers for your fight is our fight, not just for wages, hours and working conditions, but also for socialized medicine, abolition of the death penalty and the rest of the anti-labor prison punishment system, and an end to the private profit system that benefits from all the blood for oil wars that are destroying humanity and Planet Earth. Below is the latest statement from BART workers from a website that has a constant Twitter update, http://www.keepbartrunning.com/

Let us remember that most of the elected BART officials are Democrats. They have hired a union-buster for hundreds of thousands of dollars at taxpayer expense as their chief negotiator. They pay a general manager over $300,000 a year to be anti-labor. Let us also remember that it takes $120,000 a year or $60 per hour to buy a house and if you cannot afford a house, you cannot afford a family so the wages BART workers demand are never high enough for the San Francisco Bay Area. The fact that every single labor dispute involves healthcare coverage and who should pay what is a ringing indictment of the bankrupt society in which we live as the rest of the industrialized world has socialized medicine paid for with their tax dollars, including all of Europe, Israel, Cuba, Canada, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The life and death safety issues and the high rate of injuries to BART workers alone justify a strike, much less all other problems BART workers face.

So, now, here is the latest press release from
http://www.keepbartrunning.com/workers_to_resume_unfair_labor_practice_strike_at_bart
Oakland, CA – After more than 28 hours of marathon negotiations, Roxanne Sanchez, president of the SEIU 1021, released the following statement:

“Over the last several nights, all of us—workers, elected officials, the federal mediators, the media and, most importantly, our riders—have been played by a management team simply unwilling to settle the contract.

At this point, we have come to an overall understanding on economics. However, in the end, BART management is withholding settlement because they want to fundamentally and significantly change the conditions under which we work.

Time and time again, after we made a concession, management would move the goal posts, including now—after reaching a general agreement on economics—demanding changes in work place rules that have historically protected workers from issues like abuse of power, unfair treatment and sexual harassment.

Given how close we are to settlement, we are willing to take the unprecedented step of agreeing to voluntary binding interest arbitration on the specific outstanding issues of workday and workweek scheduling and wage schedules for utility workers and system service workers.

At midnight tonight, unless there were something to change, workers will be forced out on strike.”