Greyhound 'Provoked' Strike To Break The Union
The_American people have not been told the truth about the Greyhound drivers' strike. This strike, which began March 2, is not a saga of greedy workers on the rampage, as media coverage might suggest, but of a billion- dollar corporation taking dead aim at 9,375 union members who make less than $25,000 a year and have received zero pay raises since 1983.
Greyhound has come to its workforce twice in two years, hat in hand, pleading poor - claiming losses of $17.5 million in 1988 and $2.7 million in 1987. Amalgamated Transit Union workers have taken two major pay cuts,
amounting to 22 percent. Since 1983, drivers' salaries were slashed from $31,324 to $24,750, while inflation skyrocketed 25 percent, which leaves workers lagging behind 45 percent in buying power. Right now, there are Greyhound workers eligible for federal programs for the poor. Some Greyhound drivers in Philadelphia make less than $6 an hour.
Greyhound turned a profit in 1989 at its workers' expense: $730,000 in the black on revenues of $1 billon.
Almost everything you hear and read about the strike seems to focus on striker violence. The press tallies buses shot at. A TV story stresses how the striking drivers "selfishly inconvenience" the poor and those in remote rural communities by daring to strike. Greyhound ever so piously proclaims they won't negotiate with "terrorists."
The truth is, Greyhound provoked this strike. How? By offering a contract which would have meant, in effect, that its workers would obtain no increase in their base-rate wages from 1983 to 1996! Incredible! This contract would have gutted grievance and arbitration procedures and closed many maintenance garages. It is a yellow dog contract, cowardly and despicable, its sole purpose to coerce workers into disavowing union representation.
This yellow dog contract was designed to be rejected. And it was - by 92 percent of Greyhound's organized workforce.
The truth is, substantial violence has been directed against striking Greyhound workers. Two days into the strike, a driver was brutally run up against a wall and killed by scab labor, a non-union replacement driver, in Redding, Cal. In Orlando, Fla., the 16-year-old daughter of a picket was hit by a bus, rupturing a kidney. On March 29, a scab bus driver accelerated up the exit ramp at New York's Port Authority Terminal, ran a red light, and felled a striker. Nearly 60 men, women, and children on the picket lines have been hit and injured. Who among them has been interviewed by newspapers or TV? No one.
Instead, this billlon-dollar Greyhound corporation launches a massive media campaign to portray the $25,000-a-year strikers as thugs. Then, Greyhound uses ''violence" as an excuse not to bargain.
What Greyhound is doing is buying time, so they can gradually replace the whole union workforce. Having driven wages down, Greyhound sets out to break the ATU.
We've seen this stuff before, with Eastern Airlines: Start with a war chest; provoke a strike; refuse to negotiate in a serious way; direct hit-and- run scab labor replacements to attack pickets; torment, incite and violence-bait the pickets; mix, stir, ferment, foment.
Greyhound's contempt for its workforce is obvious. But the contempt this company has for its customers seems even more blatant. Clearly, Greyhound intends to use this strike not only to break the union, but also as an excuse to scrap every unprofitable bus route. Which means whatever the outcome of this strike, a lot of small towns won't get any bus service from the only national carrier.
Greyhound is pulling a swindle. The workers lose. The riders lose. America loses.
Greyhound continues to brag that their buses come on time. What good is it that the bus comes, if the company has to lie, cheat, and steal to get it there?
*
No comments:
Post a Comment