Note to friends reading this

October 22nd, 2008

This is a test of some of the multi-media technology that CTA workers may be able to use to help them tell their story to the public. Directly below is a draft of a "blog" entry that could be used as an organizing document to build support to do this. This is a non-public draft and its factual claims have not yet been verified ("[?]" signifies where a fact needs to be supported by evidence). Please do not copy or forward the information at this time. Also, many of the links to articles have not yet been found (help would be most welcome finding them). General grammatical or style criticism is also welcome.

One possible direction this may go is to migrate this personal draft over to a public site that is moderated by friends of workers, such as transportworkers.org or chicagopublictransit.org. This way we can encourage other workers to share their story anonymously but publicly in the context of organizing newsletters and face-to-face meetings (going on now). If anyone knows a good Internet-community to work with on this, or useful technology we can use, please let me know.

-erek slater
Chicago bus driver
member, Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 241

New President of CTA visits workers (2/5/07)

Ron Huberman, the new President of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and William Mooney, Vice President of Bus Operations recently visited all of the bus garages in the system. They came to my garage on a Tuesday morning.

Workers stand up to executives

Before the executives’ presentation, we were shown a “heart-warming” video about the history of the CTA. Mr. Huberman spoke of greater things; of how everyone wants a “world-class” organization. He said he wanted to build the best public transit system in the world. He spoke of the need to win over the hearts of the public to this goal.

What joy filled my heart when “the leadership of this organization” as they called themselves, turned over the meeting to questions and answers. Our garage [pictures] is a “seniority” bus-barn where some of the most respected workers have worked for decades. We let them have it! A senior clerk spoke -in a serious and dignified tone- of the executives’ plans to switch bus routes from one garage to another. He said that this garage was an institution; that bus drivers had developed relationships with the passengers and that should not be tampered with. Huberman said, in contradiction to what he told his General Manager a few days previously, that all of those changes wouldn’t happen “unless we [he and Mr. Mooney] approve it.” A mechanic, in forceful language, took the executives on: how could the CTA spend all of this money on computer gadgets and consultants when mechanics don’t have the proper tools or the correct parts to maintain the fleet we have now? “How is it that the best mechanics in the fleet who get all of the awards (we had just been presented with a plaque for the safest garage in the system) [picture], are sent the worst roach-infested poorly maintained buses? Is that how we are to be rewarded? How is it that you have all of this money, but we cannot properly ventilate this old garage? [The fumes are so bad [picture]] that we cannot even see to avoid being run over by buses!” [picture] Drivers interrupted Mr. Huberman several times as he continually said, “Right…right…we will be working on that…” A younger female part-time bus driver refused to allow the meeting to end before she was allowed to speak on behalf of part-time workers. She was heard…

Mr. Huberman is right: for Chicago to have the greatest public transportation system in the world the people of Chicago will have to be won over to this goal. But the kind of people who will lead this difficult struggle -with lifetimes of practical experience making the buses and trains go- were standing a few feet away, shouting at him.

Sardines or human beings?

Mr. Mooney, the Vice President of Bus Operations, opened his remarks at my garage by talking about the negligence of the bus driver who was recently crushed in between two buses at Midway airport. His leg was amputated, but he survived. [link to article] According to management, he forgot to apply the air-break when he got out of the driver’s seat and walked in front of his bus. This “negligent” driver had over 20 years experience.

The very same night this happened, I worked a late shift that returned into the garage after 1am. I was tired because I was used to driving split-shifts where you are given 2-5 hours work in the morning rush hours, then a long unpaid break, then another 2-5 hours “tripper” for the pm rush. You are often at work for 12+ hours. I pulled the bus into the bay to be refueled and got up to walk in front of the bus to go home. An alarm went off: I had forgotten to engage the air break and take the bus out of gear! I, a driver with less than two years experience, was lucky: I happened to be driving one of the newer buses that have this alarm safety feature (and it was working). My coworker – a veteran driver- was not so lucky.

In December, a woman attempted to take her bike from the bike-rack in front of the bus on Addison street. The driver did not notice her as he started to drive the bus again. She was dragged under the bus for 80 feet and died. Immediately the CTA used its video cameras (7 or more are on each bus) to show that it was the driver’s, not the Authority’s financially liability to the family. Even if the family gets money from the CTA or the driver, how much money is this mother of two boys worth? [article]

Last year, hundreds of passengers had to escape through emergency tunnels when they were trapped in a disabled underground train. The rail operator –who followed procedures flawlessly- couldn’t simultaneously solve the problem and let everyone on the train know to stay where they were. People panicked and opened the emergency doors and walked in the dark along the rails up through old escape hatches onto the street. [link to article] Even though they had been warning management about this for years, rail and maintenance workers were blamed and then fired. [link to article with interviews with fired rail maintenance workers] Only a few years ago, trains had a conductor in every rail car. Now a single “combined rail operator” is responsible for a thousand human lives. For what? To save a few dollars an hour?

“Adults come to work. Children play hooky.”

A theme of the executives’ presentation to workers was “absenteeism.” We were given lots of statistics about how we don’t show up to work and how that costs the CTA money. [this is why new Corrective Action Guidelines were implemented we were told] Workers “playing games” on the street is one of the principle reasons CTA service is so poor Mr. Huberman told us. He said, “Adults come to work. Children play hooky.”

Bus drivers are forced to work as “permanent part-time bus operators” for several years where we are given no guarantee of hours and no vacation. In order to make enough hours, bus drivers often sign the extra “work book” on their days off and sometimes work several weeks in a row uninterrupted. The newer and less experienced drivers are particularly vulnerable to fatigue, (the leading cause of work-place fatalities[?]) [link to article on driving fatigue related deaths and injuries], because they are continually “on-call,” not knowing the next day’s work schedule until the night before. It’s a schedule that would break anybody.

Bus drivers are not allowed to be sick. We don’t get any sick days, not even if we have worked for 30 years. If we are sick, we are put into the unpaid “sick book.” This goes into our “permanent record” which may be used later to discipline us. In practice, this policy creates great pressure on drivers to “tough it out,” sick or not. The last time I tried to work while sick (I had the flu during the winter), I was so delirious from fever while driving that I pulled the bus over and called the control center to tell them I could not continue to drive safely. I was put into the “sick book” and went home. I was able to sleep off the fever, but when I returned to work the next day the manager tried to “charge” me (in CTA legalese, “charged” literally means guilty) with “sniping,” or doing only part of a run as well as “charging” me for being sick. The lack of needed rest, alongside the fact that we are treated only as “badge numbers” –to be replaced when we are used up- is the reason some CTA workers do whatever they can to get out of the intensity and stress of their work.

We are not children “playing games.” The great majority of bus operators take their work very seriously- if we did not we would be quickly fired. Overwhelmingly, workers are responsible members of their communities with loved ones dependent on their jobs.

A system that does not work

A few days before the president came, the general manager of our garage gave us a very informative “rap session” based on a meeting he had just come from among GMs and the president of the CTA.

He told us that the global positioning system (GPS) would be used to make reports of “bad drivers.” “More of you will be coming in for interviews [with management],” he warned. [pictures of surveillance equipment used to control workers] If you are not sure what “interview” means, picture your high-school principal’s office, complete with paternalism, condescension and a “permanent record.”

Every worker knows this GPS system does not work. Time points on the schedules are constantly mismatched with their real locations, calling stops too early, too late, or not at all. Even when the system is working, satellites in space or computers in a centralized “command center” cannot account for a passenger needing assistance, a train blocking the roadway, a snow storm or the million other things front line workers have to use their human judgment for. The run schedules are produced by office managers who have never driven a bus. They are ordered to “cut costs,” not to promote courteous and safe driving. This pushes drivers to drive faster in order to get needed breaks at terminals or to get off work on time to see their loved ones. [photo]

While new and expensive surveillance equipment is purchased by the board of directors, the most basic equipment needed on the ground is in a state of disrepair. Mechanics do not have the parts they need to fix buses, often cannibalizing parts from good buses to fix defective ones [bus graveyard]. Simple two-way radios are in all buses, but few of them actually work properly. Drivers could use them to request assistance from other drivers or to stop “bus bunching” by communicating directly with other drivers. Instead the CTA relies on the bus drivers sending “canned” electronic messages to a central command center which is often slow to reply. This assumes the system isn’t taking a nap -literally on unusable “fallback mode”- which it often is. In practice, when front-line workers need to talk to a real human being for emergency assistance, the CTA relies on workers using their personal cell phones.

Cameras

Last week, for the first time, I drove my bus with a camera pointed directly in my face. The camera footage is to be downloaded for management every time bus drivers come back to the garage [link to article].

A few days before the super bowl, a flat-screen television was mounted above the clerk’s window directly facing the break room tables. [photo] Some of the workers were excited, “Finally, we get a good TV for the break room!” Instead, this monitor –aimed directly at the workers- displays where each driver is located using global positioning technology (GPS). Every day we check for our work-shift at the clerk’s window we are reminded, “You are being watched.” [picture]

If you said, “Good! Those rude bus drivers need to be watched,” then you’re next. A few days ago, it was announced that new rail cars were finally being ordered to replace the dangerously decaying 30-year-old trains. The new cars will have cameras directly on the passengers [link to article].

People who ride public transit in Chicago will have already seen the roaming German Sheppard security guard patrols. [article and picture] Mr. Huberman said at the meeting with workers that plain-clothed police officers would be put on buses, especially on buses that transport high-school students.

CTA or CPD?

The people of Chicago should know who is running their public transit system. The board of directors of the CTA is comprised of 7 appointees, 4 of which are directly chosen by the mayor. Until being recently appointed to head the CTA, Ron Huberman was the mayor’s chief of staff. He began his career as a Chicago police officer of 9 years rising to head the Chicago Police Department’s (CPD) surveillance command center that has put blue flashing cameras in poor neighborhoods around Chicago. [Link to article about Ron Huberman’s history as a cop]. [link to article about control center of CPD surveillance] [picture of camera in my neighborhood].

Huberman, a handsome man in his thirties, tried to humanize his talk to overwhelmingly black transit workers by talking to us about his time as a beat cop. He told us how when he used to go parties people would always come to him with stories of how cops brutalized someone they knew or otherwise acted immorally. He compared bus drivers to cops, saying that, “We all know there are a few bad apples out there.”

Huberman announced that he was working to put plastic shields in buses to completely surround drivers and separate them from passengers. I was saddened by this. The greatest joy I find in my work is talking with passengers from all over this world-city [picture]. Some of the best-loved drivers are the ones who greet passengers and get to know them. However, many passengers board the bus frustrated at the poor state of public services in this city. The first human face they see wearing a CTA badge is often the person they express that anger to, sometimes violently [link to article about bus drivers being attacked].

One of the hardest parts of driving a city bus has nothing to do with driving: it’s having to fight poor people to pay the fare, one of the highest in the country [link to facts about highest fares]. Every day bus drivers are required to follow “standard operating procedures” [picture] by “forcefully” requesting the $2 cash fare from people in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago. When people say that they do not have the money, I believe them. I say, “I am here to safely drive you to your destination. I am a bus driver, not a cop.” The CTA is not the CPD.

Governor makes “lemonade”

A few days before the latest threatened “doomsday” transit cuts (the transit agencies threatened to raise fares, cut service and fire workers) the Governor of Illinois accepted a bill that increased the sales tax to fund public transit in the Chicago region. In exchange for breaking his campaign pledge of not increasing the taxes on working people, he added a provision in the bill for giving free rides to senior citizens [picture]. He said he was, “Taking a lemon and making lemonade.”

Regardless of his motives, the Governor is right: this is lemonade. This is a real opportunity to prove that an expensive, time-consuming and dangerous fare collection system is not necessary to fund public transit.

The “leadership” of the CTA told us they are installing plastic shields around front-line workers, adding more surveillance cameras and hiring more police to watch over us. This is covering over rather than going to the source of these deep problems. Instead let’s make public transportation in Chicago so clean, safe and consistent that people would rather read a book on the bus than drive themselves to work in rush hour traffic. Lower the fare and keep lowering it until the fare boxes, turn-styles and iron bars we are so familiar with are altogether removed. Stop wasting resources counting, protecting, and transporting money. It sure would make life a lot less stressful for bus drivers!

“But everyone would take the trains and buses!” Good! Less traffic, less pollution, less stress… “But the system would be overrun!” Then let’s create thousands of new union transportation jobs by massively expanding public transit. Like Mr. Huberman says, Chicago is a world-class city so it should have a world-class public transportation system.

There is another way…

For many decades the CTA and the Regional Transportation Authority have been run by political patronage appointees and executives from the top down. As this system has failed, new executives and managers have been brought in periodically to “clean house.” Cleaning house has meant the service has gone down while the fares have gone up. Cleaning house has meant increasing the intensity of work for transit workers while attempting to break their unions. Officials have run public transit like a company trying to make a profit: management in opposition to the workers they control. As a consequence, workers feel like they are treated like “badge numbers” and, to the detriment of courtesy and safety, we often treat our work like it treats us.

We are going in the wrong direction, but there is another way.

During these latest “doomsday” transportation cuts, a group of transit activists, civil-rights fighters and a few drivers organized the Rider-Driver Alliance and began publishing “Transit Allies.”

A small group of CTA workers have been meeting to strengthen worker solidarity and try to end the arbitration trap they currently find themselves in where workers are not allowed to vote on their 5-year binding contract.

A small group of immigrant rights, transit and social-justice activists are working with bus drivers to show –in practice, one bus-line at a time- how “everyday” people can run a public transit system in their communities [LVEJO].

A coalition of unions, faith-based organizations, social-justice and student groups is meeting to force city administrators to make a possible Chicago Olympics be a benefit to the people of Chicago, not just land-speculators, construction contractors and tourist hotels. In time for the Olympic committee’s decision of which city will host the games, [Sustainable Chicago 2016] is trying to develop and present a plan to the city of a public transit system that would be an example to the world of worker-community ownership.

A World-Class public transportation system is possible, but the people of Chicago –not politicians or executives- have to really want and fight for it. Allied with transit workers, the community has to build and run it themselves. Let’s build it!

Test of Scribd and iPaper

This is a test of embedding documents in the blog using Scribd and iPaper. Here is the platform I used to run for union steward of Archer Bus Garage:

unionplatforoferekslater - Upload a Document to Scribd

Here is a community/worker newsletter I helped to edit during the last CTA budget "doomsday:"

transitallies - Upload a Document to Scribd

Here is a brief list of "What Every CTA Bus Operator Should Know" we have been using to encourage union workers to participate in and lead their union.

whateveryctabusoperatorshouldknow - Upload a Document to Scribd

Test of Slide Show link to Flickr

Here is a link to a sideshow I put together of dawns and sunsets I have seen while driving the bus in Chicago.

Test of Windows Live Writer

This is a test of the windows live writer program.  Here is a link to my Flickr profile.  Here is an picture of me at International Workers' Day (May Day) in Chicago.

Test subject

Test subject,
originally uploaded by erekslater.

test of sending pictures from phone camera to flickr to chicago bus driver blogspot blog.

this is a test with a picture. learning how to use this system. here is a picture of a bus in purgatory... here is a link to the New York Times website. Here is a link to my profile on the Chicago Reader. I can also be found at Live Journal (che_g) and Facebook (erek slater).