Unpublished (Nov 2008)

[Below is a blog I wrote in Novevember of 2008.]

[links to pictures and slideshows redirect to Flickr.com. click "show info" on the top right and pause the slideshow to read the captions.]



Driving the bus, I travel all around this world-city and meet all kinds of amazing, “ordinary” working people. That’s where my optimism stems.

Like the historical epoch Humanity is trapped within, Chicago is a city of contradictions; it is ready for great change.


Riders and drivers unite

While politicians fought over how best to make working people pay for crumbling public institutions and threatened the city with “doomsday” public transportation cuts, a group of transit activists, civil-rights fighters and a few drivers organized the Rider-Driver Alliance. We published “Transit Allies.” At our union (Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 241) (http://www.atu.org/), workers passed a resolution in support of the riding public.

Small groups of workers have been trying to organize themselves and educate each other “What every CTA bus driver should know.” To help do this, I ran for union steward of my bus garage of about 600 workers. I received a lot of support from my coworkers, but I came in 4th of seven candidates.


The war at work

I didn’t really understand this until I personally felt it in my bones: there is continual warfare between workers and management/executives that is largely hidden from public view. A few friends are starting a workers’ blog to get this truth out and encourage other workers to tell their story.

One thing I didn’t previously appreciate is the battle required to keep your health while working. Recently, I have developed the beginnings of repetitive stress injuries from work (wrist, back and knee problems are the most common for bus drivers). I have been fighting my health-maintenance-organization (HMO) to be able to see the doctor. Even trying to discuss this issue with my employer has led them to try to fire me on two occasions. From the employer’s perspective, it is cheaper to discard an injured worker than to pay to heal the damage they do to us, never mind actually stop the causes of these injuries. From assembly-line speed-ups, to forcing one worker to do the work three used to do, work has dangerously increased in intensity for many people. Combined this with food and pharmaceutical companies’ relentless drive for profit and their sophisticated, manipulative marketing, many workers have become trapped by these addictive foods and drugs. I have had to make and carry my own food [slideshow] and exercise [CTA softball championships] to try to maintain my health. Compared to many of my coworkers, I have it easy. Most workers, especially women, have second jobs at home feeding and caring for their loved ones. Many people that get on my bus [slideshow] have to work two or three jobs. They sleep on the bus because they have little time to do anything other than work. In practice, they are forced to eat the cheapest, fastest-prepared food that traps them and their children in a cycle of diabetes, heart disease and obesity.


My first accident

There is a lot more to this job than I thought. Everybody wants to get around the slow bus, but few drivers seem to care about doing so safely. There are tons of rules drivers have to think about that passengers never see [slideshow]. Since we know we will be blamed for anything that goes wrong, driving a city bus often feels like walking on eggshells. Talking with all kinds of workers on my bus –from other transportation workers to those on assembly-lines to service workers- I have found this to be nearly universal: nobody understands how complex and challenging a job is until they actually do it themselves.

I had minor incidents and scrapes [slideshow], but my first major accident occurred while driving the bus. I accept responsibility for this collision: I am responsible for being alert and aware of the changing road conditions as well as the limitations of the equipment [slideshow]. I had just begun dating a woman and she invited me to stay with her the evening before the accident. Some things just cannot wait… I didn’t know I had to work at 5am the next morning until 6pm that night. This incident shows the necessity of proper rest and allowing workers to take days off rather than forcing them to work no matter what. Many of my coworkers are forced to miss their child’s graduation or important medical appointments for their family, etc. We shouldn’t force workers to make the choice between loved ones and the safety of their work.

Bosses like to make us feel dumb and blame ourselves when we occasionally fail (yes, everybody fails; we are human!). Rather than accept responsibility for systemic problems, bosses blame foreign-born or “lazy” people. Before you parrot what they say about other workers, remember their jobs are just as difficult and frustrating as yours. Blame other workers and you are next… We may correctly hold an individual accountable for moments of weakness to encourage them to become stronger, but all of us are responsible for resolving social and systemic problems at the root of our personal failures.


End part-time work!

The CTA tried to take our second day off (a week) away from us, forcing part-time drivers to work seven days in a row “on-call,” get one day off, then work another seven days in a row [picture]. Part-timers organized to put pressure on officials and the CTA backed off a week later. Some of us began a campaign to end part-time work altogether [link to document] and a few weeks later officials “transitioned” 150 of us (including myself after 2 ½ years) to full-time status. 150 down, 800 to go!


A great woman

My grandmother passed. She led an amazing life: blind, death, left by her husband, but able to get a master’s degree at a time when few women were able to go to college. Management refused let me off work, but my union steward was able to get me an unpaid leave of absence based on emotional stress from the passing of a loved one. I went back to New England to celebrate my grandmother’s life with loved ones [pictures], enjoy the forest and lakes of New England where I grew up [slideshow] and do some studying of the basic sciences in NYC [pictures] and Boston [pictures]. We get no vacation as part-time workers (for several years), so it was a much-needed (but financially challenging) break.


Hard times

Everybody I talk to that gets on my bus [pictures] seems to be struggling to keep up with higher prices and debt to credit cards and banks. These financial institutions [pictures] suck on us -preying on the inexperienced or desperate- while providing no useful service to society. All this waiting on hold or in line [pictures], being harassed and humiliated by debt-collectors, and other bureaucratic mazes that we have to deal with is completely unnecessary. Like many others, hard times have brought my loved-ones closer. My father is on Social Security and Medicare, but government health insurance is very poor. My mother has helped me reorganize my debt and keeps my father on her health insurance (they recently divorced). I have moved in with my father to help with his health, share food [picture] and save money.


May Day

On the first day I was supposed to report to work to train to be a bus driver, all the instructors had to help drive 400,000+ people marching on the streets of Chicago. I joined two million people in the United States in the first political general strike in this country’s history [slideshow]. My employer tried to force me to drive cops to the 2007 march, but like millions of other workers, I refused to work on International Workers Day [slideshow]. I helped write an article about it [article].


Neighborhood power

I came to Chicago from Boston in 2005 after a trip to Venezuela that changed my life. (I travelled with a friend who wrote a photojournalism project about the trip.) Since then, I have been trying to find other people in the United States working to build neighborhood power while living as stewards of Nature. In the trying I met amazing people and lived in many of the diverse neighborhoods of Chicago. [slideshow].

A workers’ party

I have become more convinced that the Democratic and Republican parties of the United States do not represent the great majority of us. That, regardless of what they promises before election time or tell us with their media, both parties act in the interests of the same small group of capitalists, bankers and the super-wealthy in the United States. We have no real power over these parties or their politicians; once they have our vote, they do as they please…When it is election time again, they put up new faces and blame the other party, hoping we forgot what they did to us last time their party held power. I am convinced we need a new party, a workers’ party that can represent the interests of working people independent from the bosses and the banks. If it is really going to be something new, the leadership of such an organization must be directly led and controlled by shop-floor and neighborhood organizations. To find others thinking similarly, I have recently participated in national conventions of Labor Notes (Detroit, MI) [http://www.labornotes.org/], Jobs with Justice (Providence, RI) [http://www.jwj.org/], The Midwest Convention in Defense of Immigrants (Chicago, IL), Socialist Workers Party (NYC, NY) [http://www.themilitant.com/], and the Midwest Social Forum (Wisconsin)[http://www.mwsocialforum.org/].


Young Socialists

I joined the Young Socialists, the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party. They asked me to run in my local ward as write-in candidate. (Hey, tried it, but I don’t think wearing a suit is for me!) I made small public presentations at a Pathfinder Press bookstore on the Energy/Environmental crisis [link to speech] and the Cuban 5 [link to document]. I was asked to join the SWP but I was unwilling to leave my coworkers in Chicago, so I was expelled from the youth organization. I learned a great deal during the year I worked with the Young Socialists.


Cuba

My family has long been principled defenders of the Cuban Revolution. I, however, have been skeptical of what I have been told. I went to visit the island when I was a youth [slideshow], but it wasn’t until I studied the history of attacks by the United States on Cuba that a great change in my understanding of the US Empire occurred. Cuba is not perfect; it’s not simple, but it is a living, fighting example of what Humanity is capable of once we overcome the capitalist epoch of history. In the United States, it’s very difficult to know what information to trust. The “truth” is something you have to fight for; it takes work. Here are some movies [http://www.saludthefilm.net/], organizations [http://www.cubasolidarity.com/, http://www.freethefive.org/] and books [“To Speak the Truth; Why Washington's 'Cold War' against Cuba Doesn't End” (Che Guevara, Fidel Castro), “Cuba, The Untold History,” “Our History is Still being Written”] that have helped me. I have since traveled to Toronto [picture] and cities in the US to help get some of this truth out (the US government refuses to let the wives of The Five speak to people in the US). The people of the global south have a great deal to teach us if we listen critically and fight for their right to be heard.


What’s next?

Right now I am trying to work with students, co-workers and other social-justice fighters to stop the latest raise in fares and public-transit lay-offs. I am also trying to link up with class-conscious worker-leaders to run together as a slate of candidates to make democratic changes in our unions based on principles [link to draft document] of unionism learned over the last 150 years of struggle. And, call me utopian, but I have a dream.