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2, vol 115 -- September 8, 2003

the Bus Rider's Union: It's more than just buses
Aiyanas Ormond

Two and half years under the BC Liberals have really given working people in B.C. a rough ride. Housing is outrageously expensive - if you can even find a place given the super-tight rental market - and with tenants' rights slashed by the Liberals, tenants find themselves increasingly at the mercy of their landlords. Welfare has gone from a starvation wage to worse, and the waits and limits on access makes it more of a mechanism for humiliation and containment than a social 'safety-net'. Health care workers have been fired and laid off in huge numbers, while quality and access suffers for it. Tuition rates at universities have skyrocketed, and even in the public school system, fees are proliferating (my daughter is required to pay $25 for 'school supplies' for her grade one class). Insurance rates and gas prices have gone up, as have bus fares, and public transit service has been cut. Meanwhile wages for many people have declined with the introduction of the 'training wage' and increased labour market competition, as people increasingly have no choice but take whatever work they can get, regardless of low-wages, unsafe working conditions, and assaults on our dignity. In this climate, activists, organisers, and politically conscious people have had to ask ourselves: What can we do to resist what seems to be an unstoppable tide of right-wing policies?

In the last two years, the Bus Riders Union has emerged as one response to this question. It's a grassroots organising project which is self-consciously an experiment - an experiment to see if, in the context of intensifying neo-liberal attacks on the basic living conditions of working class people, we can create a popular and democratic organisation that can fight back and win real gains on a specific issue. From a broader perspective, the Bus Riders Union is an experiment to see if we can create an organisation that is gender balanced and multi-racial, both at its base and in its leadership, and that takes on structural sexism and racism as they are manifested in the provision of one specific public service: transit.

The linchpin of the Bus Riders Union strategy has always been this - that we actually get on the buses and talk to other bus riders every week. Our objective is not just to build a core of activists to put on demonstrations, but to build a real base of political support and consciousness in the community. This summer, we boarded the buses in our bright orange t-shirts for several hours, twice per week. Riding the #3 Main, the #8 Fraser, and the #19 Metrotown, we learned a lot about the hardships faced by bus riders, and how fundamental transportation is to their quality of life. Spending so much time talking to so many regular working folks has been a profoundly grounding experience for organisers with the Bus Riders Union. It also has meant that we don't need a lot of theory to understand the racist and sexist nature of Canadian capitalism. Every time we get on the bus, we are faced with the fact that First Nations people, immigrants, and refugees constitute the vast majority of bus riders in low-income East Vancouver communities, even though they are a minority of the population.

The Night Owls Campaign:
Taking on Transit Racism

"I got off work too late to catch the late 1:30 a.m. bus, and so I had to trek over three hours to get home on foot. After three months, I had to quit, and lost my house because I couldn't afford my rent."

"I applied for janitorial job. Unable to apply because of lack of late night buses... Company asks for employees to have own transport because of late night buses. Suffered depression as a result of loss of job opportunity."

"Spending money on cabs affects my food budget. The last cheque of the month is my rent money, and I don't want to spend it, so I have to borrow money to pay my rent."

These stories, penned hastily on lurching, overcrowded buses, are just a few of the real- life experiences of bus riders collected by the Bus Riders Union this summer. They are part of a project to document the hardships endured by the janitors, sales clerks, hotel workers, nurses, students, baristas, and waitresses who rely on Greater Vancouver's bus system everyday. These folks, overwhelmingly low-income and working class, mostly women and disproportionately people of colour, have suffered as TransLink, the regional transit authority, has cut service, raised fares, and generally ignored the needs of bus riders.

We decided to start collecting stories from bus riders after being consistently ignored at TransLink meetings we attended to demand the restoration of late night bus service (after 1:40 a.m.) which was cut in October. 2001. We were told that TransLink's research indicated that the late night buses weren't really needed and that they were mostly used for 'recreational' purposes (drinking). Of course we knew from 18 months of talking to bus riders that people were still suffering from the de facto curfew, and so the demand for Night Owl buses became a central campaign of the Bus Riders Union.

Over the summer we organised for the Night Owls by getting on the bus, leafletting and organising downtown late at night, working hard to make contact with night workers and talking to them about the campaign. We also took the fight to TransLink. We made presentations at their meetings, told them what we had been hearing from bus riders and night workers, and pleaded with board members to bring a resolution to restore the buses. When we were ignored, we used direct action tactics to shut down their board meetings in June and July.

The hard work has paid off. In September, the Bus Riders Union will present the results of our grassroots research to the public and to TransLink. Finally bus riders will have their words in the public policy debate over transit in this region. We also expect a motion on restoration of the Night Owls to be presented at the October meeting of the TransLink board and, needless to say, bus riders will be there in force to see that the motion passes.

Though winning back the Night Owl buses would only be a small gain in terms of the overall lives of low-income and marginalised people in the region, it would represent an important step toward bringing the needs and demands of working-class and marginalised people back into the centre of the political debate in this region and province. It would be a demonstration that, when we organise our communities to fight back, we can have a real impact on public policy and win important gains - gains based not on compromises or concessions to corporate interests, but on the strength of oppressed and exploited people, united and standing up for our rights.

Neo-liberalism and
public transit across the
continent

It's not only in Vancouver that marginalised people are identifying the bus as an important site in the struggle for social justice. In Los Angeles the first Bus Riders Union was formed in the early 90s and has brought together working class Black, Latino, and Korean communities to fight for social and environmental justice. In Boston, a similar organisation, the T Riders Union has been organising against fare hikes and for improved service.

While visiting family in the north eastern United States this summer, my family and I rode the buses in Boston and Washington, D.C. Not particularly exciting, I know; in fact it was downright unpleasant much of the time. But I was struck by the stark parallels between these cities and our own. Whether you're talking about the Roxbourough area of Boston, or downtown Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Toronto, or Vancouver, the picture seems to be very much the same. Public transit has been abandoned to those who can't afford to purchase and maintain a car - low wage workers, the unemployed and underemployed, and low-income parents. And in these economic categories, women and people of colour are vastly over-represented. In fact, perhaps more visibly than anywhere else, the buses reflect the extent to which class, poverty, and privilege are racially stratified in our society.

There is another aspect to this story, which is the steady divestment of public money from the bus systems that low-income communities and communities of colour rely on. The specifics in different cities have been varied, but taken together, the experiences of Los Angeles, Vancouver, Boston, and Atlanta suggest an emerging pattern. It is not a pattern of divestment from transit completely, but a problem of where public transit dollars are being spent. In all these cases, funding for buses that serve the majority of public transit users, particularly lower income neighbourhoods and communities of colour, has remained stagnant or decreased while regional transit authorities poured money into fixed rail projects. Rail systems are more likely to be supported and used by middle-class commuters who can drive to and from stations - the so-called choice riders. Meanwhile, transit dependent people, sometimes referred to as the 'captive market', will ride whatever bus they can get, even if they have to wait half an hour in the rain, or to dip into their food budget to make the fare, and despite the fact that carcinogenic diesel pollutants enter into their communities air. Bus riders have no other choice.

The driving forces behind the rail priority are regional real estate developers, business owners, and huge corporate consortia that stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars on a major rapid transit project. Representatives of these interests are a fixture at regional transit authority meetings - lobbying for an added station (which happens to be next to a large piece of land they happen to own), bidding on contracts, or standing behind the scenes pushing for privatisation and 'public-private-partnerships'. For example, in the case of the planned Richmond-Airport-Vancouver rapid transit line, many of the corporations bidding on the 'Design-Build-Operate' contract for the privatised line are members of the Canadian Conference on Public-Private Partnerships, an organisation which hosted TransLink CEO Pat Jacobsen as a speaker at their convention in Vancouver last year. Moreover, the company that did the supposedly impartial audit of the project is also a member of Canadian Conference on Public-Private Partnerships. So the interests of huge corporations, bureaucrats, and regional politicians come together in a seamless web of backroom dealing. Meanwhile, bus riders are left out in the cold, in this case quite literally.

The ideological justification for this misallocation of public dollars, away from those in need and toward the already wealthy and powerful is firmly grounded in the discourse of neo-liberalism. The attack on our right to public services is spun as a 'market' approach to public services, supposedly demanded by tax payers. Of course, no such groundswell of support for cuts and higher fares has ever existed. As has historically been the case, the 'market' is imposed on communities by stripping them of what had hitherto been considered social rights, such as the right to mobility.

These broad social trends have spurned grassroots organising around transit as a social justice issue in Los Angeles, Boston, Vancouver, and Atlanta - not because of the particularities of transit, but precisely because the attacks on the basic rights of poor and marginalised people in terms of public transit is such a clear reflection of the economic attacks on our communities generally.

A union of bus riders

With 250 members and two years of solid organising behind us, the Bus Riders Union has emerged as an important voice in the politics of the region. But the Bus Riders Union has never been about just creating a pressure group for buses. We are a bus riders' union; but we are also a union of bus riders. And if there is one thing we've learned from the thousands of conversations we've had with bus riders, it's that the issue of transit is inseparable from the other challenges facing working class people: housing, health care, education, childcare, jobs, and wages. We experience the realities of class exploitation, racism, and sexism not as bus riders, or welfare recipients, or patients, or students, or workers, but as human beings. So, as a union of bus riders, we have a responsibility to challenge the whole gamut of neo-liberal policies and even the roots of exploitation and oppression in capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

It's a challenge that the Bus Riders Union is well positioned for. With a long term perspective on social change and a solid practice on the ground, organising the Bus Riders Union is headed strongly in the general direction of justice.

For people interested in finding out more about the work of the Bus Riders Union, check out our Web site at http://bru.resist.ca.

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