Trimess

Monday, April 15, 2013

Sweatshops on Wheels

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The deterioration of the nation’s public transportation, like the deterioration of health care, education, social services, public utilities, bridges and roads, is part of the relentless seizing and harvesting of public resources and programs by corporations. These corporations are steadily stripping the American infrastructure. Public-sector unions are being broken. Wages and benefits are being slashed. Workers are forced to put in longer hours in unsafe workplaces, often jeopardizing public safety. The communities that need public services most are losing them, and where public service is continued it is reduced or substandard and costlier. Only the security and surveillance network and the military are permitted to function with efficiency in their role as the guardians of corporate power. We now resemble the developing world: We have small pockets of obscene wealth, ailing infrastructure and public service, huge swaths of grinding poverty, and militarized police and internal security.

This process of destroying our public transportation system is largely complete. Our bus and rail system, compared to Europe’s or Japan’s, is a joke.

“Our money is meaningless in politics,” Larry Hanley, the international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), lamented when we met in his office here in Washington. “It is still sought after, but it really has no weight in determining anything.”

“I am watching as 80 percent of transit systems have had to raise fares or cut service since the recession and then this money is used to build the bosses new bathrooms or buy them new cars,”(in Trimet's case new offices/furniture, raises) Hanley said. “What it speaks to is a really stupid policy on national transit.

FULL ESSAY IS HERE: Chris Hedges: Sweatshops on Wheels - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

1 comment:

Erik H. said...

Simple.

The focus is on building big projects to make the managers and directors look good.

The basic function of providing transit is no longer seen as a core function of a transit agency; it is seen as rather an annoyance and a hassle.

In fact, those agencies that can, have outsourced their core function of operating transit to private contractors (i.e. Valley Metro in Phoenix, RTD in Denver) while existing merely as a overpriced management function.

When service goes bad, the management and the contractor simply point fingers at each other, leaving the poor rider in the crossfire and with absolutely no improvement in service, setting up transit for failure.