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The
following is the text of prepared remarks to the Labor and Sustainability
Conference, held in St Paul, Jan. 19-20. Due to time constraints, the
actual oral presentation was somewhat shorter.
Bill
Onasch is a retired bus driver, a former vice president of ATU Local 1287
in Kansas City. He represents Midwest Chapters on the Labor Party Interim
National Council.
One
aspect of the environmental crisis that probably does not get sufficient
attention is what became known as urban sprawl.
My hometown of Kansas City is the perfect
poster child for this blight. The official metropolitan area encompasses
seven counties in two states. The population is a little under two
million. We have the most freeway lane miles per capita of any major city
in the world.
But business development promoters have
expanded this metro definition even further to take in no less than 17
counties, extending as far west as Topeka, Kan., and as far north as St
Joseph, Mo. This area is about 150 miles east to west and 100 miles north
to south, about the size of Belgium.
While we are among the most extreme
examples, we are hardly unique. Most major cities—including the Twin
Cities—have gone through a similar process. While the growth of this
sprawl has been largely unregulated, it is not unplanned. It is the
consequence of conscious decisions made after World War II by those who
rule America.
The country was just emerging from more
than 15 years of uninterrupted depression or war. There was already a big
housing shortage and tremendous pent-up consumer demand when the baby
boomers started arriving on the scene in big numbers.
Instead of renovating the somewhat shabby
urban cores, as was done in Europe at the time, developers decided to
take advantage of relatively cheap land prices to build brand new
suburbs. Government-guaranteed VA and FHA loans lured much of the white
working class out of the bustling urban cores into brand new
single-family houses, where the birds sing and the flowers bloom.
Now what’s wrong with that? It turns out
plenty was wrong. That cheap land surrounding the cities used to be where
our milk and eggs came from every day, along with much of our fresh fruit
and vegetables in season.
Locally produced food has become a
boutique industry today. Most items in our grocery stores were
transported hundreds, even thousands of miles.
In addition to removing acreage from
productive farming, in many cases wetlands were destroyed, leading to a
host of new, sometimes deadly problems, such as those described by the
Chair [Phyllis Walker, president of AFSCME Local 3800] in the Katrina
storm surge in New Orleans.
In many cities, Kansas City included,
part of the sales pitch for the new developments was racially motivated.
Bank red-lining, and sometimes covenants attached to home deeds, insured
that most of the new suburbs were white. Conversely, what remained of the
urban core was largely Black.
Most inner cities faced a declining tax
base, leading to deterioration of basic services. The Kansas City School
District has lost its accreditation.
The fall-out from sprawl has had enormous
social and economic, as well as environmental, consequences. Abandoning
the established urban infrastructure meant a whole new one had to be
created, spanning vast areas with new water, sewer, electrical,
telephone, and gas lines.
While the old cities were usually well
served by mass transit, a vast new road network had to be built—at
taxpayer expense—to access the new housing. No transit service to speak
of was expanded to these areas.
It was that factor, not some “American
love affair with the car,” that made us car-dependent. Once you were out
in the new suburbs, if you didn’t have a car you were marooned.
Most people started spending a good chunk
of their lives commuting to work in their cars. Lacking the corner stores
that were so abundant in the cities, they became accustomed to driving to
the nearest filling station or strip mall just to buy a quart of milk.
There is no group of workers more in
touch with the problems of urban sprawl than transit workers. We see all
sides of it through the passengers we carry, to the traffic we drive in,
to the fight for public funding.
Kansas City has a proud transit heritage.
We had the first electric-powered streetcar. We once had an extensive
network of streetcar lines, which included many miles of exclusive right
of ways. In the 1930s this was supplemented with electric trolley-bus
lines.
At its peak, during World War II, the
system carried nearly 400,000 passengers a day in a city that at the time
had a population of only 400,000. Such a system would cost many billions
to replicate today.
Then KC not only got hit by the general
trend of postwar sprawl. We were also one of a number of cities targeted
by General Motors, who covertly acquired transit systems in order to
destroy them. The streetcar and trolley-bus lines were eliminated. They
paved over tracks and sold the overhead wires for scrap.
They did this on an even grander scale in
Los Angeles. Different forces brought a similar outcome to the Twin
Cities and, ultimately, nearly every major city.
In 1969 Congress passed the Urban Mass
Transit Act. With the help of federal funding, the failed private transit
companies were reorganized into quasi-public bodies. While this saved
mass transit from extinction, it recast its role. Instead of a vital,
commonly used public service in need of expansion, it was designed to
primarily provide bare-bones transportation to those unfortunates without
access to a car.
Diverting transportation funds from
highways to transit was always like pulling teeth. What funding that was
available was usually for big-ticket capital projects—such as building
subways or light-rail systems where there was money to be made by
construction contractors—while operating funds needed to provide
day-to-day service shrank.
In 1992, in response to lost
operating-fund assistance, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority
initiated a downsizing strategy that included, for the first time in many
years, lay-offs of bus drivers. Some of us approached our local union
president and sold him on the idea that we should organize a public fight
against the cuts in service.
A Community Outreach Committee was
launched that enlisted support from community, student, and environmental
groups. Our committee submitted a petition with 8000 signatures
protesting the cuts to the Kansas City, Mo., city council, who passed a
resolution of support.
In Kansas City, Kan., we bused angry
transit users to city council meetings whenever there was any talk of
further cuts, and their sometimes rowdy interventions kept the status quo
in place for several years. We held rallies and organized community
meetings. We published a position paper putting transit in the sprawl
crisis context.
We did win some short-term reprieves of
service, and put transit on the agenda for discussion. But we didn’t have
the political clout to do much more.
Then we heard about an initiative by a
most remarkable union leader, the late Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil,
Chemical & Atomic Workers Union. He had convinced his union to
sponsor Labor Party Advocates. We thought a Labor Party sounded like a
good idea in general, and we were particularly attracted to the
environmental stance LPA was staking out.
ATU Local 1287 became an early endorser
of LPA, and activists in our Community Outreach Committee took the
initiative in setting up a Kansas City LPA chapter, as well as a Labor
Party Transit Club in our local union.
Mazzocchi was generally credited with
being the principal leader of the successful drive to get OSHA passed in
1970. He worked with Karen Silkwood, whose life and death as a Kerr-McGee
nuclear fuel plant worker was made famous by Meryl Streep’s film
portrayal.
Tony also had a long history of
collaboration with the broader environmental movement, working closely
with figures such as Ralph Nader and Barry Commoner.
Tony had confidence in the working class.
He believed that, told the truth and given reasonable options, we
generally do the right thing. That’s what encouraged him to take
environmental issues to the membership of a union whose bosses were among
the top polluters.
It was within the old OCAW, now part of
the Steelworkers, that the concept of Just Transition, incorporated from
the beginning in the Labor Party program, was initially formulated. Just
Transition rejects the counterposition of jobs versus the environment. We
want, and believe we can have, good jobs while repairing and reversing
the environmental destruction caused by corporate polluters.
Certainly some union jobs—including UAW
jobs—would face elimination as we reorganize economic activity to tackle
the enormous environmental crisis—above all global warming. The Labor
Party approach to Just Transition is to provide retraining to all such
displaced workers and to assist them with incomes and benefits to
maintain middle-class living standards until they are placed in new
suitable work. Nobody will be left behind.
This program would be largely paid for by
a tax on corporate polluters—similar to the Super Fund tax used to clean
up environmental messes created by irresponsible industries.
Some will say this Just Transition is
socialistic pie-in-the-sky that can never be realized. We’d better rally
around our employers to save our jobs. Well, let’s look at just one
example from history concerning UAW members.
In 1942 all auto production in the USA
came to an abrupt and total halt, not to be resumed for nearly four
years. Did this lead to disaster for UAW members? Quite the contrary. The
numbers in the plants swelled considerably, and there was more overtime
available than even the greediest could work.
Those plants were put under government
control, and virtually all capital and operating expenses were guaranteed
by the federal government. It was a triumph of industrial mobilization.
Of course, in this example, the product
was planes, tanks, and jeeps for the war effort. We don’t need such
things today. But can’t such plants, along with their workers, be
converted to serve a new green economy?
As a matter of fact, one proposal for
using the plant across the street being abandoned by Ford is to build
clean mass transit vehicles—and we need a lot of those if we are serious
about global warming.
The labor movement needs to recognize
that environmentalists are not our enemy. Our adversaries are the
employers who care nothing about either the environment or our jobs.
The union movement and the environmental
movement are in fact a natural fit as allies.
We need to unite to educate, agitate, and organize in
our workplaces, campuses, and communities. This conference is a good step
in that direction.
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