Fifty years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, Atlanta's Transit Riders Union (TRU) is continuing the struggle. Formed this spring as a committee of Atlanta Jobs with Justice, TRU has already played a key role in stopping a $.25 fare increase proposed by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA).

Fifty years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, Atlanta's Transit Riders Union (TRU) is continuing the struggle. Formed this spring as a committee of Atlanta Jobs with Justice, TRU has already played a key role in stopping a $.25 fare increase proposed by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA).

As TRU builds on that success, Atlanta's transit riders, union members, and community supporters are heeding the call TRU co-chair Sheila Adams made at a December 5 community forum: "Get on board!"

Fifty years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, Atlanta's Transit Riders Union (TRU) is continuing the struggle. Formed this spring as a committee of Atlanta Jobs with Justice, TRU has already played a key role in stopping a $.25 fare increase proposed by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA).

Fifty years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, Atlanta's Transit Riders Union (TRU) is continuing the struggle. Formed this spring as a committee of Atlanta Jobs with Justice, TRU has already played a key role in stopping a $.25 fare increase proposed by the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA).

As TRU builds on that success, Atlanta's transit riders, union members, and community supporters are heeding the call TRU co-chair Sheila Adams made at a December 5 community forum: "Get on board!"

The December 5 event linked TRU's ongoing longhaul campaign to the legacy of Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. In 1955, Montgomery's African-American community had organized and planned a boycott for years before the actual boycott was launched. Parks was one of many community activists who became trained organizers and leaders of that struggle.

STOPPING A FARE INCREASE

As in most major cities, Atlanta's public transit system overwhelmingly serves Atlanta's African-American working class, who would have suffered disproportionately under the fare increase MARTA proposed this spring.

TRU's campaign against the increase began when a coalition of community, labor, environmental, disabled, senior, and student activists and organizations brought over 100 people to protest at MARTA's May board meeting. Twenty-six people testified and demanded that MARTA not balance its books "off the backs of the people who can least afford it."

The board tabled the decision. The coalition came back to the June board meeting and successfully turned back the fare increase, a historic victory.

Following that campaign, TRU began working this summer with Amalgamated Transit Union Local 732, which was in the middle of a contract fight and looking for support. Local 732 represents more than 2,500 transit workers in the metro Atlanta area.

Over 400 people--mostly union members--attended a September 26 mass meeting and teach-in on issues facing transit workers and riders. At this meeting, there was electricity in the air as riders and workers energized one another to continue their mutual struggles.

The contract fight was linked to the community's demand to restore Route 61 bus service to the Bowen Homes community, a low-income, African-American community on Atlanta's northwest side.

A few days later, 200 ATU members and community supporters turned out again at the MARTA board meeting. This time the board had to listen to testimony from dozens of workers about their issues and from the community about Route 61.

Board chairman Michael Walls heard Route 61 mentioned so many times that he assigned a staff person to meet separately with those affected. This protest jump-started contract negotiations (which had been at an impasse). At the end of October, MARTA announced route changes which included restoring service to Bowen Homes.

COMMUNITY-UNION ALLIANCE

Forming a strategic alliance between transit riders and workers is not a new idea. When the "Unity Speaks" reform slate swept Local 732's top offices in December 1998, their platform included a vision of working in the broader labor movement and with the community the union serves.

ATU members were part of a community, civil rights, and environmental justice delegation that traveled in February 2000 to Los Angeles to meet with that city's Bus Riders Union and learn about their work. The trip was co-sponsored by the Environmental Justice Resource Center (EJRC) at Clark Atlanta University, which has led the way in analyzing transportation equity issues nationally.

EJRC Director Dr. Robert Bullard asserts that understanding racism is central to understanding the financial difficulties MARTA faces today.

TRANSIT RACISM

In his book Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity, Bullard notes that MARTA is regional in name only. In fact, MARTA is supported by a sales tax from only two counties and the city of Atlanta.

Suburban counties, including two that have seats on the MARTA board, refused to join the system, in order to deny Atlanta's African-American majority access to their neighborhoods and the jobs which have historically followed whites out of the city.

MARTA is the largest transit system in the country that receives no operating help from the state, yet the state has four members on MARTA's board.

MARTA represents two problems to the new Republican majority in Georgia's state capitol. First, it is primarily an Atlanta public institution, which means that the African-American community is in control of millions of dollars in resources. Second, ATU represents the only public sector workers in the state with a collective bargaining agreement.

Fighting the decisions of a newly-created, regional "Transit Planning Board"--and a possible state takeover of MARTA and privatization--will take a strategic alliance of riders and workers. Building on its initial successes, the Transit Riders Union is preparing for much bigger fights ahead.

With the traffic and air quality problems that plague Atlanta, the need for mass transit is a no-brainer. But creating a truly regional transportation system raises the question of how it will be funded and who will control it.

According to Bullard, "Until racism is reined in, the Atlanta region will continue to have a patchwork of unlinked, uncoordinated, and 'separate but unequal' transit systems feeding into and feeding off of MARTA."

Whatever the future holds, Jobs with Justice and TRU will continue to fight for MARTA to be the sole transportation provider for the Atlanta region, for transit riders to have real say over decision-making, and for the rights of union workers to be protected.