Organizing on the “Factory on Wheels” The Bus Riders’ Union and Anti-Racist Feminism for the 21st Century fiona jeffries
Cet article rapporte un incident entre grants and people with disabilities. peaked in the Reagan-inspired de- le syndicat des chauffeurs d’autobus Women and a disproportionate regulation boom of the 1980s, two de Vancouver (BRU) qui ont envahi number are Aboriginal people and key factors drove the Centre towards la voie publique pour en faire un site people of colour make up the bulk of non-conventional spaces of organiz- de syndicalisme social et de féminisme the city’s transit dependent (BRU). ing. First, its radical critique of U.S anti-raciste. J’ai discuté avec le BRU The BRU situates urban mobility as capitalism, including the official la- démontrant la centralité des luttes a political struggle against colonial bour movement; second, its under- qui agitent le capitalisme mondial capitalism’s narratives of gendered standing of the changing political et le testament de la renaissance de la subjectivity, where public and mo- landscape occurring both globally pensée politique et d’action autour des bile subjects are characterized as and locally under neoliberal restruc- présences dans une ville. En arguant male, while private and immobile turing. Recognizing and politicizing que la stratégie de communication du life are portrayed as female. It seeks Los Angeles as a site of intense la- BRU concernant le transport en com- to overturn such narratives by mo- bour mobility, where women from mun se doit de donner un espace vital bilizing transit users through calls the Global South provide a lion’s à l’organisation féministe, j’ai relevé for “the right to get around” and share of the city’s competitive edge, deux aspects de leur travail: les poli- through campaigns such as “End the the L. A. BRU’s analysis of the pro- tiques de la visibilité et l’élaboration Curfew” (that aims to reverse cuts duction of capitalist social relations des pratiques contestataires qui abolis- to transit night service). The BRU’s rendered the bus system and its us- sent ce qui distingue une citadine ac- constituency and organizing style ers into a 400,000-strong “factory tiviste et un chauffeur d’autobus. suggests a concrete project for the on wheels,”1 a crucial site for justice assertion of new claims organized organizing (Mann). Vancouver’s Bus Riders’ Union around a justice politics of everyday In the aftermath of the 1992 Los (BRU) is a strongly women-led ac- free mobility in the neoliberal city. Angeles Revolt (Ramsay), the BRU tivist group transforming the city’s Here, the historical spaces of social set out to work with various social public transit into a site of social organizing, such as the trade union justice movements in the city, in- unionism and anti-racist feminism. or the neighbourhood association, cluding the movement to defeat Cal- Public transit is typically seen to be are being radically transformed by ifornia’s racist Proposition 187 and space of mundane urban travel, but privatization and de-regulation. the Justice for Janitors campaign. the rise of the BRU renders the bus In this context, the initiation of a This affinity with other grassroots as a hotly contested means of trans- union of bus riders is both surpris- movements became the basis of the portation used by Vancouver’s most ingly innovative and long overdue. BRU’s new social unionism. Work- precarious workers. The BRU’s on- The idea of a new kind of social ing from the view that “the geogra- the bus organizing experience shows unionism, built on the self-organi- phy of work and travel reflects the that Vancouver’s transit dependent zation of bus riders, emerged out of spatiality of patriarchy, structural bus riders, both numerous and di- Los Angeles in the early 1990s as racism, and the division of labour” verse, are comprised of low-wage a project of the Labour/Commu- (Burgos and Pulido 80), the BRU workers, the unemployed, students, nity Strategy Centre. Rooted in Los confronted Los Angeles’s transpor- refugees, children, seniors, immi- Angeles’s fierce labour struggles that tation authority and its active role in
VOLUME 25, NUMBERS 3,4 127 urban segregation. Their “No Seat, central place of social reproduction. work around the central role of so- No Fare!” campaign, documented This approach sheds politicized cial reproduction in the production in Haskel Wexler’s 1999 film The light on a hallmark feature of our of capitalism is very relevant to the Bus Riders Union, articulated specifi- current experience of global neo- contemporary experience of transit cally feminist demands of the public liberal restructuring: the continu- dependent women. transport constituency—street light- ous expansion of the working day. ing at bus stops, unarmed escorts, Hence, one of the BRU’s significant Anti-Racist Feminist Social an end to overcrowding, accessible contributions to feminist social jus- Unionism child care—combining transitional tice organizing in the neoliberal era demands with legal tactics and radi- is in its challenge to the extension of The BRU’s organizing approach cal grassroots organizing. unpaid work time that many wom- uniquely combines traditions of Vancouver’s own BRU emerged in shop floor and community organiz- the summer of 2001. A screening of ing. It draws together those tradi- Wexler’s Bus Rider’s Union brought The BRU signals tions in new ways that respond to Los Angeles BRU organizers to Van- the challenges and try to make sense of the radi- couver to meet with local activists. cal transformations in urban space The film made visible a face of the of organizing throughout the last couple of de- city that is generally kept hidden for justice cades of neoliberal transformation. from its spectacular representation. In particular, it brings into focus It clearly articulated anti-racist fem- across mobile the changing compositions of urban inist agitation around mobility and and dispersed politics born out of mass migra- visibility in the U.S.’s most global- constituents who tions and the new claims that have ized city. For bus dependent Van- emerged out of these processes. The couver activists, the film provoked don’t necessarily right to mobility, the right to pub- a sense of belonging to an extraor- share fixed common lic space, and the right to the city dinary social constituency, at once are contested within an analysis of connected to place but not necessar- spaces such as neoliberalism, civil rights, and an ily to conventional spaces of social neighbourhoods or emergent social movement tradi- movement such as the factory or the factories. tion based in the struggles around nation-state. Like Los Angeles, Van- social service cuts, privatization, couver is also a multi-lingual, cos- strike breaking, anti-union legisla- mopolitan, and heavily car-oriented en, especially women dependent on tion, and growing urban economic city, where the vast majority of pub- public transportation, experience in polarization. The BRU signals the lic transport users are low-income, the neoliberal city. challenges of organizing for justice racialized women. Los Angeles BRU The BRU’s organizing practice across mobile and dispersed con- organizers and Vancouver commu- draws on grassroots movements that stituents who don’t necessarily share nity activists discussed strategies for meet at the historical nexus of work- many fixed common spaces such dealing with public transit authori- ing class politics, internationalism as neighbourhoods or factories. As ties in a political culture where bus and feminism. Their style invokes Los Angeles BRU organizer, Martin riders are not considered political the grassroots labour movement’s Hernandez, explains: “Since de-in- subjects but recipients of a service. history of radical shop floor orga- dustrialization, buses are among the These representations and interac- nizing and community-based social last public spaces where blue-collar tions suggested the Vancouver bus unionism in combination with au- people of all races still mingle.” (qtd. could be a site for the elaboration tonomous Marxist feminist critiques in Davis 272). The BRU’s feminist of new social relations and radical of capitalist work and the invisibility challenge to the mainstream labour imaginations, pointing towards the of women in working-class history pact with Fordism and its fleeting building of what Paulo Virno calls a and politics. An especially impor- promises of a family wage, itself in- “non-state public sphere” (42). tant influence has been the - orga creasingly under attack over the last In this paper, I approach the nizing and theoretical contribution two decades of neoliberalism, is to BRU’s conception and practice of of movements explicitly oriented organize on the bus as a space of re- social unionism as an animating towards internationalism and social productive labour. force in feminist activism and in ex- reproduction, such as the interna- The group’s cultural politics in- panding the traditional trade union- tional Wages for Housework cam- jects a vital energy into the North ist conception of labour—which paign and its activists and theoreti- American conception of union orga- has historically focused on produc- cians, such as Selma James (Efting). nizing. In calling itself a union, the tion and the wage—to include the That movement’s groundbreaking Vancouver BRU draws on the best of
128 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME the labour movement’s traditions of tactics reminiscent of the Wob- the ongoing privatization of public agitation while avoiding mainstream blies2 with those of grassroots urban services and declining social rights, labour’s verticalism and privileging movements of the last four decades. these demands implicitly ask: How of “productive,” waged labour. The This dialogical feminist organiz- does public transit impact the lives BRU’s ability to draw on the city’s ing practice extends to the BRU’s of women who must travel long and grassroots multiculturalism, and the radical investigation strategy called complicated routes to ferry children, anti-racism at the core of its organiz- “Testimonial Research,” whereby buy food, attend to aging relatives as ing, draws us closer to this radical organizers conduct interviews so well as get to and from paid work? tradition, and meanwhile subverting that bus riders can narrate their own Importantly, the demands suggest the traditional union movement’s his- experience and analysis of the tran- a shedding of the reform/revolu- toric white male industrial image and sit system. This method makes con- tion binary by working through its fraught relationship with national the concrete experience and life de- capitalism. As the factory system and sires of riders. These objectives are industrial work metamorphoses dra- This political imagined and articulated through matically under neoliberalism, public strategy aims to a combination of “direct contact space may be shrinking but the bus organizing,” political street theatre is an expanding space (Dutton and harness the diversity and demonstrations, interventions Mann). The “factory on wheels” is a of the public transit at the Transit Authority’s meetings, specifically neoliberal urban form. It constituency as a organizing bus riders to participate is a mirror of the modern industrial in these meetings, and direct ac- factory that emerged out of the en- source of powerful tions designed both to publicize an closure movement, whereby expro- accumulated alternate vision of public transit as a priated mobile workers are forced common good and to economically together in capitalist social relations. knowledge, thereby impact the transit authority through Indeed, much of the BRU’s organiz- departing from the withdrawal of fare payments. ing efforts challenge the complicated conventional cultural politics of race, class, and Visibility and Encounter: The gender on the bus. claims of political Fare Strike The BRU’s politics of communi- representation. cation are significant to recognizing The Vancouver BRU’s first Fare multiple struggles within the city. Strike was launched on January The precariousness of public tran- crete a radical planning movement 14, 2005 following Translink’s (i.e., sit-dependent service workers, shift in which the users of public services B.C.’s Transit Authority) New Year’s workers, students, single moth- are recognized as constituent actors. resolution to raise transit fares for ers, and the elderly is the basis of Out of this dialogical, feminist the third time in five years. Transit their dialogical organizing model. research approach emerged the fares have increased by 40 per cent This political strategy aims to har- BRU’s slogan/demand for “the right over this period. The fare strike tac- ness, not contain, the diversity of to get around,” which seeks to oc- tic sets in motion a mass refusal in the public transit constituency as cupy the spaces of enclosure and order to make visible the economic a source of powerful accumulated overturn neoliberal command. Also power of transit users as the makers knowledge, thereby departing from elaborated through this process, of the public transit system. Accord- conventional claims of political rep- Vancouver’s BRU has tabled four ing to the BRU, over 5,000 passen- resentation. The BRU is not claim- “transitional demands.” These de- gers boarded the bus while refusing ing to represent bus riders but to mands articulate concrete struggles to pay the fare, demonstrating and open up a space for the articulation relevant to women’s lives through therefore politicizing the presence of democratic desires for mobility, an analysis of capitalist relations of public transit users and collec- justice and equality. of reproduction as well as produc- tively demanding a restoration of This aperture is enacted through tion. They consist of: the defence pre-hike fares. The strike aimed to tactics such as street actions, dem- and expansion of public services, win a concrete goal connected to onstrations, and traffic blocking an end to transit racism, a policy larger aims of social transformation. theatrics and, through what the framework that privileges environ- This process challenges the logic of BRU calls “direct-contact organiz- mental sustainability and public the reform or revolution debate by ing.” Talking to riders and drivers health and that puts women at the turning struggle into an argument and engaging in multi-lingual pam- centre of transit planning (Roberts). about public services as a commons phleteering on the bus, the BRU As a critique of top-down planning run by the people that use it. It is fuses industrial union organizing and a way of drawing links between a strategy first and foremost about
VOLUME 25, NUMBERS 3,4 129 moving people into collective action, dependent riders, those who have transit as a serious political issue. about encouraging bus riders to see experienced the greatest burden The contact on the bus was used as themselves as social actors that can from lagging services and increased a medium for linking the struggles of take part in transforming the world costs. The strategy was to target transit-dependent people to broader immediately around them—in this Translink at the fare box to leverage systemic critiques of capitalism. It case to make a fair and equitable restitution of the 2004 transit fare, a was specifically oriented toward the public transport system and to resist demand based on the expressed de- development of a community-level the fare increase as symptomatic of sire of riders. dialogue on neoliberalism, interna- the upward transfer of wealth that is The move towards this civil dis- tionalism, and public space. BRU a structural feature of neoliberalism. obedience strategy was a response organizers framed the fare increase In the fare strike model, social sub- to the limitations of the electoral as a service cut because, according jects can participate in a mass action system as evidenced by the inacces- to their research, the increased cost through not paying the fare—an sibility of local government politi- of travelling was directly pushing act of refusal that affirms political cians and the refusal of TransLink people off the bus. The Vancouver agency. to negotiate. After the BRU’s effort organizers pointed to the powerful Nine months later, in the lead up to push open top-down spaces of role of the transit industry lobby in to the 2005 municipal elections, political representation—postcard determining public infrastructure the BRU launched a second fare campaigns, testimonials at Trans- policies and resource allocation. strike. To experiment with form Link meetings—failed to stop the They explained the webs of corpo- and to build momentum through increase, organizers determined that rate and political interest—dredged a concentrated period of on-the- civil disobedience in the form of the through investigative research—be- bus organizing, media presence, fare refusal strike was necessary to tween the car dealers, gas industry, and ongoing community dialogue, create the space of dialogue about and private transit developers to the the strike took place over five days public transit as a justice issue. ruling provincial government. in November. From early morning Hence, the fare strike acted as both rush hour until past the evening a critique of electoral politics and Activism, Research, and the crush, organizers boarded the buses a way to make public transport an Oppositional Constituent and leafleted at major nexus bus election issue. It was, the organizers stops. The strike concentrated on explained, a way of moving people The fare strike of 2005 was my first those inner-city routes that move into action, and an opportunity to experience with on-the-bus organiz- the largest concentration of transit- educate people on the bus to see ing. At the crowded and tumultu-
130 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME ous intersection of Main Street and with the passengers. than in many other spaces of public Terminal Avenue, I joined several People on the bus were intrigued, organizing, it was on that bus that I BRU activists for the last shift of the not the least because of the infuriat- experienced a collapse between po- strike. The area, an industrial scale ed bus driver and this curious group litical activist and urban subject. In- transport hub with a constant flow of women wearing bright orange deed, the whole basis of the BRU’s of car traffic, is also the main nexus shirts respectfully testing what is organizing is rooted in its identifica- for a number of long inner city bus often a fraught relationship between tion as part of the transit dependent routes. It is an especially bleak area uniformed driver and passenger. public. This is, of course, integral of the city, especially as bus after bus At one point, the driver protested to their strength and credibility as rolls by filled to capacity, routinely loudly at an organizer’s charge that a movement and what distinguishes leaving passengers behind. The bus the transit system is a racist institu- social unionism from the hierarchi- we board is predictably over-crowd- tion, evidenced, she continued, in cal logic of representational politics ed. The organizer designated to be the routine cutting of services, such that separate leadership and subjects the liaison with drivers boarded first as the Night Owl bus, and in the on the one hand and the “organized” to explain the strike and express the relentless fare hikes, both of which and the “unorganised” on the other. BRU’s solidarity with the bus drivers’ disproportionately impact riders of This is the logic of the factory as a own struggles to halt the trend to- colour concentrated in low-wage separate inside to the outside of else- wards privatization, address the sys- shift work. Other riders immedi- where, whereas the BRU operates on tem’s terrible overcrowding and their ately surged into the debate. “Yes it the logic of the city as a constituent general demands for better working is!” a grocery-laden woman passen- everywhere. conditions. On this dark and rainy ger yelled back, “it is racist, sexist, Hence the struggles around pub- winter afternoon on a relentlessly anti-working people, anti-student lic transit represented in transna- crowded route, the bus driver was in and young people, they just do what tional movements like the BRU a foul mood. But after an outburst they want!” At this point an elderly point to some ways in which we of angry frustration, he permitted man—who moments before had can re-assess the long-held strategy the four of us to board provided we been complaining about the strike of the General Strike and look at it “didn’t harass any passengers.” action holding up passengers who in terms of generalizing the strike in As the bus inched into rush “have dinner waiting at home”— the neoliberal factory without walls hour traffic towards the bursting joined in proclaiming “and anti-se- or wages. This tactical shift suggests bus stops ahead, the BRU liaison nior citizen!” This moment suggests a perception of a more general shift sparked a dialogue with the driver how suddenly the bus-riding subject towards the sphere of social repro- about the difference between politi- became visible in a whole new way, duction, of the service economy and cal organizing and harassment. As asserting a political presence that the migrant workforce that is often passengers streamed onto the bus, came from the riders themselves. characterized by the generality of the organizer held her hand over At this point something shifted on its ties rather than the specificity of the fare box and informed them the bus, filling it with effervescent work sites. It suggests a collapsing of that we were on a fare strike. Pas- discussion. The bus had turned into the distinction between activist and sengers responded with a mix of be- a moving debate. The driver finally social actor. As in other spaces of wilderment, delight, and occasional ejected us several stops later, but mobility and public life, it renders apprehension, particularly after the passengers clapped and cheered in the bus a space of immediate trans- bus driver began screaming that we support as we flew off the bus to be formational politics. The BRU’s could not do this. The organizer met by a representative of the Tran- Fare Strike tactic is suggestive of discussed the politics of the strike sit Authority. the significance of feminist politics with both the oncoming passengers Throughout that strike I saw in mobility struggles in ways that and the driver. Another organizer many instances where the politically collapse the distinctions between addressed the bus as a whole, charg- marginalized urban subject became productive and reproductive labour ing that “the transit authority is a active oppositional constituent. Visi- and between activist and subject, racist, sexist, and inept institution ble on the faces of many riders as they distinctions that in many respects run by people who never have to entered the bus was the pleasure in propelled theoretical and tactical take the bus and who are respon- collective defiance of a system whose developments of social movements sible for deteriorating air quality routine and invisible humiliations throughout the twentieth century. and increased hardship for bus rid- are rarely recognized. The collective ers.” The rest of us distributed leaf- solidarity of refusal also provided a Fiona Jeffries lives in Vancouver and lets about the fare strike in Punjabi, break in the mundane frustrations is a Ph.D. candidate in the School Spanish, Chinese, and English, and of commuting on a beleaguered of Communication at Simon Fraser discussed the state of public transit public transportation system. More University. Her writing focuses on re-
VOLUME 25, NUMBERS 3,4 131 sistance to the new enclosures and she Cultural Studies 25 (3) (2003): Merlin Press, 2000: 259-275. is presently writing her dissertation on 201-223. Ramsey, Kikanza. “Riding the Free- the politics of fear and mobility in ur- Efting, Jennifer. Personal interview. dom Bus in L.A.” Forum for ban fortress North America. December, 2006. Applied Research and Public Policy Mann, Eric. “A Race Struggle, 15 (3) (2000): 77-79. 1Coined by Strategy Centre co- a Class Struggle, a Women’s Roberts, Martha. Personal interview. founder, Eric Mann, the term “fac- Struggle All At Once: Organizing June, 2005. tory on wheels” is meant to signal an on the Buses of Los Angeles.” Virno, Paolo. The Grammar of the overlooked continuity between the Socialist Register 2001. Ed. Leo Multitude. New York: Semiotext(e), industrial factory as a historic site Panitch and Colin Leys. London: 2004. of organized resistance to capitalism and the city bus where an increas- ingly diverse and dispersed work- ing-class population encounters one another in a similar kind of social FARIDEH DE BOSSET and organizational proximity that suggests radical possibilities for social a tilt justice organizing, only this time in the often overlooked and unlikely i. You judge my words iv. The dizzying swing figure of the lumbering urban bus. like the Carthage God, Baal. of the rocking chair 2 The Wobblies, the shorthand name Harsh and unforgiving. was comforting. for the Industrial Workers of the You fear the fertile womb, The tilt was menacing enough World (IWW) was an internation- the new moon, to be a reminder of the alist autonomous labour movement the first spring storm. bitterness born amidst North America’s pro- You fear the fresh breath of loss found labour upheavals at the turn erasing the old. yet of the sweetness of the twentieth century. The IWW of not falling. pioneered a radical labour move- ii. It was only a thorn ment dedicating to organizing the embedded v. They met in a washroom unorganized across industrial sectors, in the flesh of a finger, at the intermission national, racialized, and gendered di- confident of “Oh happy days”, vides. The Wobblies were especially in its lodgment, nesting. almost shivering groundbreaking in their organiza- But the flesh raged in their shriveled old skin, tional approach that was uniquely against the uninvited guest sad and struck by the play, horizontal and democratic and their protesting and defending two strangers sharing communicational style which em- its boundaries. an experience phasized street theatrics to commu- A fight that only blood and talking of their lives nicate across linguistic barriers. could wash clean. spent shoveling paper and laundry, References iii. And the tree sheltered keeping busy the crow. of pleasing the world Burgos, Rita and Laura Pulido. “The Now the darkness belonged with little delight, Politics of Gender in the Los Angeles to both. sustained by a faint hope. Bus Riders’ Union/Sindicato de They had to share it, And here they were at the end Pasajeros.” Capitalism, Nature, So- they had no choice. of a road and its detritus cialism 9 (3) (1998): 75-82. And somehow they found seeing their lives played Bus Rider’s Union (BRU). “A a common joy on the stage. Strategy for Grassroots Resistance.” in waiting And they went back for Vancouver: 2004. for the sun rise. the second act. Davis, Mike. “Runaway Train crushes buses.” The Nation 18 Sept. 1995: 270-274. Dutton, Thomas and Lian Hurst Farideh de Bosset is a poet who sees the storm in each soul and the seed of Mann. “Affiliated Practices and beauty in each cell and wants to share it with the world.
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