Seven Oaks Magazine.

On October 16, after watching TransLink directors vote overwhelmingly in favour of moving forward on the latest bus fare increase, fourteen organizers from the Bus Riders Union (BRU) stood up, marched to the front of the room, and shut down the meeting. I am one of the organizers who shut down the meeting that day.

There has been considerable discussion about the reaction of Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell to our actions on that day. Mayor Campbell, in an ill-advised moment of candor, implied to the BRU and everyone else exactly what he thinks of transit-dependent people, given the label he hurled at us: “Total losers”, he yelled. About the BRU specifically, Campbell opined that we ought to stop using him as our “punching bag”.

Now, these poor-bashing statements are certainly interesting for what they reveal about the state of COPE and the divisions raging within the party (in fact, two elected COPE representatives are BRU members). But Larry Campbell and COPE are not the most interesting players in this sequence of events. I think that the events on October 16 are most important for what they reveal about the power of grassroots organizing and the role of organizing, direct action and lobbying efforts within the struggle to expand the rights of working class and marginalized people.

Larry Campbell was right about one thing. Public transit in the lower mainland certainly does produce winners and losers. Who are the losers when TransLink follows an ideologically-driven path of service cuts, fare hikes and privatization schemes? Bus riders – who are majority women and disproportionately people of colour and Aboriginal people. Big businesses like Bombardier are the clear winners. While the working class suffers fare hikes and service cuts, a small number of rich men make a killing from lucrative construction contracts and Public-Private Partnerships. This, in a nutshell, explains why the BRU sees the struggle for a first class public transit system as an important part of the class struggle in the GVRD.

The Bus Riders Union was founded in 2001 by a group of transit-dependent bus riders who came from various left traditions: anti-poverty organizing, labour activism, feminist organizing, and solidarity work with revolutionary movements in Latin America and the Philippines. The BRU was formed as a living experiment to see if we could build an explicitly anti-racist movement of working class and poor people, led by women.

There are two overarching objectives to this experiment. First, and most importantly, we want to build working class power by uniting the multi-racial working class that rides the bus. We use the strategy of direct contact organizing to achieve this objective. We build our own organizational power, while at the same time pressuring TransLink to actually implement real changes to the transit system. By concentrating on direct contact organizing, we win concrete victories that will improve the lives of transit dependent people; concrete victories boost our credibility in the community and make our direct contact organizing even more effective. If we are successful in our organizing strategy, the BRU will be ever more difficult for TransLink to ignore.

Like the groundbreaking anti-poverty group OCAP (the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty), the BRU fights to win. We fight to win because concrete victories are very important. Without proof that we can actually improve conditions, few people are interested in participating in grassroots organizing. When I ride the bus as a BRU organizer, many riders tell me that they support the BRU, but express disbelief that we will ever win any real positive change. As of March 2004, I can tell bus riders that positive change really can come from getting involved in the BRU. In March we won the return of late night buses after a very hard fought 18 month campaign, Night Owl Buses: End the Curfew Now! By winning these small but tangible victories, we hope to expand the expectations of bus riders of what they deserve, and encourage more people to become involved in the struggle for social and economic justice.

How do we win? Like I mentioned, we use a strategy of direct contact organizing to build the BRU as a manifestation of working class power. We concentrate the majority of our energy on actually riding the buses talking with bus riders. We engage in popular education on the bus; we claim the buses as a political space and hear input from thousands of bus riders. The process of organizing by talking to one person at a time is called direct contact organizing, and by placing this at the centre of our organizing we maintain our relevance and credibility with bus riders.

We use many different tactics to work towards victory. There are two that are of primary relevance to the events of October 16: principled lobbying and collective direct action. Principled lobbying means that we communicate our position regularly with the TransLink board and give them the opportunity to do the right thing. The October 16 meeting disruption was the culmination of over six months of communications with the TransLink board, in which time we made many delegations at their monthly board meetings and made special presentations on the impact of high fares on women bus riders. We also provided each TransLink director with a 130-page report detailing the impacts of high fares and bus cuts on the lives of working class and marginalized women in the GVRD. We certainly have not used TransLink directors as ‘punching bags’. On the contrary: we engage in ongoing communications with a goal of giving TransLink directors as many opportunities as possible to do the right thing. We recognize that Larry Campbell and the rest of the TransLink board have the ability to make tremendous improvements to the transit system, if they only possessed the will to do so.

When TransLink votes against the interests of transit dependent people, we engage in collective direct action. Direct action as a tactic has been used by millions of working class people around the world to protest attacks on their social, economic and political rights. When we shut down TransLink meetings or take to the streets, we follow some awesome footsteps indeed. Some of the greatest heroes of the twentieth century, including Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi and countless unheralded others, were vocal proponents of direct action as a tactic to build community power.

Transit dependent bus riders hold very little political or economic power. To be specific, we are late night office cleaners, McDonalds workers and welfare recipients; we are single moms, kids and people with disabilities. We are among the poorest of the working class. As we fight this fare increase we are up against some of the biggest economic and political players in British Columbia. Other ‘stakeholders’ in the municipal transit system include The BC Liberals, the 2010 Olympics Committee and the Bombardier Corporation, just to name a few.

Even as we face powerful opposition, bus riders retain the power to organize. And we will be organizing hard, because this proposed fare increase is an outrageous attack on transit dependent communities. The increase, if it goes ahead, will be the third in five years. It is an unconscionable attack on women, people of colour and Aboriginal people – communities already staggering from the effects of a six-dollar minimum wage, the erosion of labour standards and the gutting of welfare and other social services.

So the struggle continues. We are holding public meetings and maintaining our presence on the buses. We will be at the November 19 TransLink meeting to, again, give TransLink directors the opportunity to realize the ramifications of another fare increase and to vote against moving forward. One thing is for sure: if the fare increase does go through, there will be no more business as usual. If TransLink continues to attack the economic human rights of bus riders, we will fight back by impacting their own bottom line. The BRU promises a fare strike for early 2005 if the fare increase goes ahead.