Portside

As we celebrate Rosa Parks' birthday, it is an ideal day to promote the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act and urge our elected representatives in Congress to pass it.

This uprising is the result of repeated failures by leaders to take the problem seriously. This country has a 20% unemployment rate, a global pandemic, and racist police institutions. Ignoring these root causes of unrest won't make them go away.

Bus drivers and subway workers are dying from coronavirus at an alarming rate, and transit union leaders are calling for aggressive action to make them safer.

The 200,000-member-strong Amalgamated Transit Union cited Biden’s electability against President Trump.

Transit in the Washington, D.C., area is heavily unionized. But until recently there was one stubborn holdout—the DASH bus system in Alexandria, Virginia.

Union organizers in states like Tennessee are hoping to change that. Since 2010, the number of union members in Tennessee has grown from 115,000 to 155,000. Still, only 5.7 percent of Tennessee workers are members of a union.How To Patrick Green, even one new member is a big deal. Green is a president of Local 1235, which is part of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Nashville, Tennessee. In the three years that he has been leading the union, the local’s membership rate went up by 36 percent, despite being in a right-to-work state.

The May 26 attacks on the MAX light rail train hit close to home for many local union members.

The breakthrough came after the worker deaths in Walnut Creek on Saturday. By Sunday, union leaders said they were ready to make concessions. By Monday, both sides agreed to sit down and a deal was struck in time to get limited train service running for the Tuesday morning commute.

Negotiations between BART and Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 and Service Employees International Union Local 1021 began months ago, but the two sides remained tens of millions of dollars apart on wages, pensions and health care benefits last week.