Philly strike doesn't get much coverage. There is no such thing as a free press

Mass media lies! 

Both the Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle had a short (very short) paragraph on the transit strike that wreaked havoc in Philly yesterday  The SF Chron is a mass consumption paper while the Wall Street Journal is a paper that the ruling classes produce for themselves. 

While both reports were very easy to miss due to being so brief and buried away in the depths, the difference was interesting.

The WSJ had a little more detail and the piece was slightly longer. The reader (the capitalists class in the main) got a much better feel of the potential power of the workers and the effect of the stoppage. The strikers stalled the city's "bus, subway and trolley operations" the WSJ reported.  It addded: "The sudden strike....took many riders by surprise.." and that it "..all but crippled a transit system that averages more than 928,000 trips each week-day."

The Chronicle, which is meant for workers to read, opened with opinions by  "Labor experts" (these are generally academics and are confirmed as experts by universities) saying that "..striking transit workers may have a tough time earning sympathy from riders who are losing their own jobs and taking salary cuts." 

The Chronicle said nothing else other than that Ed, Rendell,  Pennsylvania's Democratic governor  was "stunned that the Union walked out on a proposed contract that included an 11.5% wage increase over five years."

Both papers have no interest in making struggles between bosses and workers headline news if they can avoid it.  The front page of the Chronicle had a major article on great white sharks.  Murder, rape, acts of individual terrorism, these are newsworthy and they are presented in such a way as to demoralize and convince us that people are inherently rotten and this state of society is a natural and everlasting state. Wars are good except wars between the classes. 

The conclusion the Chronicle wants its working class readership to draw is that the greedy Union workers are getting a great deal but are willing to disrupt people's lives (except the precious world series) for more.  Not that a 2% or so raise every year is a big deal given years of concessions and no doubt many more in the present contract.

It attacks the transit workers for not caring about the rest of us. The Wall Street Journal's readers do  not have to be convinced of this.  They fear workers unity and use the Chronicle to weaken it. Worker's unity threatens them and their profit making.

The reason this tactic will get more of an echo among workers than it should, is that the trade Union leadership has no counter to it; they refuse to spread local struggles and make them general.  To do this they would have to demand what workers need instead of what is acceptable to the employers and the Democratic Party.  The Unions are perceived as caring only about their own members because they refuse to go on the offensive against the the employers nationally (or internationally)  and fight for all workers and our communities. Consequently, strikes are isolated, cut off from the working class (and the middle class) as a whole.  They are also cut off from each other, form other Unions, even those belonging to the same international

You have a situation like here in the Bay Area where the transit workers leaders (subway, buses etc.) threaten to strike but the bosses know they don't mean it.  The Union leadership simply want the bosses to "cut less".  Top Union officials call it "Using a scalpel instead of a chain saw". this is a common phrase that is popular with them.  In other words, concessions are OK but don't be so mean. You can't win this way; they are also afraid the bosses will go to far and cause an uprising they can't surpress.

So, like in Philly, you have a situation here in the Bay Area that a contract of the potentially powerful BART transit workers comes up, a contract for a workforce with benefits and a retirement package that most workers only wished they could have, and a wage twice what most others take home every week, and the Union expects support or sympathy from the community. But it doesn't reach out to the community. 

A worker earning $12 an hour with no benefits and unable to get to work due to a transit strike by workers wanting to save their benefits and $35 an hour or at elast keep them, needs a reason to support this struggle never mind join it. "It's not good to cross picket lines" won't do it.

Like the police and the courts, the employers have a range of fronts to crush strikes and keep us from uniting against them; the Chronicle's small report about the Philly strike in today's edition is one of those fronts.  If strikes take on a momentum then the media war increases as does the police presence and strikebreaking.

But the employer's tactics are made all the more successful due to the failure of the heads of organized Labor to mobilize all workers in a generalized offensive against them. For any of us wanting to fight back, we cannot expect to be successful without a generalized offensive.

It's like fighting with one hand behind our backs