National Labor Relations Board finds streetcar contractor engaged in unlawful anti-union activity; Transit Union calls for a WMATA Takeover of Project
Media Contact: David Roscow, 301-431-7100
Washington, DC – As news surfaced that the beleaguered DC Streetcar will not be ready this year and an exposé showed that the project has drained more than $200 million in taxpayer funds, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that the private DDOT contractor charged with operating the streetcar engaged in unlawful anti-union activity, including threatening, intimidating, and interrogating workers who wanted to join a union.
The settlement decision from the NLRB requires RDMT/McDonald Transit and temp agency The Midtown Group to post in the workplace, email, and read aloud to streetcar employees a notice that the companies would not interfere with efforts by workers to unionize. Specifically, the companies committed to refrain from asking about individual employees’ support for a union, surveilling union activity, or threatening wage cuts or layoffs if employees unionized.
The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) says the decision is a legal victory, but that more must be done by Mayor Bowser’s office to improve the wages and working conditions for streetcar employees. According to the union, the central role of private contractors, especially a temp agency, in such a high-profile project puts public safety and service at risk, as detailed in a peer-review report released in July. It also transforms public transit jobs that once brought DC families into the middle class into low-wage “sweatshops on rails.” For example, a DC streetcar operator starts with an hourly wage that is nearly half that of a Metrorail operator.
“Even after we brought these issues to their attention, Mayor Bowser and the DC Council continued forking over millions of taxpayer dollars to the most incompetent transit contractor in the nation. That is bad news for workers and for people on the X2 stranded behind empty streetcars. You don’t create pathways to the middle class by undercutting wages and rewarding scofflaw contractors,” said ATU International President Larry Hanley. “This is a failure of management and accountability that runs from the streetcar barn straight over to the Wilson Building.”
According to ATU organizers, which a majority of streetcar workers had pledged to join before eight of their union-supporting co-workers were suddenly fired in February, the reading of the notice took place on December 3rd. Immediately thereafter, they say, workers renewed their interest in joining a union. Midtown staff, however, angrily demanded that conversations between employees and union organizers end, a move the union says shows the depth of anti-worker animus at the project.
The decision came in response to ATU filing an unfair labor practice charging that DDOT contractor RATP Dev. McDonald Transit, and its subcontractor, temp agency The Midtown Group, illegally fired 8 of their employees in retaliation for union activity. While the NLRB did not find enough cause to reinstate those eight workers, their affidavits and the subsequent proceedings proved that the contractors had violated federal labor law, a development that opens new opportunities for streetcar workers to organize without illegal interference.
Public testimony from employees has made clear that working conditions not only did not improve under the oversight of Mayor Bowser’s DDOT, but in fact worsened. According to former streetcar staff, supervisors and managers knowingly directed workers to violate safety and operations protocol, interrogated workers who had spoken with union organizers, and threatened that wages would be slashed and jobs eliminated if workers joined the union.
“Our city and the Mayor should not support an outsourcing model that abuses and impoverishes workers and continues the shenanigans of wasting taxpayer dollars,” Hanley continued. “Even with all of its own serious problems, we would rather see WMATA run this project directly. I’m calling on Mayor Bowser to remove these rogue contractors, recognize the workers’ right to join ATU Local 689, and begin the process of integrating this into a publicly-operated and publicly-accountable transit system.”