por David Bacon
San Jose city workers and union members rallied to protest a proposal to take away bargaining rights from the union. (PHOTO BY DAVID BACON)
Members of the city workers union in San Jose, the capital of California’s Silicon Valley, marched Tuesday to City Hall and packed the council chambers, in a growing confrontation with Mayor Chuck Reed over proposed budget cuts. Yolanda Cruz, president of Local 101 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, spoke to a rally of hundreds of union members in a church behind City Hall. The union will fight, she said, not just the imposition of drastic service reductions, but also the Mayor’s threat to go to the ballot with a measure to require an election every time city workers want a raise or benefit increase.
“We will not be forced to pay for the city’s economic crisis with our bargaining rights,” she declared. Cruz was supported by the union’s national secretary treasurer, Lee Saunders. He compared Reed to Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, who rammed a measure through that state’s legislature drastically curtailing public worker union rights. “They think they can bring Wisconsin to California,” Saunders thundered to an angry crowd. “That’s just sonot going to happen.” The church exploded in cheers.
Later union members marched to City Hall for a second rally with community supporters. Cindy Chávez, former city council member and now executive secretary of the South Bay Labor Council, told union members that the rest of Silicon Valley’s labor movement would give them the same support public workers in Wisconsin received from unions throughout the country.
Local labor and community groups have backed Local 101 in previous conflicts with the city. In 1981 the union struck for nine days, and won the nation’s first contract provision guaranteeing women equal pay for work of comparable worth. At the time, women earned 18 percent less than men in sex-segregated jobs.
The strike challenged sex discrimination that was pervasive throughout city employment. But even more, it was an indictment of the low wages and inequality suffered by hundreds of thousands of women who make up the vast majority on the production lines in Silicon Valley’s huge electronics plants. That fight earned the union respect from working women in the valley that has lasted 30 years.
Mayor Chuck Reed intends to put that loyalty to the test. San Jose has a projected budget deficit of $115 million for next year. He has announced drastic service cuts, including the elimination of over 400 city jobs. Citing a “fiscal emergency,” his threatened initiative on the November ballot would raise the city’s retirement age and cut the pensions of retirees.
