News

Americans for Transit The Center See Strong Career Pathways as the Key to Increasing Transit Support

Posted September 2013

                                   
Since the start of the great recession, transit workers, riders, and the industry as whole have faced financial distress and political attacks. Layoffs, route abandonments, fare increases and service cuts in nearly every city across the country face riders who rely on the systems every day as well as the transit workers who keep these systems running.

In June of 2012, Larry Hanley, both the International President of the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Center’s Board Chair, teamed up with Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First to form a new national non-profit, Americans for Transit (A4T). A4T’s mission is to create, strengthen, and unite transit rider groups across the country to build a national organizing and political movement in support of the nation’s struggling public transit infrastructure. Hanley founded A4T on the premise that while ATU’s 200,000 members are better organized than the millions of daily transit riders in America, those transit riders are much more numerous, and if united, political powerful.

Americans for Transit assists local unions, community, transit advocacy and rider organizing groups in building strategic campaigns and partnerships to win on a variety of public transit issues including the following:

*  Stopping service cuts in Seattle
*  Preventing privatization in Atlanta
*  Expanding transit in Raleigh
*  Building public support for stronger driver assault legislation in
    Pennsylvania

The work the Center does around workforce development and creating pathways to good transit jobs is a critical part of the community-labor puzzle of building more public and political support for mass transit. The need for a new workforce to fill the good jobs across the transit industry is an opportunity that cannot be understated. Creating pathways to transit jobs can create pathways to the middle-class and provides an enormous organizing opportunity in the communities that rely on public transit - mostly the nation’s large cities. That is why Americans for Transit continues to work with the Transportation Learning Center to align their community organizing efforts with the Center’s work to get low-income and people of color into transit jobs.

For more information on A4T’s campaigns or to identify a group in your community visit the A4T website or contact info@americansfortransit.org.