The trains are running again in the San Francisco Bay Area as two union and Bay Area Rapid Transit management have reached a tentative deal ending a four-day strike. The deal must be ratified by union members and by the BART board, but in the mean time the strike is ending and normal service is expected to resume by Tuesday afternoon.
The strike had been prompted in large part by management's desire to be able to set aside existing work rules, which workers said would compromise safety. Those safety concerns were reinforced in one of the worst possible ways Saturday when a train struck and killed two workers inspecting tracks. Monday night the National Transportation Safety Board announced that the train had been driven by what they termed an "operator trainee"—a scab, in other words. That foregrounded workers' safety concerns in general and certainly concerns over management's plans to use scabs if the strike dragged on. In the tentative deal, the unions reportedly made concessions on rules involving technology, which BART management had made much of even while poo-pooing safety concerns.
The strike highlighted some of the Bay Area tech community's disgraceful tendencies, with wealthy tech executives outraged that BART workers were fighting to stay in the middle class and retain a reasonable expectation of safety. As Corey Robin wrote, "The technorati like to think of themselves and their gizmos as 'disruptors.' They want to see everything disrupted—except their morning commute." To them, mere workers shouldn't have the power to disrupt. But if the economic race to the bottom is going to be slowed, workers will have to do a lot more disrupting, so unless you want to see vastly more inequality, learn to love disruption from below, not just from technological innovation.