STAR-BULLETIN / 1971
Mayor Frank Fasi accepted delivery of buses shipped from Texas, for the city's bus system.
1971 strike
prompted city to
create public fleetFormer Mayor Fasi led
the effort to buy and expand
a system run by Harry Weinberg
About 76,000 daily bus riders had to scramble for rides to work and school for two months during the last Oahu bus strike 32 years ago.
On Jan. 1, 1971, 350 drivers and other employees walked away from their jobs. It was the second time Hawaii Teamsters Local 996 had struck against Honolulu Rapid Transit, a private transportation company that served only the metropolitan area and was owned by legendary businessman Harry Weinberg.
When drivers began returning to work on March 1, it was to a city-owned system that would triple in size and cover routes islandwide within five years.
But for the 1971 strikers, it took eight months for service to be restored to a pre-strike level of 108 vehicles on 15 routes and for all employees to get back to full work and full pay.
"The timing was right," said former Mayor Frank Fasi last week of the city takeover. City Hall, not the bargaining table, was the main arena as the mayor and the City Council moved to create a public transportation system.
Fasi said the city benefited from relatively new federal legislation that made U.S. Department of Transportation funds available for public transportation. More than 100 municipalities on the mainland had already received funds.
The second stroke of good timing was that Dallas had 50 buses immediately available, he said.
The flamboyant mayor went to Texas to complete the deal, returning to the Honolulu stage in a Stetson hat and boots.
"I told them to give me 60 days and we would have a public bus. Well, it took me 57 days. The bottom line was a need that had to be taken care of," said Fasi, who considers the public bus service "one of my legacies."
In 1971, Windward, Leeward and Central Oahu service was provided by other companies, and Honolulu riders got some relief when 13 Leeward Bus Co. vehicles were made available for city routes.
Newspapers reported the effects on riders, with military bus service organized for base workers and staggered work shifts attempting to meet parking problems. Discussions arose about the benefits, dangers, and legality of hitchhiking.
The seeds of government discontent with the private bus operation sprouted in 1967, when the island's longest bus strike to date -- 67 days -- left an estimated 70,000 daily commuters in distress.
That strike "had convinced public officials and both Honolulu newspapers that such costly disputes could be avoided in the future only if the transit system was operated as a public service," wrote the late Bernard W. Stern in his 1986 book "Rutledge Unionism, Labor Relations in the Honolulu Transit Industry."
Stern wrote that the U.S. Department of Transportation informed the city in August 1970 that Honolulu was eligible to receive two-thirds of the acquisition cost of HRT, Leeward Bus Co. and another Weinberg company, Wahiawa Transport.
Neither Weinberg nor Teamster president Art Rutledge was averse to a city takeover.
"It was a squeeze play," said Walter Heen, who was City Council chairman at the time. "Weinberg wanted to sell the franchise and Rutledge figured it would be easier to negotiate with the city."
"I was concerned about whether all those bus drivers would become civil servants and get longevity, pension and benefits as city employees," said Heen.
Four months before the strike, Fasi presented the City Council with a plan to:
>> Apply for $10.3 million in federal funding.
>> Buy the private bus companies' assets.
>> Buy 160 new buses over a five-year period.
The Council authorized the purchase of HRT in September 1970 and in subsequent bills, appropriated $2 million for the down payment on HRT and $2.7 million for new buses.
"For once we weren't bucking each other," said Heen of the mayor-Council accord on the issue. "The City Council was not averse to doing something to help resolve the strike and achieve long-term peace in running transit."
Mass Transit Lines Inc., a company specifically organized to run the transit system for the city, was incorporated in September 1970. It reportedly took Weinberg by surprise when four of HRT's top management left to become the first MTL officers.
The Teamsters had voted to strike after their contract expired Sept. 1, 1970, but they postponed the deadline three times, the last time because a strike would inconvenience people at holiday time.
Just four days before the strike began, the city, union and MTL signed an agreement that Local 996 would continue to represent the workers and all bargained rights would be continued.
The current debate about raising bus rates echoes the last strike. HRT said the only way it could meet union demands for higher wages was to raise the 25-cent fare. But the state Public Utilities Commission refused Weinberg's 1970 request for a 5-cent fare increase and his 10-cent hike proposal one month after the strike began.
The 1971 bus strike wound down rather than coming to a defined finale:
>> In May, the Teamsters negotiated a 50-cent raise for drivers, up to $3.97 an hour, with the new management company.
>> Weinberg sold most of his buses in increments to the city over the next several months and went out of the transportation business without an announcement. He got less than half of the $9 million pricetag he put on HRT property, the Alapai Street terminus land as well as vehicles when, two years later, state courts upheld the utility commission appraisal.
>> In 1972, the city took over North Shore and Windward service from Leeward Bus Co. and continued to expand into an islandwide service.
A 1974 Hawaii Employers Council report said that "for strike statistic purposes, we have arbitrarily set the ending date for this dispute at March 1971, when these strikers were determined eligible to receive unemployment insurance benefits."
In 1992, the city switched the management of the bus system to Oahu Transit Services with little fanfare and MTL Inc. was dissolved.
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Honolulu‘s last bus
stoppage featured
colorful charactersThe three protagonists were
>> Harry Weinberg had taken over HRT in 1959 from the Castle family, which had held the franchise since the 1920s. Investor, owner and director of several corporations, including bus companies in Dallas and New York, Weinberg was portrayed as ruthless in his shrewd and often hostile acquisitions of that and other local corporations. That negative image has been eclipsed in recent years by charitable bequests spread liberally in the community by the Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Foundation, which he created before his death in 1990 at age 82.
on the public stage long after
the 1971 commuter crisis:>> Art Rutledge, who was Weinberg's match in irascible and wily temperament, dominated for 40 years the local union he had founded. He had led HRT workers out for 36 days in 1948 and 35 days in 1950, as well as a brief 1946 "no fare" strike in which drivers declined to collect fees from riders. He retired in 1990 and, when he died in 1997 at 90, it was estimated that he had led almost 200 strikes or work stoppages as head of Local 996, and of the Local 5 Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union.>> Frank Fasi's five subsequent terms as mayor were more often characterized by disputes with the Council than détente. About the current strike threat, he said Friday, "The city administration should be into it with both feet. The amount of burden (city subsidies) put on the tax load would be peanuts compared to the benefits for working people, kids and senior citizens." If the city government got the full share of the hotel room tax, as do other municipalities, there would be no problem funding public transportation, he said.
