San Francisco transport strike

To put it mildly, something interesting is always happening in San Francisco. A few years ago, the more sociological – or maybe I should say morbid – tourists used to sneak off to look at the Haight-Ashbury district which bred, or rather collected, the hippies and the yippies.

It was a villainous, poor section of the city where young people, most of them from upper middle-class families, went into a slummy exile from the society they despised and the families they mocked. These youngsters had almost nothing in common with the earnest and essentially self-reliant types who pooled their allowances or their trust funds, bought land in some empty landscape and grew organic crops and, more or less, followed the early nineteenth-century American communes. 

Some of these people were admirable in their determination to renounce the comforts and materialism of the society they were brought up in, however solemn or over-simple the lonely societies they created. Some of them were an excuse for drifting into total lassitude and calling it meditation. I suppose the nightmare caricature of the remote and self-ruling commune was the little company of sad and half-demented youngsters, girls mostly, who lived with their king and idol, Charles Manson and who still parade near his prison and stay loyal to the hideous gospel of his modest version of Murder Incorporated. 

Haight-Ashbury was neither rural nor organic nor dedicated to anything but a vagabond exile. It's bang in a dreary section of the city and the new arrivals fell not into a religion, however bizarre, but into a pattern of squatting in some garret or basement, roaming their own night spots, getting high on speed or heroin or amphetamines, or all three, and sleeping it off by day. They bolstered their egos by spouting to each other a group jargon about the detestable life of the establishment, about the hypocrisy of marriage and its absurd requirement of a licence and a wedding ring, about their own experiences of squaresville in the town they were raised. They, also, through the big protest years of the late Sixties and early Seventies, could bolster their ideology by reading Eldridge Cleaver's 'Soul On Ice' and recounting with enthusiasm at night what Jerry Rubin had said at the trial of the Chicago Seven. 

Well, as Duke Ellington said, 'There've been some changes made' and the change has been so gradual that it seems to have escaped the watchdogs of the press. I was in San Francisco about a month ago and Haight-Ashbury was still there, still run down, still has its quota of the listless and the aimless, but only one in ten of them is a hippy or a yippy. There's been a slow but general exodus and one reporter had the wit to track a lot of them down and find out what happened to them. After the innumerable eruptions of hot air on the extreme and youthful left in the late Sixties, something was bound to give. 

Eldridge Cleaver fled the country, lived in Paris and Africa but now has come back, voluntarily, to stand trial and says that it took a couple of years or so of exile in other countries to feel a strange and wholly unexpected respect for his native land and its government. That must have been a wounding blow to the hippies who worshipped him and who, as a point of honour, spelled America with a 'k'. 

Worse followed. Jerry Rubin, the liveliest and most impenitent of the rebels, is rebelling no more. He's written his autobiography. He winces at the memory of his old self. He's tried everything from yoga to yoghurt and psychoanalysis to est and has proclaimed, not simply said, that he and every one of the Chicago Seven were as guilty as could be. These confessions and reformations have dented the ideology of the Haight-Ashbury yippies by depriving them of their gurus, but the spirit of penitence, or perhaps only of boredom, was in the air; also, the spirit of alarm. Professional dope pushers moved in and organised the trade and roughed up the dreamy hippies till many of them realised that they were now the victims of an underground establishment a good deal less laughable than the establishment of Mom and Dad. 

Well, as I say, nine-tenths of them have gone. Some have vanished without trace, some have seen the ecological light and gone into rural communes, some have begged forgiveness and taken up their college courses where they left off six or seven years ago. But more than 50 per cent have gone back to their hometowns and reconciled with their families, which is a tremendous figure and one we should never have guessed at as a wild possibility in the rampant independence and the mockery of the late 1960s. 

I don't know what the moral to draw from all this is. A cynic might say it only goes to show that even in matters of human values and principle, fashion is a powerful factor. Sooner or later, these sincere sheep will come out in some other uniform than torn jeans and beads and leather windbreaks. Some of them, if they can yet assert any individuality after years of non-conformist conformity, may even put down the guitar and take up some other instrument not of the group's choice, but of their very own. 

All in all, it looks like what the obituary writers call 'the end of an era' and it strikes me as poetic in a sad, sad way that San Francisco was where Patty Hearst finally holed up and was caught and was taken off to prison. 

Well, the latest news from San Francisco is a world away from Haight-Ashbury. News of protest and defiance squarely among the squarest of the city's inhabitants – the bus drivers and tube workers. They've gone on strike, no doubt for the fringe benefits, the tricky time-and-a-half, free time for pregnancies, post-natal care, recreation grounds, earlier retirement, shorter hours and all the things that nowadays come into any labour contract, but mainly they want more pay. The bus drivers think of the dustmen – sanitation personnel, as we racily call them. 

San Francisco dustmen struck and now get 13,500 – pounds – a year and the bus drivers have just turned down an offer of £14,000 a year. The strike has more or less isolated the working population that crosses the Golden Gate Bridge and comes in to daily work from the north. The tube strike is grievous on many grounds. It took years to design this tube and construct and it was advertised, just before it opened, as the world's most sophisticated tube or subway. That meant it was more streamlined, it was more technologically hip and it had the new air conduction vents with the super-heterodyne dynaflow motion and the portisfriggis. The problem was it wouldn't go – not for long, it was always breaking down, so that people who'd given up their cars or got used to leaving them home for the family made a point of not using the famous Bay Area Rapid Transit System and switched to the buses instead. This put an extra load on the buses and the bus drivers. Ergo, a strike of bus drivers. 

Now, heaven knows, there's nothing new in transit strikes in any country I may happen to be talking to but what is new and what ultimately may come to be called, if it isn't already, the 'San Francisco syndrome', is the simple fact of defining bus driving, garbage clearing and such, as professions entitled to the salary of what were once conceded to be the higher-paying and socially superior jobs. In San Francisco today and, indeed, all around the country, since the strike is prominently featured on national television every night, there must be thousands, perhaps millions of country doctors and city school teachers and even professors at eminent universities, who wish that they, too, could have their professions redefined so that they, too, might begin to earn $27,000 a year. 

Until about ten years ago, I think it was as true in America as in less affluent countries that the scale of wages was very much that which has held since the nineteenth century. I say 'scale' – the unwritten law that working people could earn only a certain maximum which stopped short of the general level of wages paid to the professions. Now this is so obvious that it's either not worth saying or it's one of those simple discoveries that nobody thought of before Aristotle. It is so obvious, anyway, that nobody seems to have said it. We've gone on down all the years during which labour management relations have grown more complex and more acrid, we've gone on talking about the labourer being worthy of his hire and the boons and blessings of the closed shop while the industrial and craft unions have been developing a whole new view of their monetary worth to society. 

Meanwhile, the professions, the learned professions, especially, have simply lived on the old assumption that being professionals and not workers, they must be living better than the average skilled factory worker. They have slowly and sadly learned that it is not so, that they, along with the old and the pensioned professionals, are the worst victims of inflation. It's odd that the more educated should have done nothing to redefine their worth to society and the less educated have done everything. 

At any rate, the San Francisco example will be copied. The city council howls that the city cannot possibly pay its bus drivers and tube drivers anything like $28,000 a year but the men simply say that even that's not enough. The city council is undoubtedly right in saying that the city cannot for long bear the burden of massive deficits in the city budget. San Francisco is headed down the drain along with New York, which, by the way, has done some painful penny-pinching but is not more than two years away from the prospect of a bankruptcy worse than that of 1975. 

And for all the wordy reports from economists and the lamentations of the city fathers and the manifestos of labour, nobody has a solution. If you think you have one, send it to the mayor of San Francisco. Never mind his name! Just, 'The Mayor of San Francisco, California' with 'Strike Solution' in the lower left hand corner of the envelope. 

If he gets it and it works, the Lord will bless you and, if you're an anti-abortionist, will multiply your kind.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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