During the Great Depression, Washington regulated the communications, banking and transportation industries, limiting Big Business’ ability to abuse its workers. But Corporate America never rests, and has tried ever since to roll back employee rights and working conditions. Congress deregulated intercity bus service 25 years ago.

The results of deregulation have been disastrous on the workforce. In 1983, there were 20,000 unionized employees at Greyhound and Trailways. The two carriers merged in 1987, and today there are only about 3,000 represented workers in total – an astonishing 85% decline.

The public has also paid a steep price. The cuts in service have been so deep that we no longer have a nationwide bus service. This has hastened the decline of small town America, as Greyhound was the last means of public transportation for thousands of small cities and towns across North America. It has also left the country with no mass means of escape in the event of natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

The unregulated marketplace is also a major contributor to the nation’s enormous highway death toll, both by encouraging transport companies to drive down wages of drivers and mechanics – forcing them to work longer hours to make ends meet until they succumb to fatigue – and by increasing the number of private cars on the road.

The deregulation tide may finally be turning. Financial practices that regulators wouldn’t allow are widely blamed for the current recession, and the airline industry’s recent troubles can also be traced to deregulation.

This may be the best opportunity in decades for ATU Local 1700 members to restore Greyhound to where it would be if the intercity bus industry hadn’t been deregulated. It won’t happen by itself. We must mobilize every union member if we want to stand any chance of succeeding.

The Contract Action Committees that members organized during the last negotiations must continue working as organizing committees. We have our work cut out for us: First we must organize ourselves and our new sisters and brothers from Carolina, Vermont and TNM&O bus lines and the maintenance companies. We must build a force that can negotiate from a position of strength. Then we must organize the hundreds of thousands of non-union bus workers across North America whose low wages and substandard working conditions undercut our ability to secure decent living standards. Our goal can be nothing less than organizing every intercity bus employee.

Political organizing is part of that effort. Congress must reverse the damage it did to our jobs and to public transportation policy when it deregulated the intercity bus industry. That means persuading our Congressional representatives to support us. This year we will “adopt a Representative” in Congressional districts across the country. In conjunction with that, we need to vastly increase our COPE campaign. And every member must help elect a worker-friendly president. Attend your union meetings for full discussions of these urgent matters.

Our jobs could be good jobs. There is no reason we should not have jobs that we would eagerly look forward to going to every day. It is up to us to work collectively to make our jobs into the good jobs we all know they could be.