Bus drivers, carpenters, and musicians

Good afternoon! We’ve got stories on San Francisco workers, past and present, and some hard-working international musicians .

Back in the day, “free Muni” was more than a slogan––it grew out of the activism of now-retired Muni drivers like John Murray, Ellen Murray, and Victor Grayson. Grayson says that blaming the lack of funding on passengers or drivers has always been a mistake. “The real issue is what public transportation does, in terms of the economic vitality of the community,” says the former Black Panther, who drove for Muni from 1994 to 2014. “And responsible corporations need to pay their fair share.”

John Murray, who drove from 1974 to 2004, says the original campaign for free Muni was “part of the revolutionary spirit of the times.” (Those were also times when driving a bus paid a living wage with a pension.) Ellen Murray, who began driving in 1985, noted that not all drivers shared the trio’s radical politics––though some advocated for free Muni in other ways. One driver used to tell passengers who didn’t have the fare to wait for Ellen Murray’s bus. “He’d say, ‘The free bus is behind me.’ Because I wasn’t going to push people about the fare, and he knew it,” she said.

Today, fancy restaurants are selling handcrafted pizza up the street from the Muni yards––but there are still picket lines in the Mission. Flour + Water’s Mission location is being picketed by the carpenters union, which alleges that carpenters working on the restaurant’s forthcoming North Beach space are paid less than half the union’s $57/hour “standard.”

The union alleges that Cookline, the construction company hired by Flour + Water, has subcontracted carpentry from a Salinas-based building company which pays its carpenters $28/hour and offers no benefits. This hourly wage is the price (before tip or tax) of a plate of the restaurant’s pork raviolini. Chris Brown, co-owner of Cookline–which has worked on several successful, high-end restaurants in the city–could not confirm the wages, because Cookline uses a subcontractor. “I wouldn’t know what other companies pay their employees,” he said.

Very few people get rich from working as experimental jazz musicians, but some continue to improvise. Croatian-born jazz vocalist Astrid Kuljanic makes her Bay Area debut Saturday at the Red Poppy Art House with her Transatlantic Exploration Company. Kuljanic grew up in a highly musical family in Rijeka, a Croatian port city on the Adriatic where music was woven into everyday life–– if someone didn’t pull out an accordion, it wasn’t a party.

During a weekly gig at a Yugoslavian bar in Astoria, Queens, Kuljanic built a quartet featuring her husband Mat Muntz on bass and gajda (Serbo-Croatian bagpipes), Ben Rosenblum on accordion, and São Paulo-born Rogerio Boccato on Brazilian percussion. “The aesthetic came out of the instrumentation,” Muntz said. “It’s pretty eclectic.”

As is the style of the sidewalk musician in Walter Mackins’ SNAP today.

More soon,

Sara