(08-17) 20:16 PDT -- A wave of anger over a threatened BART strike, averted hours before a Monday walkout, carried a sobering message to employee unions and politicians: In hard economic times, voters in the liberal Bay Area can run out of patience over the demands of organized labor.
The palpable outrage at the 900 rank-and-file members of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 - expressed in Internet forums and on SFGate.com, The Chronicle's Web site - helped settle the impasse after politicians, other unions and political leaders pushed for a last-minute deal.
But the politics of the BART settlement present a challenge for powerful labor unions as candidates are shaping their messages for the governor's race next year, experts say.
"A lot of anger reflects the uncertainty of the economy and the pain that a lot of people were already feeling," UC Berkeley Professor Harley Shaiken, a labor expert who closely tracked the BART negotiations, said Monday.
Rather than seeing the strike threat as a sign of workers standing for their rights, he said, the public seemed to be saying, " 'They're getting something while I'm giving up something. That makes me angry.' "
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/17/MNOD199P6E.DTL