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	Workers Vanguard No. 1168	17 January 2020

NYC Transit

TWU Tops Push Through Rotten Contract

For a Class-Struggle Union Leadership!

The members of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, who keep the subways and buses running in New York City, have been saddled with another rotten contract by their sellout leadership. The new agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) was ratified by a two-thirds margin on January 9, but well under half of the 35,650 eligible TWU members returned mail ballots. The four-year contract’s paltry annual wage increases—maxing out at 2.75 percent in the final year—and new out-of-pocket health care costs are an affront to union members trying to eke out a living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Transit workers are compelled to work overtime just to be able to provide for their families. Many also have to endure grueling commutes from distant towns where housing is more affordable.

The Local 100 bureaucracy has committed itself in the contract to collaborating with the company to enforce speedup and to target workers who take “too much” paid time off. This makes it complicit in the MTA’s vicious disciplinary system, dubbed “plantation justice” by the heavily black, Latino and immigrant workforce. The contract does nothing to address the needs of the growing number of women workers, instead palming off questions like adequate bathroom facilities and maternity leave to a joint committee. Pregnant women often work right up until childbirth and have to return to work soon after delivery.

For months after the previous contract expired last May, Local 100 president Tony Utano kept the membership in the dark about negotiations, only to issue empty bluster in the press against the slash-and-burn proposals of the bosses. Amid this theater, he called a rally on October 30 to allow angry union members to blow off steam. Many of the 8,000 who turned out were “Tier 6” workers furious about being shackled with substandard pensions under state law. This contract does nothing to change their inferior status.

It was the previous Local 100 head John Samuelsen, a labor flunkey of New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who agreed to consign all subsequent new hires to Tier 6, which jacked up paycheck deductions for the pension fund and slashed pension benefits. Today, Samuelsen’s protégé Utano lamely calls to “fix Tier 6” by lobbying the state government in Albany—knowing full well that Cuomo, who runs the MTA, is the architect of this anti-worker scheme! The trade-union bureaucracy in the U.S. is an integral component of the Democratic Party dedicated to preserving the profit system. Time and again, trade-union officials like Utano bind the interests of labor to those of the capitalists.

Wage and benefit tiers erode the very purpose of unions by pitting veteran workers against younger ones. The bosses, with the acquiescence of labor officialdom, use such divisive measures to sap the fighting strength of the union. Many workers across the country are fed up with tiers, as shown by the UAW auto strike last year. Equal pay for equal work! Full benefits for all!

The multiethnic riding public—working people who rely on the subways and buses to get to their jobs every day—knows firsthand how decrepit the system is. In 2018, the MTA brought in union-buster Andy Byford to “fix” NYC Transit by wringing out sweat and blood from the unionized workforce (see WV No. 1127, 9 February 2018). Early in his tenure, Byford devised a scheme to hire non-union private contractors to deep clean filthy subway stations, while union cleaners “observed” them. His real intent was to “deep clean” the union, and the program is now the leading edge of the bosses’ longstanding effort to gut the TWU. The use of these contract workers poses the danger of a phaseout through attrition of union cleaners, many of whom are black, Latino and female.

By agreeing to the cleaner program last year, Utano criminally handed to the bosses a dagger that cuts against industrial unionism, that is, the organization of all workers, regardless of trade or title, into one union. Industrial unions maximize the collective strength of the workers. The new MTA contract codifies Byford’s scheme and sets the stage for the elimination of TWU cleaner jobs—long a path to higher-paid titles, especially for black women. The Local 100 leadership should not be aiding and abetting cuts to union positions, but rather should launch a fight to stop and reverse the subcontracting, while aggressively organizing the existing contract workers who toil at sub-union wages and conditions.

Down With Bosses’ “Law and Order”!

One of the most pernicious provisions of the new agreement is the explicit pledge by the union “to aid the MTA in reducing fare evasion.” Currently, Cuomo and the MTA bosses are deploying 500 new cops to “fight fare beaters and assaults.” For his part, Utano has screamed for more police to “protect” transit workers.

The Progressive Action (PA) opposition to the Utano leadership is no better. PA leader Tramell Thompson bleats that “police officers are not on the platforms where they belong” in order to supposedly keep transit workers safe. While Thompson occasionally taps into felt anger against plantation justice, he consistently channels it into a pro-cop program.

Transit workers should remember Darryl Goodwin when they hear such calls for more cops on the platforms (see WV No. 1116, 25 August 2017). The 54-year-old black station agent was hounded to death by the NYPD, the courts and the MTA, for not being quick enough to open a gate for cops chasing a “perp” in the subway. The racist cops pose a deadly danger not only to workers but all the oppressed, as vividly demonstrated by three incidents last fall in Brooklyn subways, where the thugs in blue brutalized black youth and a Latina churro vendor (see article above). The police form a central pillar, along with the courts, prisons and military, of the racist capitalist state, enforcing the dictatorship of the capitalist ruling class.

Disgustingly, both PA and the current TWU bureaucracy falsely portray the Police Benevolent Association as a band of class brothers. Cops are not workers. If transit workers were to strike, it would be the guard dogs of capital who would try to break the picket lines and bring in the scabs—just as they terrorize black and Latino youth on the streets and in the subways. Cops and “Transit Property Protection Agents” (security guards represented by the TWU) have no place in the labor movement!

Tailing both the Utano regime and the PA wannabes is Local 100 Fightback (long known as Revolutionary Transit Worker, or RTW). As Thompson’s occasional bloc partners, these opportunists put out a flyer last month that does not mention, much less oppose, the pro-cop “law and order” poison of PA and the in-bureaucrats (“10 Reasons to Vote NO,” 18 December). Shortly after Trump was elected, RTW abandoned any “socialist” pretenses, enlisting outright in the Democratic Party “resistance.” More recently, this outfit has openly promoted so-called “progressive” Democratic representatives of the class enemy like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The “law and order” campaign to rid the subways of the homeless and “fare evaders” can only drive a wedge between workers and the victims of this depraved capitalist system. In NYC, Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio, who also trades on a “progressive” reputation, enforces the racist housing and mental health policies that drive homeless people underground. The Utano leadership and all current oppositions, including PA and Fightback, share a common political framework that chains working people and the oppressed to the vicious rulers who exploit and readily discard like rubbish so many when there is nothing left to squeeze.

Capitalism’s reducing of the downtrodden and mentally ill to a desperate state, combined with the frustrations fueled by delays, breakdowns and fare enforcement, is the culture medium that has bred episodic assaults on transit workers. The MTA bosses’ hue and cry over “fare evaders” is not only a pretext for more racist cop terror but also an attempt to obscure their responsibility for the decaying transit infrastructure. Management, acting in the service of the capitalist politicians and its Wall Street creditors, has let the system rot, making working conditions miserable and unsafe for Local 100 members and the rest of the working class who ride the subways and buses.

It is past time to return to the historic position of the TWU: For free mass transit! Ripping out the turnstiles would strengthen the link between the ghettos and barrios and the cause of labor. Mass transit should be a service for the public good, not a steady income stream for finance capital, which makes out like bandits by collecting interest on the MTA’s $41 billion debt. Labor must fight for billions for transit and other mass public works, and would do well to take a page from the unions in France, which have been waging strike action—with transit and rail workers in the forefront—to beat back a government attack on pensions. The TWU should also be leading a fight against cop attacks on black and Latino youth, as well as the homeless. The issue of hazardous working conditions cries out for establishing independent elected union safety committees with the power to shut down unsafe work.

But don’t look to the pro-capitalist bureaucrats who run the unions today to wage such vitally necessary battles. A new, class-struggle union leadership must be forged that is committed to the understanding that the interests of the workers and the capitalists are irreconcilable. Such a leadership would advocate for independence from the capitalist class and their Democratic and Republican parties. Labor and its allies need a revolutionary workers party, a tribune of all the oppressed built in struggle and devoted to putting an end to the rule of the exploiters.

Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics

As always, in the lead-up to the contract expiration, bourgeois politicians and the tabloid press found a way to demonize transit workers. Supposedly “privileged” Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) workers were the piñata representing all MTA workers. Last spring, Cuomo raged against alleged “overtime abuse” on the LIRR. The capitalists sought to intimidate working people by blowing smoke about LIRR and NYC Transit workers “stealing” from the public.

In fact, the MTA keeps its crumbling system running through speedup and dangerous use of overtime. As the penny-pinching Byford made clear, paying overtime is more “efficient” than paying “for a full-time employee.” The union tops’ appeal to members to work overtime and “make more money” is an accommodation to the MTA’s refusal to hire the new workers necessary to maintain the system. What is needed is a fight for a reduction in work hours with no loss in pay, as part of a program for full employment—not just in NYC transit and commuter rail, but across all industries nationwide.

There is a disparity in pay and disciplinary penalties between the largely minority Local 100 workers and the predominantly white LIRR and Metro-North commuter rail workers. PA seizes on these inequalities to push the false notion of “white skin privilege,” which shifts responsibility for such disparities from the racist MTA brass, where it belongs, to the white workers who are exploited by exactly the same employer. While hitting black workers the hardest, the whip cracked by the boss is aimed at the entire workforce to drive it to the limit.

PA plays into the bosses’ divide-and-rule ploy, which can only leave black workers isolated and vulnerable. In this country, the special oppression of black people is integral to the capitalist system of exploitation. The labor movement as a whole must fight for black freedom and equality if it is to open the road to its own emancipation.

Thompson’s pushing “white privilege” also serves to alibi the union tops who have repeatedly screwed the LIRR workers. As Local 100 president in 2014, John Samuelsen sealed his alliance with Cuomo by ramming through a concessionary contract for NYC Transit. That deal was designed to pull the rug out from under a looming strike by the many craft unions representing the LIRR workers. Like déjà vu all over again, Utano’s new giveback contract not only comes at the expense of Local 100 members but also will be used to whipsaw the LIRR unions into line—the contract of the largest one expired in December.

To fight racist discrimination and to win equal wages and benefits for all at the highest level require joint, integrated struggle of city transit workers and regional rail workers. Common struggle could also lay the basis for a single, powerful union of all transport workers in the region.

But any effort by transit workers to withhold their labor would run up against the anti-strike Taylor Law. The December 2005 strike by Local 100 members holds lessons, both positive and negative. By openly defying the Taylor Law, it started down the only path that could score a win for labor, while garnering the support of working people throughout the city, not least in the ghettos and barrios. However, as Democratic politicians railed against the union and the courts issued injunctions, the strike was sabotaged by an array of labor bureaucrats. The TWU International initially opposed the strike and city union chiefs pressured for its end.

Without a contract in hand or a pledge of amnesty from reprisals, Local 100 head Roger Toussaint called it off. Ending the walkout while it was solid and popular subjected Local 100 as well as its individual members to crippling fines and bred demoralization and hostility toward the union. At one point, up to half the membership had stopped paying dues.

The Taylor Law can be rendered a dead letter. To do so requires a fighting alliance of all city and state unions under its lash—from Local 100 to those representing sanitation workers and teachers. The only way workers ever won anything was by wielding their social power against the bosses. The unions in this country, from longshore to auto to transport, were built in defiance of the bosses’ anti-union laws.

The question of leadership is crucial. The workers must be armed with a program to fight it out class against class. A workers party, forged in opposition to the Democrats and all other bourgeois parties, would broaden the struggle against the bosses into a fight to sweep away the capitalist system itself and usher in a workers government.