Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 895	6 July 2007

Payback for 2005 NYC Transit Strike

State Revokes TWU Dues Checkoff

Rip Up Slave-Labor Taylor Law!

NEW YORK CITY—In an attempt to bankrupt Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 for its solid and popular three-day strike in December 2005, a New York state court has revoked the union’s dues checkoff. As of June 1, members’ dues were no longer automatically deducted from paychecks by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). In response, Local 100 has taken measures to collect its dues directly from union members for the first time in decades.

The 2005 strike shut down bus and subway service in the financial center of U.S. imperialism in defiance of the state’s Taylor Law, which bans public employee strikes. But the pro-capitalist Local 100 leadership stopped the strike after 60 hours without a contract in hand and without winning amnesty from Taylor Law penalties. For its part, the TWU International openly opposed the strike, while the city labor leaders ducked for cover. Calling off this effective strike emboldened the courts and MTA bosses to go after the union, fining workers six days’ pay, imposing $2.5 million in fines on Local 100, briefly jailing union president Roger Toussaint and now eliminating its existing dues collection system. Beholden to a policy of class collaboration, Toussaint & Co. turned around and energetically campaigned for Democratic Party strikebreaker Eliot Spitzer in the 2006 gubernatorial race, even though Spitzer as state Attorney General enforced the Taylor Law reprisals against the union.

Make no mistake: It is the duty of all Local 100 members to pay their dues. A bankrupt union cannot carry out its purpose: defending the livelihood, safety and working conditions of its membership against the bosses. According to the Chief-Leader (8 June), Local 100 officials were projecting to get half the union membership to “sign up” to pay dues by June 1. But many workers are refusing to pay out of disgust with the policies of the union tops and the rotten contract rammed down their throats in binding arbitration. Union members have every reason to be angry at Toussaint and other Local 100 officers. What is needed is a new, class-struggle leadership of the unions. But not paying dues only weakens Local 100, and the MTA would love to drive a stake into the heart of this powerful, multiracial union.

At the moment, Toussaint says that he wants to permanently replace dues checkoff with direct payments to the union. In fact, the whole system of dues checkoff put the union’s money into the bosses’ hands, giving management an instrument for financial blackmail. Local 100 can petition the court to have the system reinstated after 90 days—at the cost of pledging to abide by the Taylor Law and never strike again. Without the right to strike, a union has surrendered its purpose. In 1980, dues checkoff was taken away in the heat of the 11-day NYC transit strike. It was restored six months later after union misleaders sold out work and safety standards.

Dues checkoff in NYC transit has its origins in a rotten deal with the class enemy. In 1948, TWU leader Mike Quill was facing a restive membership and militant opposition within the union, not least as a result of the World War II “no strike pledge” he upheld and the NYC rulers’ stonewalling on contract negotiations. In backroom discussions, Quill accepted Democratic Party mayor Mike O’Dwyer’s “offer” to let the bosses control dues collection and then transfer that money to the union. In return for dues checkoff and a package of wage increases, Quill disavowed the union’s historic opposition to transit fare hikes, opening the road for the bosses to respond to all future union demands by threatening fare increases. The fare was soon doubled! Quill’s policy of class collaboration continued as he worked to purge most of his former Communist Party comrades out of the TWU during the anti-red witchhunts of the 1940s and ’50s.

As we wrote in an exchange on dues checkoff in WV No. 358 (6 July 1984):

“The dues checkoff is a classic example of the tendency for trade unions in the absence of a revolutionary leadership to turn into appendages of the bourgeois state, reflecting the sellout labor bureaucracy’s desire to live in ‘harmony’ with the class enemy. It is of a piece with the various ‘labor courts,’ boards and capitalist labor legislation generally which these fakers always count on. And it is particularly true for the dues checkoff in NYC transit where the boss and union treasurer is the state itself.”

Dues should be collected by union reps, which would help make the union leadership more accountable to the ranks. Instituting this method of dues collection would better prepare the union for its future battles and goes hand in hand with the fight for a class-struggle leadership of the unions that is financially and politically independent of the capitalists and their state. In its struggle, labor must rely on its own organized power, which includes control of union finances vital to win strikes.

It is this power that can smash the anti-strike Taylor Law through uniting transit workers and all city and state labor at the head of the poor and oppressed. In order to mobilize the mass of the city’s dispossessed behind it, the TWU should raise such demands as free, quality mass transit for all. But even after the TWU has repeatedly felt the sting of Taylor Law penalties, the Local 100 leadership wants capitalist politicians in Albany to “reform” the law by giving the government’s Public Employment Relations Board the power “to seek an injunction when a party engages in prohibited subjects of bargaining.” The union bureaucrats want a more evenhanded Taylor Law to keep the bosses honest. But the entire purpose of the law is to keep public workers unions in chains, and any strengthening of its provisions will ultimately redound against the unions.

Various and sundry oppositionists and “militants” in Local 100 are critical of the Toussaint leadership but do not represent a break from the politics of class collaboration. Among the more left-talking are union members supported by the fake socialists of the League for the Revolutionary Party. An article on dues checkoff in their publication Revolutionary Transit Worker (RTW) No. 41 (10 June) rightly opposes its revocation and states that “the bosses’ hands should be kept off the union’s money.” But in practice RTW has made a mockery of the principle of class independence by lashing up with others who bring the capitalist state into the union’s affairs, including by giving “critical support” to Toussaint in the 2000 elections, despite the fact that he had sued the union.

As Marxists, we fight for the complete independence of the trade unions from the capitalist state and the bosses’ political parties. A new leadership is needed to turn the unions into instruments of class struggle. Such a leadership would support the building of a workers party that leads all the exploited and oppressed in the fight for a workers government.