Labor: Defend the TWU! Defeat the Taylor Law!
For a Solid NYC Transit Strike!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 793, 13 December 2002.

NEW YORK CITY, December 10—Amid repeated chants of “Strike! Strike!” some 10,000 transit workers at two mass meetings three days ago voted to authorize strike action when their contract expires on December 15. Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 is the powerhouse of NYC labor. If the subways and buses stop running, it will bring the financial center of American capitalism to a screeching halt. Transit workers: Strike to win!

With NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg vowing to impose the strikebreaking Taylor Law and Governor George Pataki threatening to call out the National Guard and state police, a showdown is looming between the capitalist rulers and the most powerful union in the city. The bosses and bankers of Wall Street want to humiliate and break this union in order to set a precedent for the entire city labor movement. If the transit union is defeated, then it will be open season on the city workers organized in AFSCME District Council 37, other public employee unions, black and Hispanic people, the poor, the unemployed and immigrants.

With the economy slumping and with an aggressively hostile government in Washington, transit workers are in a tough position. But behind the hysterical threats being directed at the TWU is the recognition that the union has the power to shut NYC down cold. The city manifestly cannot arrest 34,000 strikers or otherwise run the buses and subways in the face of a solid strike. You can’t run the subways with bayonets! Should the government invoke the Taylor Law, this should be met by strike actions mobilizing the power of the entire NYC labor movement. If the transit union proceeds with militancy and determination, in conjunction with other city unions, the labor movement could win a much needed victory that could put into motion a counteroffensive against the bosses. Today the Taxi Workers Alliance, representing a tenth of the city’s cab drivers, announced it would stop work in solidarity with a transit strike. It’s about time labor fought back!

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has contemptuously offered a giveback deal that would freeze wages this year while increasing health care copayments and reducing pay to finance pension benefits. Raises in the following two years of the contract would be allowed only in exchange for increased “productivity,” i.e., increased work by fewer employees. Transit workers are all too aware that such “productivity money” literally comes out of the flesh and blood of the workforce. In the last month alone two maintenance workers, Joy Antony and Kurien Baby, were killed in separate incidents as a result of management’s blatant disregard for safety. Local 100 president Roger Toussaint accurately called the MTA proposal an “insult, an outrage and a provocation.”

To wage the solid strike needed to win—shutting down MTA subways and buses as well as the private lines buses—transit workers must look to their allies in the city’s labor movement and the ghetto and barrio poor, not to the Democratic and Republican politicians who represent the class enemy. Yet Toussaint declared on WINS radio the night of the vote, “The Governor should step in.” The governor has already stepped in—with threats to smash the union with National Guard troops.

And one had better believe that the White House is paying close attention to the transit negotiations. During the recent longshore dispute on the West Coast, “Homeland Security” czar Thomas Ridge warned the International Longshore and Warehouse Union that a strike would threaten “national security,” and some weeks later, after an employers’ lockout, the Bush administration invoked the slave-labor Taft-Hartley Act. If a transit strike shuts down the financial capital of U.S. imperialism, you can bet that Ridge and others in the Bush administration will train their eyes on the TWU. To pursue its wars abroad, U.S. imperialism demands class peace at home. By the same token, working-class struggle would deal a blow against U.S. imperialism’s predatory wars abroad as well as union-busting austerity and brutal repression at home.

The city bosses have launched an anti-union propaganda barrage, with Bloomberg foaming that a transit strike would “endanger human life.” But it is the multibillionaire mayor who is demanding massive cuts in social services, including a 30 percent cut in the education budget, as well as a big jump in property taxes which will inevitably be followed by rent increases. Already rubber-stamped by the Democratic-run City Council, Bloomberg’s austerity schemes are designed to force the working class and poor to bear the brunt of the economic crisis manufactured by capitalism itself. As a union call for a December 16 NYC labor rally put it, “We Did Not Share in the Wealth! We Will Not ‘Share The Pain’!” An average transit worker would take over 100,000 years to earn what Bloomberg is worth. In fact, Bloomberg could just about wipe out the city’s budget deficit by writing a personal check!

When Bloomberg and other government officials claim that a transit strike would jeopardize the health and safety of New Yorkers, this is sheer hypocrisy. The MTA not only constantly disregards its own safety measures but is exempt from federally mandated safety regulations. City officials are already slating firehouses to be shut down and are talking about privatizing ambulance services. Officially the city bosses pay homage to firemen as heroes because they died in the attack on the World Trade Center. But in reality the politicians believe what Deputy Mayor Marc Shaw recently said: “Since we can’t get these guys to be any more productive in fighting fires, since they only fight fires 5 percent of the time—they’re hanging around doing nothing the other 95 percent of the time—let’s find other things for them to do” (New York Times, 8 December).

Local 100 members are rightly furious at a 6 December editorial in the vile, labor-hating New York Post which advised the Bloomberg administration to “prepare the arrest warrant” for Toussaint and the entire membership if the TWU strikes. Outrageously, the editorial denounced the union’s stated intention to defend itself as “Toussaint’s jihad.” This is very much along the lines of a smear campaign directed at Toussaint’s Local 100 “New Directions” leadership at the time of the TWU national convention in October 2001, when an anonymous pamphlet was circulated with a section titled: “New Directions and Sept. 11: Bin Laden’s Friends?” According to New Directions supporters, the force behind this smear campaign was the TWU “old guard” headed by International president Sonny Hall.

Anyone in the labor movement who buys into this dirty game is playing into the hands of the bosses, their kept media and their political agents—Republicans and Democrats alike. While at home the “war on terror” has been used in the first instance to witchhunt and persecute South Asian, Arab and Muslim immigrants, its targets also include the unions. The bourgeoisie is well aware that the organized labor movement potentially represents the most socially cohesive obstacle to its class rule. A year ago the leader of striking teachers in Middletown, New Jersey was labeled a “representative of the Taliban,” while the strikers themselves were clapped into jail. This highlighted the fact that the “war on terror,” which the government uses to drum up support for its military adventures abroad, as in Afghanistan and now Iraq, is simultaneously directed at those who resist capitalist exploitation at home.

The Democrats—A Bosses’ Party

Contrary to the ravings of the New York Post and other right-wing media, the Local 100 president is not a Marxist nor even particularly radical. Toussaint is a strong supporter of the Democratic Party; indeed, every TWU rally has had a large number of Democratic Party politicians on the speaker’s rostrum. Other NYC labor leaders, like 1199 hospital union chief Dennis Rivera, a former co-chairman of the state Democratic Party, switched to Pataki in the last elections.

The Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are a party of big business. The Democrats appeal to a different constituency, using a different rhetoric. The particular role of the Democratic Party in American bourgeois politics is to convince the working class and the oppressed black and Latino minorities that they, too, can benefit from the capitalist system with the right kind of government policies and regulations.

Despite occasional differences on secondary issues, the two parties of capital are united when it comes to protecting the fundamental class interests of the bourgeoisie. The new pieces of legislation beefing up the forces of state repression, such as the USA-Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, have been passed with the support of Democratic Party legislators. Another graphic example was the 1999 TWU contract negotiations. Both Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Democratic state attorney general Eliot Spitzer intervened to get injunctions criminalizing not only strike action but even advocacy of strike action. They threatened to destroy the union and bankrupt union members with fines of $1 million against the union and $25,000 against individuals the first day of a strike, with fines doubling every day thereafter. For her part, Hillary Clinton intoned that the Taylor Law was a “wise law” because “public employees should not legally be allowed to strike.”

At bottom, the pro-Democratic Party labor leaders accept the framework of capitalism and the laws designed to protect capitalist property. The bureaucrats claim that if the right people are appointed to such institutions as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), then they will function in the interest of the unions. In fact, the labor laws provide a whole panoply of strikebreaking weapons. The Wagner Act of 1935, signed by the aristocratic liberal Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave the NLRB wide powers to determine which unions would be recognized as bargaining agents by the employers, and the period immediately following saw a far more rapid expansion of company unions than real unions. Since then, new anti-strike legislation has been codified in Taft-Hartley and other laws.

Had the militants in the 1930s adhered to the law, then the CIO mass industrial unions, including the TWU, would never have been organized. The entire history of the American labor movement is one of laws broken and court injunctions defied. No decisive gain of labor was ever won in a courtroom or by an act of Congress. Everything the workers movement has won of value has been achieved by mobilizing the ranks of labor in hard-fought struggle on the picket lines. This was demonstrated by the struggles that preceded the organizing of the TWU in the 1930s. These struggles, as in 1895, were marked by pitched street battles with thousands of cops, company agents and National Guardsmen. They often involved mass arrests and firings as well as scabherding. During a 1918 strike, a scab motorman crashed his train into a tunnel wall, killing 92 people, the worst accident in New York transit history. That is what strikebreaking means.

The first great organizing victories of the 1930s were led by communists and socialists. The key to success in such battles as the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, led by the American Trotskyists, was a clear understanding that the capitalist state is the executive committee of the ruling class and hence an enemy of the workers. As noted by James P. Cannon, a founder and leader of American Trotskyism:

“The modern labor movement must be politically directed because it is confronted by the government at every turn. Our people were prepared for that since they were political people, inspired by political conceptions....

“They prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don’t work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight.”

—History of American Trotskyism (1944)

To defeat the government’s array of strikebreaking laws requires both the industrial and political mobilization of the working class.

Cops, Courts Out of the Unions!

The pioneers of the labor movement would have choked over the thought that the police are anything other than the hired thugs of the bosses. Yet Toussaint invited Patrick Lynch, head of the Policemen’s Benevolent Association, to speak at a September TWU rally and then hailed him at the December 7 mass meeting. The cops’ job is to protect the property and power of the capitalists. Should there be a transit strike, the same police who routinely brutalize black and Latino youth will be mobilized to smash picket lines. They will be assisted in this by the TA’s security guards, who outrageously are organized by the TWU. Cops and security guards out of the unions!

For years, New Directions has brought court suits against their opponents in the union. These unprincipled actions open up the TWU to meddling and intervention by the class enemy and further subordinate the TWU to the bosses’ state. These same courts will be used to invoke the Taylor Law. Differences within the union should be debated in the union, not brought to the bosses’ courts!

Without the right to strike, unions are gutted of their very reason for existence. The AFL-CIO officialdom prates that “you can’t strike against the government.” But who wins in any battle between capital and labor depends on the relationship of forces as measured in struggle. In the middle of World War II, against the howls of the whole capitalist order denouncing them as traitors and agents of Hitler, coal miners defied the wartime no-strike pledge. In response to FDR’s threats of military strikebreaking, the miners pointed out that you can’t mine coal with bayonets. When the NYC bosses tried to break the 1966 transit strike using the Condon-Wadlin Act (the predecessor of the Taylor Law), the union defied a court injunction. Thrown behind bars, Local 100 president Mike Quill declared: “It is about time that someone, somewhere along the road, ceases to be respectable. Many generations of great Americans before us have taken this road, and if they didn’t take this road, half of you would be on home relief.... The judge can drop dead in his black robes, and we would not call off the strike.” The strike won, and the Condon-Wadlin Act became a dead letter.

A recent handout from Local 100 reproduces a New York Times article from 1968 and praises then-mayor Lindsay for negotiating a good settlement. It is captioned: “Where are our political leaders? Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki—Where are you?” The implication is that with “good faith” bargaining on both sides, labor and management can arrive at a common interest that benefits both parties. This is fundamentally false: the interests of capital and labor are diametrically counterposed. What the Local 100 leaflet doesn’t say is that the 1968 settlement, which gave union members a pension after 20 years’ service with no employee contributions, came about because Lindsay had been solidly walloped by the union two years earlier and couldn’t stomach another strike.

When the TWU walked out again in 1980, we wrote in a special Workers Vanguard supplement (11 April 1980) headlined “Smash the Taylor Law! Bust the Union-Busters!”:

“The TWU membership on the lines in this strike needs a leadership with the guts and program to stand up to the bosses’ courts and politicians, and to wage a militant class struggle against the capitalist austerity offensive.... A class-struggle leadership with a program for victory would seek to mobilize all New York labor to defend the TWU against the Taylor Law. It would shut down all the commuter busing and put the screws on PATH and LIRR unions to bring out their ranks as well in a powerful joint transportation strike.”

But after eleven days, despite the ranks remaining solid and the city beginning to feel the pinch, the Local 100 leaders caved in and New York transit workers were sold down the river.

The 1966 strike victory led to many gains for TWU members, and for many years transit was the best union job in the city. The erosion of the traditions of militancy, including the union tops’ panicky collapse during the 1980 strike, has enabled management to become much more aggressive. The transit bosses were further emboldened by the union leadership’s acquiescence to Giuliani and Spitzer’s strikebreaking in 1999. In the past three years, TWU members have been subjected to 48,000 disciplinary actions and 45,000 “home investigations.” Today transit workers are dogged by a small army of “beakies,” company snoops, drug testing centers, security guards, etc. For every five transit workers there is one supervisor! Firing the whole lot of these parasites would realize genuine efficiencies, and would probably provide the money for a hefty wage hike for the real workforce.

For a Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government!

It is crucial that the heavily integrated TWU take up the defense of “workfare” recipients forced into doing the jobs of transit workers just to get their welfare payments, on the basis of a deal cooked up with the city by the previous Local 100 leadership under Willie James. The point is not to deny these hard-pressed people their jobs but to demand that they be organized by the TWU and receive union wages! It is also crucial for transit workers to defeat attempts to divide this industrial union. Earlier this month, private lines bus workers resoundingly voted to reject a despicable move by Toussaint’s “old guard” opponents led by Hall to split the workers away from Local 100 even as the contract battle loomed.

The TWU should respond to the bosses’ campaign for a big fare hike by demanding the abolition of fares, a demand that would win enthusiastic support from the mass of the population. Public transit is a necessary social service. You don’t pay firemen when they come to put out a fire, so why should working people have to pay for transit just to get to and from work? The capitalists had the subways built to haul workers into Manhattan from the boroughs—so make the capitalists pay! It is the Marxists who fight to mobilize the labor movement for such demands, as part of the struggle to forge a revolutionary workers party that takes up the cause of all the oppressed and poor.

The last time there was a huge financial crisis in the city it was the working people who were made to pay, as union leaders caved in to the Wall Street banks and Democratic Party machine. In the mid 1970s, the TWU and other unions had their contracts voided, thousands of jobs were slashed, the bus and subway fare was raised 50 percent and free tuition was abolished at CUNY after 129 years. The unions pledged billions from pension funds to guarantee the bankers’ loans to the city. The banks have received many times the value of these loans in the form of interest. In fact, a good part of the deficit cited by the MTA amounts to these loans and the interest due on them.

The unions should demand that the city and MTA open their books for public inspection. The bloodsucking banks and utilities must be expropriated! Billions should be made available by the federal government for rebuilding and restoring an efficient and safe urban transit system as well as decent housing, schools and hospitals.

To achieve such ends necessarily runs up hard against the realities of decaying American imperialism. The reformist view that one can smoothly make the transformation to “more butter, less guns” is a myth. American capitalism demands the maintenance of its “top dog” position as a military power, necessarily at the expense of intensified exploitation of working people at home and abroad. Only the revolutionary struggle for a workers government, which once and for all expropriates the bourgeoisie, can point the way forward for the labor movement. To lead such a struggle, what is indispensable is a class-struggle workers party that intransigently opposes the bourgeois order.