NYC Transit: Jobs, Health Care, Pensions on the Line

TWU Must Fight Bosses' Attacks!

NEW YORK CITY—With the contract between Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) expiring on December 15, the transit bosses are gunning for major givebacks from the union’s 33,000 subway and bus workers. The MTA typically tries to conceal enormous budget surpluses as it works to squeeze the union for concessions. But the MTA is only too ready to fatten the pocketbooks of its real estate buddies, as seen last year when it offered to sell property on Manhattan’s West Side worth nearly $1 billion to developers for $210 million. With this year’s contract negotiations proceeding, the MTA has a surplus of over $1 billion that’s just too big to hide. Even so, the bosses are demanding major concessions that would lead directly to fewer jobs and higher health care costs for workers as well as an additional tier of workers with inferior benefits.

The attacks on the TWU are part of a class war by the capitalist rulers against working people in the U.S. and internationally. The same capitalist government that launched the imperialist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq left masses of black poor and others to die in New Orleans. Now many Hurricane Katrina survivors are threatened with eviction from the meager shelter they managed to get in other areas, while many also still remain without jobs. With help from the courts, United and Northwest airlines and auto parts maker Delphi have declared bankruptcy in order to annul pension plans and tear up union contracts, part of a broad assault on wages and health care and other benefits. To the parasitic capitalists, pensions have become outmoded and outlandish perks: workers should simply work like slaves, then die.

It’s time that labor waged some class struggle against these assaults. Earlier this month, over 5,000 Philadelphia transit workers in TWU Local 234 and United Transportation Union Local 1594 waged a one-week strike that blocked the bosses’ drive to make workers pay thousands in health care premiums (see “Philly Transit Strike Beats Back Bosses’ Assault,” WV No. 858, 11 November). Although some concessions were made, the strike fended off the bosses’ most onerous demands, showing that unions have the power to fight back.

TWU Local 100 must fight the MTA’s union-busting multi-tier system. If the TWU gives in to the MTA’s current demand, new-hires would be forced to pay health care premiums for the first time and would have to work an additional seven years to qualify for a pension. The company’s attempt to pit younger workers against older workers must be answered with the elementary union principle of “equal pay for equal work,” reinforcing the union solidarity needed to defend all workers. Sanitation workers, firefighters and several other NYC public employee unions have recently negotiated contracts that stiff new-hires with lower pay packages in return for long-delayed wage hikes that barely cover inflation. The MTA is also reportedly going after the workers’ right to change job locations, while demanding an expansion of “broadbanding.” Under this scheme, workers do several types of work rather than stick to what’s in their current job title, leading to a reduced workforce carrying heavier workloads in more dangerous conditions.

The MTA also wants to reduce the workforce by introducing new technology that would supposedly make many workers redundant. The decaying, century-old subway network does need to be modernized and made safer: 21 workers have died on the job in the last two decades. But the MTA’s modernization schemes are intended only to save them money by getting rid of workers, simultaneously making the subways more dangerous for both workers and passengers. The MTA wants to remove station agents from the token booths, which would frequently leave passengers without assistance, particularly for emergencies. The transit bosses are also aiming to remove conductors from the trains by implementing the computer-operated One Person Train Operation system. Under capitalism, the introduction of new technology, which should benefit the whole of society, is inevitably used to eliminate jobs. The labor movement should counter this by fighting for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay, to divide up the work and provide more jobs.

If the MTA insists on hardlining its giveback demands, then the TWU must be prepared to resist with all its might. The union’s power to do so ultimately resides in its ability to shut the city down by mobilizing its membership to strike. Transit workers did this successfully in 1966, and also struck in 1980 before being sold out by the union misleaders. But they also know they are saddled with the state’s Taylor Law, which was created to shackle unions by outlawing public employee strikes. The right to strike can only be won through hard struggle in defiance of anti-labor laws. Key to smashing the Taylor Law is forging a fighting alliance with all of NYC labor at the head of the city’s working masses and its ghetto and barrio poor.

Workers Need Class-Struggle Leadership

To reverse the decades of attacks on labor will require the kind of class struggle that built the industrial unions. Labor needs a leadership that understands that the interests of the working class and the capitalist class are completely counterposed, and that labor must be politically independent from the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties.

Local 100 president Roger Toussaint, who won office with phony credentials as a “militant” alternative to the conservative TWU “old guard,” has strengthened the chains binding the union to the exploiters. Toussaint supports Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who in 1999 explicitly supported the use of the Taylor Law against a possible TWU strike. Last year the TWU International threw its support to John Kerry, and the AFL-CIO tops spent millions in union dues on his failed presidential bid. This year the Local 100 tops hustled votes in the mayoral election for Fernando Ferrer, a man who declared that the NYPD committed no crime by its coldblooded killing of African immigrant Amadou Diallo.

Pouring union resources into the coffers of capitalist politicians—a clear expression of the labor bureaucracy’s acceptance of the entire capitalist system—is the antithesis of what workers need. A class-struggle labor leadership would break the unions’ ties to the Democrats and support the building of a workers party that fights for a workers government. It would also break from the labor bureaucracy’s criminal support to the government’s “war on terror,” which is nothing but a pretext for brutal imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq and for cracking down on immigrants and opponents of government policy at home. The government’s repressive measures attack fundamental democratic rights and are particularly aimed at suppressing the black population and regimenting the entire working class. That the “war on terror” takes aim at unions was graphically demonstrated during the transit contract struggle in 2002, when the gutter press terrorist-baited the TWU for threatening to strike.

Toussaint enthusiastically signed on to the “anti-terror” drive, working to turn union members into auxiliaries of the racist cops. Following the criminal London transit bombings in July, the Local 100 bureaucracy offered that “transit workers are in a position to spot suspicious activity in the system” and berated the MTA for not training transit workers to do that (Local 100 Express, August 2005). Toussaint provided union funds to hire Israeli and other “counter-terrorism” experts to “train” Local 100 members.

The crackdown on “terror suspects” following the London bombings brought nothing but more vicious racist repression, as cops flooded subway stations and other transit facilities. In London on July 22, police jumped a worker from Brazil, Jean Charles de Menezes, who was sitting in a subway car, and executed him with seven shots to the head. In NYC on July 24, a police SWAT team dragged several men from Britain of Pakistani origin off a tourist bus in Midtown Manhattan, handcuffed them, forced them to kneel and searched their bags before finally releasing them.

Toussaint and the labor bureaucracy as a whole criminally embrace the racist cops as union brothers. Thus Toussaint touts Patrick Lynch of the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association as an “ally” of the TWU. The cops are the hired guns of the capitalists whose job is to terrorize the ghettos and barrios and repress working-class struggle—they have no business in the unions! Neither do the MTA’s “Property Protection” security guards, who are members of Local 100.

In a gross violation of labor principles, five local vice presidents are suing Toussaint and the union over a series of complaints. Before his election in 2000, Toussaint’s New Directions opposition group repeatedly sued the leadership in office at the time. The courts are an agency of capitalist repression—their intervention into union affairs can only weaken the union. Courts, cops—out of the unions!

MTA “Plantation Justice”

NYC transit workers are wary of their leadership in this year’s contract negotiations given their experience the last time around. In 2002, 10,000 transit workers voted to authorize strike action at two mass meetings a week before the contract expired. Then, as the clock was ticking down, thousands of TWU members marched over the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall prepared for a long-awaited fight, but were infuriated to learn that the ink was already drying on a deal.

Under that settlement, workers received no wage raise in the first year, just a lump-sum bonus. Local 100 officials claimed that they at least won some gains against the MTA’s vicious disciplinary system, but the numbers tell a different story. A recent Local 100 Internet posting notes that renewed MTA efforts to “increase efforts to improve employee availability” mean “tougher time and attendance rules and more disciplines and threats.” Last year alone, the MTA hit the predominantly black subway and bus workers with 15,204 disciplines, with minority and women workers in the lowest-paid jobs the hardest hit. No wonder transit workers call this “plantation justice.”

This time the Local 100 tops are not even making a pretense of preparing for a strike. Isolated shop rallies have taken the place of union-wide protests, and a mass union meeting isn’t scheduled until December 10, just five days before the contract expires. What’s needed is a series of mass meetings—not showpieces where the bureaucrats present the decisions they’ve already made and union members get no chance to speak, but decision-making meetings where the membership hammers out a policy of struggle against the MTA.

It is through union struggle that the TWU can defeat the MTA’s multiple schemes to pit different sections of the workforce against each other, weakening the union as a whole: immigrant versus native-born, new-hires versus veteran workers, bus division versus subways, regional/suburban lines versus city transit. A hard fight lies ahead. The only road to victory for transit workers and the entire working class is mobilizing labor’s power independent of the capitalist state and political parties. The working people need a party that fights for their class interests, a workers party committed to overturning this whole system of capitalist exploitation, racial oppression and imperialist war.