MTA, City Gear Up Against TWU

NYC Transit Workers Must Prepare to Strike

United Labor Action Can Smash Taylor Law!

NEW YORK CITY, December 5—As the December 15 expiration of its contract approaches, Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 is in for a hard fight against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bosses and capitalist politicians. Backing the MTA, Republican governor George Pataki is threatening to hammer the union with the state’s Taylor Law, which bans public employee strikes, in order to push through attacks on pensions and working conditions that aim at the heart of this powerful, multiracial workforce. These threats are retailed by the big business media, with an MTA official telling the New York Post (29 November), “A strike would cripple the city—but it might kill the union.” The 33,000-strong Local 100 can defeat this anti-labor assault, but it will take a hard class-struggle fight.

The TWU’s power lies in its capacity to bring the finance capital of the world to a halt by shutting down NYC subways and buses. A strike authorization vote will likely happen at a December 10 mass union meeting. Transit workers have repeatedly expressed a grim determination to fight the MTA’s attacks, knowing full well that the Taylor Law threatens the union and individual union members with massive fines and jail sentences. It will take hard struggle defying anti-labor laws and relying on the strength of the whole labor movement to defeat the union-busters and win the right to strike. As we wrote in “TWU Must Fight Bosses’ Attacks!” (WV No. 859, 25 November), “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.”

The TWU, with its predominantly black and immigrant membership, is connected to every part of New York City. A successful fight against the MTA’s vicious disciplinary procedures—dubbed by unionists “plantation justice”—would resonate with all minorities and all labor. Against efforts by the MTA and City Hall to pit the public against the union, the TWU could win massive support by resurrecting its historic demand for free mass transit.

The need to prepare a strike, which means preparing for battle against not only the MTA but also the capitalist government, runs straight into the question of the union leadership. TWU members have been chanting “No contract, no work” at shop gate rallies. Too often NYC teachers and city workers have worked without a new contract, sometimes for years. Local 100 president Roger Toussaint says that a strike “is an option that we will not take off the table. There’s the law and then there’s justice. We want justice” (New York Times, 3 December).

But as one transit worker told WV, “Toussaint is blowing hot air to the press and cold air on the workers.” Local 100 members remember that Toussaint, newly elected to office, talked militant in the 2002 contract battle, only to shaft workers with a sellout sealed with a bear hug with MTA chief Kalikow. This capitulation to the MTA brass and the bourgeois state flowed directly from the labor bureaucracy’s program of class collaboration, which sees allies for the workers in the politicians and government of the capitalist enemy. At a November 29 union rally at a bus depot, Toussaint brought in Democrat Jesse Jackson, whose role is to defuse social struggle. Jackson says he might get involved in the NYC transit discussions. In Los Angeles in 2000, he came in to help scuttle a four-week strike, resulting in a settlement that reinforced a divisive multi-tier wage scale.

What the Local 100 leadership is not doing is preparing the membership for a hard struggle against the attacks on their jobs and benefits. The November 29 protest was one of a series of atomized Tuesday “days of action” at shops and depots that the Local 100 tops have substituted for mass union rallies. The December 10 meeting will be the first mass union gathering all year. What the Local 100 tops do instead is push the union’s role in providing “security” in the subways, expressing the Toussaint bureaucracy’s support to the government’s “anti-terror” drive. The “war on terror” is nothing but a pretext for cracking down on immigrants and opponents of government policy at home and for imperialist war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Its ultimate target is the labor movement.

Among those opposing the Toussaint leadership are individuals such as Car Maintenance Division vice president Ainsley Stewart and executive board member Martin Goodman, who is supported by the reformist Socialist Action group. However much they claim to be for a “real fight” for workers’ interests, Stewart and Goodman were part of the New Directions outfit that helped propel Toussaint into office and whose hallmark was suing their union opponents in the bosses’ courts. In fact, Stewart and four other vice presidents are currently suing Local 100. This treacherous policy did not stop self-proclaimed “militant” Eric Josephson, who is supported by the fake-socialist League for the Revolutionary Party, from giving Toussaint “critical support” in 2000. The courts are the very agencies that would impose massive fines on the union and its members for violating the Taylor Law. Their intervention into union affairs only serves to place the union under the thumb of the capitalist state. Courts out of the unions! Labor must clean its own house!

The kind of leadership labor needs is one based on the policy of class struggle and its corollary—the political independence of the working class from all the parties and state agencies of the capitalist enemy. This means a struggle to break the political chains forged by the trade-union tops to the capitalist Democratic Party and to build a workers party committed to the fight for a workers government. Workers make society run. When workers rule society, transport and industry will be ripped out of the hands of the greedy capitalist exploiters and put at the service of all.