Down With Slave Labor Taylor Law!

Bosses' Court Slams TWU for Striking

New York City

APRIL 24—There is no justice in the capitalist courts. Witness how in the past week and a half state Supreme Court justice Theodore T. Jones sentenced Roger Toussaint, president of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 in New York City, to ten days in jail, fined the union $2.5 million and revoked its automatic dues checkoff indefinitely, thereby threatening to bankrupt Local 100. The court also fined Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) locals 1056 and 726 and suspended their dues checkoff for 30 days. The unions’ crime? Transit workers crippled the financial center of U.S. imperialism by carrying out a powerful two and a half day strike last December in defiance of the state’s Taylor Law.

The slave-labor Taylor Law shackles the unions by banning public employee strikes. And without the right to strike, the very purpose of a union is undermined. The retribution meted out to the TWU and ATU, including docking union members two days’ pay for each day on strike, sends a clear message: workers have no rights which the capitalists are bound to respect.

Defense of Local 100 and its officials for using labor’s strike weapon should be the starting point for united action by the labor movement to smash the Taylor Law. Many Local 100 members are rightly furious with the Toussaint leadership for pulling the rug out from under the strike while it was having a major impact. In protest, some plan to refuse to pay dues. But this would mean giving aid to the class enemy that wants to crush the TWU. Toussaint is not headed to jail for sending workers back to the job without a contract but for representing the striking union. Transit workers should be proud of the power, unity and organization they showed during the strike. All members must pay their dues so the union can engage in its future battles, while fighting for a class-struggle leadership that stands for their interests. A fighting labor movement with a leadership worth its salt would respond to the jail sentence and fines with labor action, not by turning the outpouring of justified anger into hot-air protests such as today’s “solidarity” rally organized by the AFL-CIO tops. Free Roger Toussaint now! Down with the fines!

The transit strike was provoked by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) with the goal of imposing drastic cutbacks in workers’ benefits. The strike was hugely popular among working people and in the ghettos and barrios, and workers in the U.S. and abroad took notice of the transit workers’ defiance. But the capitalist rulers saw the strike by the predominantly black and immigrant Local 100 as a modern-day slave rebellion.

That the people who “Move New York,” fed up with years of MTA “plantation justice” and a vicious disciplinary system, had the nerve to demand decent medical care and money to eke out some kind of retirement after working all their lives infuriated the billionaires, Wall Street financiers and real estate barons like MTA chief Peter Kalikow. The stock market just hit a six-year high, the economy has been in a five-year “recovery,” new millionaires are being minted at a record rate, and the MTA itself was sitting on a $1.5 billion surplus! Kalikow just bought a brand-new customized Ferrari that cost at least $260,000 to add to his “awe inspiring” car collection, as one Ferrari buff put it. Yet supposedly there’s no money for workers, as the banks and corporations look to slash wages and shred benefits won through hard class struggle by earlier generations of working people.

In the TWU’s Local 100 Express magazine (January 2006), Toussaint wrote: “Strikes are like little wars.” That’s true—strikes are won or lost on the battlefield. As the December strike showed, Local 100 has tremendous power. After all, it is impossible to replace 33,700 transit workers en masse and you can’t “outsource” transportation. The union should have demanded: No reprisals or fines! By demobilizing an effective strike and pulling down the picket lines, Toussaint & Co. shifted the terrain from one where the union could fight to one where the workers were shackled to arbitration board meetings and court hearings where the bosses call the shots.

Once the workforce was off the streets, the Local 100 tops struck a contract deal with the MTA that included a major concession: open-ended contributions by the current workforce, beginning at 1.5 percent of gross pay, toward some improvements in retiree health care. Saddling transit workers with crushing health care costs is meant to be an opening wedge into smashing hard-won pension and health benefits for all New York City labor. This contract was rightly rejected, albeit narrowly, by defiant transit workers.

So the Toussaint leadership waited, kept the membership dispersed and let scare tactics run their course. The state’s Public Employment Relations Board ordered the union into binding arbitration. Union officials used the threat that binding arbitration would enforce an even more onerous contract to get the previously rejected contract passed in a revote. Nonetheless, nearly 30 percent of the over 20,000 who voted still rejected the contract, including a majority of train operators and almost half of conductors. One furious train conductor told a WV salesman that Toussaint “should have respected” that initial vote. Another, seeing our paper, yelled out, “They’re trying to end all New York unions!” For its part, the MTA has dismissed the new vote as an “empty gesture,” insisting the old offer is no longer on the table.

Why was an effective strike demobilized by the union tops? It wasn’t just that Toussaint caved in. While on strike, Local 100 was stabbed in the back by the TWU International, which opposed the strike and urged strikers to return to work. The TWU was also left high and dry by the entire New York City labor officialdom, including the Central Labor Council and other key unions. UFT teachers union president Randi Weingarten, SEIU 1199 head Dennis Rivera and other union tops refused to even say that they supported the strike.

The reason the union tops continually sell out their memberships is that, at bottom, it is not possible to serve two masters. There are only two real sides: either the side of the workers or the side of the capitalists who exploit them. The union bureaucrats in this country, while drawing their salaries from the trade unions, support the capitalist system and the politicians who front for it, centrally in the Democratic Party (even though its pose as a “friend of labor” has worn pretty threadbare).

The strategy of the Local 100 tops is the vain hope that the Democratic politicians whom they have supported will come to the union’s aid. They have poured millions into the coffers of politicians in recent years, including thousands in donations to Attorney General Eliot Spitzer from 1998-2004. Spitzer’s office spearheaded the reprisals against the TWU for striking and has jailed the TWU president. Senator Hillary Clinton, a favorite of the Toussaint leadership, hailed Spitzer’s earlier use of the Taylor Law against transit workers during the heated contract negotiations in 1999. Though the union is appealing the fines, Toussaint nonetheless accepts the state’s “right” to punish the union. Following the court ruling, he declared, “Two and a half million is excessive, it’s too much and it’s one-sided. We don’t think the judge should have gone that far” (Amsterdam News, 20 April).

In court, Toussaint was backed by such union “allies” as Jesse Jackson, black front man for the Democratic Party, and Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA). The role of Jackson, who said the strike was a “necessary evil,” is to defuse struggle and lure workers back into the fold of electoral politics. The PBA and other cop “unions” are not part of the workers movement. The cops are enemies of working people and minorities and are duty bound to safeguard the bosses’ profit system, which includes smashing strikes. Cops, security guards out of the unions!

For unions to become instruments of militant struggle against the capitalist exploiters requires fighting against the policies of the union bureaucracy. This includes fighting against any government or court intervention into the union movement. One immediate example of this danger is the revocation of dues checkoff. We oppose the court’s penalties against the union. However, as we have pointed out, this shows the danger of letting capitalist employers control dues collection through payroll deduction. Dues collection should be done by elected union officials, which would also make them answerable to the membership.

To unchain the power of labor, a political fight is required to oust the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats and to forge a labor leadership dedicated to class struggle against capitalism. The labor movement desperately needs a leadership based on the complete independence of the working class from the bosses’ state and its political parties. Such a leadership would be forged in class struggle as part of the fight to build a workers party to fight for a workers government, under which industry will be ripped out of the hands of the capitalists and a planned, collectivized economy will be built, based on production for social need and not for profit.