For a Class-Struggle Union Leadership!

TWU Local 100 Elections: No Choice for Members

NEW YORK CITY—The 34,000 members of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 have begun to receive ballots for elections for union president and executive board. The issues in the election center on the three-day strike last December that shut down bus and subway service in defiance of the state’s slave-labor Taylor Law. Thousands of transit workers are furious at Local 100 president Roger Toussaint for demobilizing an effective strike and leaving them without a contract. A host of candidates, most of them one-time Toussaint supporters, want to tap into this anger to advance their own careers in the union hierarchy while hiding their own treacherous record. But this rogues’ gallery of phony oppositionists has nothing to offer workers that is fundamentally different from the incumbent leadership. None of them fights to break the union’s ties to the capitalist political parties and state agencies. Local 100 members have no choice in these elections.

The December strike crippled the center of U.S. finance capital and gave workers a shot at winning real gains from the transit bosses. It resonated with New York’s working people, and with ghetto and barrio poor across the country who saw a chance to deal a blow to the same capitalist ruling class that fleeces the workers and rides roughshod around the world. But Toussaint, threatened with reprisals by Republican governor George Pataki, called the strike off as his phony Democratic Party “friends” joined in to smash it. NYC’s labor officialdom pressured the union to go back out of fear of damaging their cozy relationship with the bourgeois politicians.

In the build-up to the Congressional elections, the TWU tops stumped for Democratic Party strikebreakers, from Hillary Clinton to Eliot Spitzer, who as state Attorney General slammed Local 100 with anti-strike injunctions resulting in massive fines for the union and its members and jail time for Toussaint (see “Toussaint Backs His Jailer,” WV No. 878, 13 October). None of the slates fielding candidates for Local 100’s top union posts opposes this support for Spitzer and other capitalist politicians.

What the labor movement needs is a leadership that sets the unions on the path of class struggle against the capitalist exploiters. And that means fighting for the complete independence of the unions from the political parties and courts of the class enemy. This perspective is utterly counterposed to what’s on offer from the Local 100 candidates, all of whom have a history of undermining the very purpose of the union, which is to defend workers against the bosses.

Both Barry Roberts (“Rail and Bus United”) and Ainsley Stewart (“Union Democracy”), Local 100 vice presidents who are running for president against Toussaint, voted against the strike! The TWU International outrageously opposed the strike and encouraged scabbing. Roberts, an International vice president, co-signed a letter on the second day of the strike urging Toussaint to end it and take the bosses’ pre-strike “offer” that included massive attacks on pensions and other givebacks. Stewart has always preferred binding arbitration—the current fate of the union contract. Binding arbitration is a trap that puts the fate of the membership in the hands of a supposedly “neutral” board that is in reality stacked on management’s side. No to binding arbitration!

Following the strike, a rotten alliance of Toussaint’s opponents coalesced around opposition to the giveback contract the Local 100 tops had negotiated. Many in this bloc—ranging from Stewart and his running mates, John Mooney and Bill Pelletier, to a bevy of left-talking union “militants”—had worked together for years as supporters of the New Directions (ND) opposition that propelled the “progressive” Toussaint into office in 2000. Among the fake militants seeking office today is former ND leader Steve Downs, a candidate for chairperson in his section of the train operators division who is supported by the Solidarity group. Marty Goodman, a long-time ND activist who is supported by the reformist group Socialist Action, is running for re-election to the Local 100 Executive Board.

The ND caucus was braintrusted by the professional union-suers of the Association for Union Democracy. As we warned during the 2000 union elections: “ND’s stock in trade is using the courts and other government agencies as a club against its rivals, which serves only to further shackle the power of the union and place it under the thumb of the capitalist state” (“Sellouts, Traitors, Finks: No Choice in TWU Local 100 Elections,” WV No. 746, 17 November 2000). It was in this tradition that Stewart, Pelletier and Mooney (a supporter of Mayor Mike Bloomberg), along with Roberts, launched a $3.3 million lawsuit against Toussaint in early 2005. The lawsuit was only recently dropped as a ploy to boost their electoral ambitions. The head of the “Fresh Start” slate, Mike Carrube, also was trained in the ND school of dragging the union into the bosses’ courts.

The more “militant”-talking candidates are no better when it comes to the courts and capitalist politicians. Downs has openly supported suing the union. Goodman may claim to oppose anti-union lawsuits, but he bemoans the demise of the ND caucus that was a vehicle for this treachery. In Solidarity’s Against the Current (September/October 2006), Downs mentions the attacks by “Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki, and corporate-owned media” during the strike but disappears the role of Spitzer and his fellow Democrats in trying to break it. Goodman, in a leaflet posted on Indymedia, criticized Spitzer as a “union buster” and “fake progressive” but proceeded to praise another capitalist politician, the Green Party candidate for state Attorney General who claimed she would “never sign an injunction” against the union.

Claiming to offer a militant alternative to this bunch is Eric Josephson, a candidate for Chairman and Executive Board in the Track Division who is backed by the League for the Revolutionary Party and distributes Revolutionary Transit Worker (RTW). Josephson writes in RTW (5 November) that the old ND crowd’s “strategy of building a reform group in the union on an a-political program of vague militancy and unprincipled lawsuits against the union is what allowed Toussaint to use them as a vehicle to power.” This is rather rich coming from Josephson, who gave Toussaint “critical” support in 2000 and earlier this year tried to bring every union-suing bureaucrat together in the “vote no” movement against Toussaint. Josephson makes a mockery of the principle of class independence by lashing up with those who bring the capitalist state into the union. No to anti-union lawsuits! Labor must clean its own house!

Since the various oppositions are at bottom no different from Toussaint’s “One Union” lash-up, they’re reduced to griping about his bureaucratic methods. The Local 100 tops are certainly heavy-handed. But the lack of democracy within the union flows primarily from the political program of its misleaders. The purpose of union democracy is to hammer out a program and course of action to fight for the workers’ interests and select a leadership based on such a program. Real union democracy necessitates complete independence from the bosses, their political parties and their state.

For the racist ruling class, the strike by this predominantly black and immigrant workforce had all the trappings of a slave revolt. The power the union showed then is what is needed to fight racist and anti-immigrant attacks on and off the job. A militant TWU leadership would tackle head-on the draconian discipline known as “plantation justice” meted out by the transit bosses. As a concrete measure in fighting racist injustice, some TWU militants are working to mobilize the union behind the cause of freedom for black death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal (see article, page 5). It is through such struggles that a new labor leadership will be forged, one committed to building a workers party that leads all the exploited and oppressed in the fight for a workers government.