As MTA Demands Layoffs and Cuts

TWU Local 100 Tops Sign No-Strike Pledge

For a Class-Struggle Leadership of the Unions!

With its January 15 contract deadline approaching, Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 is in a tough situation. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) bosses and capitalist politicians are out for blood, and the Local 100 leadership has surrendered the union’s most effective weapon, strike action, by pledging to the government never to strike again. Mayor Bloomberg and the city administration insisted on this pledge before restoring dues checkoff and as part of the reprisals against the union for its powerful three-day strike in December 2005 in defiance of the slave-labor Taylor Law, which bans strikes by New York State public employees. Negotiations on the new contract are reportedly underway, but transit workers have been kept in the dark.

With the economy teetering on the brink of a worldwide depression, the MTA is demanding heavy givebacks from transit workers, including the elimination of over 2,000 jobs. There is talk of slashing pensions and health care benefits across the board, a separate tier of inferior benefits for newer workers, and an insultingly low wage increase. The MTA’s announced austerity measures include service cuts and additional fare increases, making riding the buses and subways even more hellish for riders and workers alike.

To halt these attacks against the TWU requires mobilizing the membership for hard class struggle, including strike action. The MTA’s attempts to maintain or impose new tiers, which divide newer and older workers, must be answered with a fight for equal pay for equal work. If the ruling class gets away with slamming Local 100, it will bode ill for other New York State public employee unions, as Democratic Party governor David Paterson seeks to tear up their contracts. Local 100 is the powerhouse of New York City labor and can show the way to beat back the bosses’ anti-labor attacks. The Taylor Law can be smashed; the key is the fighting unity of transit workers and all city and state labor, with the support of the poor and oppressed.

The 2005 transit strike could have been won. It was hugely popular among working people, blacks and Latinos and showed the way forward for labor. But the Local 100 tops refused to employ the kind of tactics needed, such as setting up picket lines to shut down the LIRR, PATH and Metro-North rail lines into and out of NYC. After 60 hours off the job, transit workers were sold out by their pro-capitalist union misleadership, who stopped the strike without a contract in hand or winning amnesty from the Taylor Law penalties. This emboldened the courts and MTA to go after the union. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg denounced the black, Latino, immigrant and white workers who make up the TWU as “thugs,” city labor leaders refused to support the strike, while the TWU International openly opposed it, calling on workers to scab. For his part, after issuing the no-strike pledge, Local 100 president Roger Toussaint has taken a new position with the International.

It is an indictment of the sellout Local 100 tops that many TWU members have drawn the wrong lessons from the strike, becoming disillusioned with the union. What was needed then and is needed now is a class-struggle leadership committed to fighting for its members, based on the understanding that the interests of the capitalist class and the working class are irreconcilably counterposed. Such a leadership must be based on the program of complete political and financial independence from the capitalist bosses, their state and their parties. This is in stark contrast to the policies of the Local 100 bureaucracy, which time and again has pledged loyalty to the capitalist Democratic Party.

After getting rubber-stamp approval from the union’s executive board, Toussaint gave his no-strike pledge two weeks before Democrat Barack Obama was elected president. In the lead-up to the election, Local 100 tops campaigned vigorously for Obama, sending members door-to-door and mobilizing them for phone banks. All told, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win federations poured $450 million into the 2008 elections. The massive effort to elect Obama was promoted by the union tops with the lie that labor would finally have a “friend” in the White House. But Obama’s role is to be Commander-in-Chief of racist U.S. imperialism. He is gearing up to impose stark austerity on workers, blacks and other minorities. His job will also be to quash social unrest and opposition to such measures.

In return for the no-strike pledge, a state court restored Local 100’s dues checkoff, the system of automatic dues deduction from workers’ paychecks by the MTA that was revoked after the 2005 strike in an attempt to bankrupt the union. We vigorously defended Local 100 against all reprisals, including the capitalist court’s revoking of dues checkoff. At the same time, we oppose the dues checkoff system, but it is the job of the union to get rid of it. As we warned in “State Revokes TWU Dues Checkoff” (WV No. 895, 6 July 2007): “The whole system of dues checkoff put the union’s money into the bosses’ hands, giving management an instrument for financial blackmail.” This was borne out by the no-strike pledge. Dues should be collected by elected union reps, which would make the union leadership more accountable to the ranks and would help prepare the union for future battles. The bosses should have no hand on the union’s purse.

Many embittered workers have refused to pay their union dues, equating the union with the rotten leadership. By all accounts, less than half of the membership is paid up on their union dues. All Local 100 members must pay their back dues. Not paying dues plays directly into the hands of the bosses, who want to bankrupt the union to stop it from carrying out its purpose: defending the livelihood, safety and working conditions of its membership against the bosses.

Transit workers have told Workers Vanguard that the union is now making an effort to encourage the several thousand members who have been paying dues via automatic bank deductions to continue to do so. Reportedly, new hires will be encouraged to sign up for this method of payment, so that it may take some 20 years, through attrition, before everyone is paying their dues online.

The union has collected its own dues in other periods. In the days following the amalgamation of the various NYC transit companies into one in 1940-41, the union faced a drop in payments. As Joshua B. Freeman described in his history of the TWU, In Transit (1989):

“Neither the TWU’s leadership nor its more militant members were prepared to sit idly by while the union’s membership slipped away. On August 8, 1940, workers at the IRT’s Livonia barn stopped working when lamp trimmer Frank Salvatore boasted that he was dropping out of the union. The stoppage ended only when Salvatore applied for union reinstatement and apologized for his actions.…

“The most serious incident involved John F. Connolly, the son of the former president of the defunct IRT Brotherhood and a worker at the IRT’s 240th Street inspection barn. Connolly was refusing to pay his union dues, claiming mistreatment by the TWU in a seniority matter. On November 4, after Connolly failed to meet a deadline set for paying his dues, the 170 workers at 240th Street stopped work for two-and-a-half hours. The next morning they resumed their stoppage until Connolly finally went to Transport Hall to pay up.”

Workers also picketed the homes of those who brazenly refused to pay dues. Union-loyal picketers carried signs highlighting the gains the union had won for workers, such as wage raises, paid vacations and health care benefits.

Class Collaboration vs. Class Struggle

The union bureaucrats are wedded to the maintenance of this capitalist system. Their allegiance to the supposed “lesser evil” Democrats has, in fact, facilitated the bourgeois rulers’ assaults on the working and living conditions of the American working class: the dismantling of millions of manufacturing jobs, cuts in social programs, rampant cop terror in the ghettos and barrios and the incarceration of black and Latino youth in the racist “war on drugs.” It is a further indictment of the Local 100 bureaucracy that it has lined up with the MTA in pushing transit workers to serve as adjuncts to the cops in the bipartisan “war on terror,” which is ultimately aimed at labor, blacks and immigrants. A fighting labor movement would mobilize in defense not only of its own members but also of black rights, immigrants and all the oppressed. For labor’s power to be unchained it must break with the Democrats.

Class collaboration—the promotion of the false idea that the bosses and the workers have common interests—is also the stock-in-trade of Toussaint’s reformist opponents in the union, among them: Steve Downs, founding member of the now-defunct union-suing New Directions (ND) caucus, who is supported by Solidarity; one-time ND activist Marty Goodman, who is supported by Socialist Action; and Eric Josephson, who called for “critical” support for Toussaint in 2000 and is backed by the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP). There has been little opposition from these reformists to the union’s fealty to the Democratic Party.

Writing that it is “accepted as obvious by most people that the election of Barack Obama as this country’s first Black president would mark an historic victory against racism,” the LRP notes: “In one sense, it would,” because “choosing a Black man” to lead the U.S. “would be an extraordinary shift” (Proletarian Revolution, Spring 2008). Far from a “historic victory against racism,” the election of Obama will do nothing to change the nature of black oppression in racist capitalist America. As for Solidarity, it supported the small-time capitalist Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, whose purpose in running was simply to act as a shill for the Democratic Party.

This past June, Josephson, who distributes Revolutionary Transit Worker (RTW), was elected vice-chair of the Track Division, running on a campaign statement that avoided the key questions of class independence facing transit workers. While his statement raised opposition to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, it did not oppose the union’s endorsement of Obama, who has promised to keep troops in Iraq and send even more to Afghanistan.

In a letter to the editor, published in the 22 August edition of The Chief under the headline “Resolve TWU Dues Crisis,” RTW supporters argue for a provisional dues “amnesty” to restore members to good standing (and voting rights) who promise to pay dues owed; these workers would lose that status if they fell behind again. This is a thinly veiled attempt to garner votes by pandering to backward workers who didn’t pay their dues, undermining the union. Despite militant-sounding rhetoric, RTW’s program at bottom is class collaboration. RTW urged that “Toussaint & Co. also have to fight vigorously for the restoration of our legal right to dues check-off.” With Toussaint’s no-strike pledge, RTW got what it wanted.

It is crucial to forge a union leadership that will enter the battle from the viewpoint of class war, not acceptance of capitalist exploitation and oppression. Union struggle can defeat the MTA’s schemes to pit different sectors of the workforce against each other, including by organizing into the TWU with full pay and union rights the “workfare” recipients forced to do transit jobs to get welfare benefits. Against the capitalist politicians’ attempts to play off transit riders against workers, a class-struggle leadership would resurrect the TWU’s historic call for free mass transit. Rip out the turnstiles! The capitalist rulers are shelling out trillions of taxpayers’ money to shore up the parasites on Wall Street. The union must fight for billions to rebuild the mass transit system, which the capitalists have let decay for decades. Ultimately, to free society from the fetters of capitalist oppression and exploitation and provide a decent living standard for all, the working class must wrest the means of production out of the hands of the capitalist class. For that, workers need their own party, a workers party that fights for a workers government.