In Face of NYC Transit Layoffs

TWU Tops: Lieutenants in Capitalists’ “War on Terror”

Pleading poverty on the heels of the capitalist financial meltdown, state and municipal governments across the country are cutting services to the bone, imposing sweeping layoffs and attacking pensions. This anti-labor offensive began at the top, when early last year the Obama White House showered hundreds of billions on its Wall Street patrons and engineered the bailout of Chrysler and GM by tearing up union gains won through decades of hard struggle. Now Democrats and Republicans alike at all levels of government are gunning for the public workers unions.

In New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is slashing bus and subway routes and threatening mass layoffs, with over 200 subway station agents already out of a job, 275 more holding pink slips and 750 other transit workers facing the ax. Station agents play a vital role, from helping subway riders navigate the system to finding lost children and calling ambulances for the injured and ill. The leadership of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 ought to be mobilizing the rank and file against the MTA bosses and their government higher-ups to fight for these jobs and for free mass transit. Instead, besides their usual practice of begging capitalist politicians in Albany and Washington for mercy (and, now, for more stimulus money), the Local 100 tops are pleading that station agents provide a “first line of defense” in the government’s “war on terror.”

This is as grotesque as it is dangerous. The “war on terror” is an all-purpose fiction pushed by the bloody U.S. ruling class to justify invasion and mass murder abroad and a vicious clampdown on the rights of the population at home—in the first place immigrants, but also black people and the labor movement. Unions and unionized workers have been targets of the “war on terror” from the outset. In December 2001, the leader of striking teachers in Middletown, New Jersey, was vilified as a “representative of the Taliban” and the strikers were clapped into jail. As we wrote at the time, “This should be an alarm bell to the entire labor movement about what the bosses’ jingoist ‘national unity’ means” (“228 NJ Teachers Jailed for Striking,” WV No. 771, 28 December 2001).

On March 4, the Local 100 bureaucracy staged the first of several rallies against the layoffs where the “war on terror” theme has been played to the hilt. Recently elected Local president John Samuelsen invited onto the stage capitalist Democratic Party politicians and Police Benevolent Association head Pat Lynch, as his predecessor Roger Toussaint regularly did. Lynch gave his stamp of approval to the TWU tops’ campaign to enlist station agents as “anti-terror” auxiliaries to the cops. No wonder: It’s the job of Lynch and his cop “union” to enforce “law and order” against blacks, immigrants and the unions. Lynch has no place on the TWU’s rostrum! Cops out of the unions! Samuelsen even appealed directly to the Chair of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, to pressure the MTA bosses to keep the station agents on the job as “eyes and ears” for the bosses’ state (Transport Workers Alert, April 2010).

Acting as lieutenant in the reactionary “anti-terror” crackdown is second nature for Samuelsen, who is, after all, a former prison guard. Only weeks before the TWU’s 2002 contract deadline, he complained about subcontractors employing immigrant day laborers who do not undergo background checks, ranting, “We don’t know if they have a criminal background or anything about them.” This racist bigotry is poison for the labor movement, and not least for the TWU with its integrated membership that includes workers from all parts of the world.

As part of the pro-Democrat, pro-imperialist AFL-CIO bureaucracy that supports the “war on terror,” the TWU tops are hardly alone. Many union bureaucrats collaborated with the government in the implementation of the Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program. In the name of “port security,” TWIC requires port workers to undergo background checks and acquire identity cards to work. Since being rolled out in April 2009, it has caused a de facto purge of tens of thousands of port workers. Black and Latino workers, many of whom had been caught up in racist “war on drugs” dragnets in the past, have been especially hard hit by TWIC.

In one of his final writings, revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky observed: “The labor bureaucrats do their level best in words and deeds to demonstrate to the ‘democratic’ state how reliable and indispensible they are in peacetime and especially in time of war” (“Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940). Trotsky emphasized that to “turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy” requires the “complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state.” And that requires forging a new, class-struggle leadership.