Charleston Five longshoremen arrested for defending picket lines against cop attack (January 2000).
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South Carolina clay miners appeal for solidarity in fight for their union (October 2001). 
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December 2005    

Smash the Taylor Law with Mass Action!

DECEMBER 10 – As the New York City transit negotiations come down to the wire, city rulers are talking tough. Mayor Mike Bloomberg says he’ll sleep over at the Office of Emergency Management bunker in Brooklyn and threatens to throw the book at Transport Workers Local 100 if the workers walk out. They pretend they can break a strike with New York’s Taylor Law, which outlaws strikes by public employees. But the fact is that they can’t run the subways without the transit workers. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority bigwigs’ talk of running the trains with management personnel is so much hot air. The bosses know it: companies have already booked every hotel room in Midtown and Wall Street for their key personnel.

It’s all a matter of power, and the TWU has it. The 33,000 transit workers can shut down New York City tight. It’s high time to use that power, and the entire union movement should join the battle. The transit workers’ fight is the fight of all NYC labor, and if they hit the bricks, everyone should be out there with them. Here is the chance to fight back and win against years of givebacks and management takeaways.

What’s key is leadership. At a mass meeting at the Jacob Javits convention center December 10, Local 100 members will likely be asked to vote on authorizing the leadership to call a strike. But for the union leadership under Roger Toussaint, this is just a bargaining tactic. When transit workers voted in December 2002 to authorize a strike, the TWU tops “stopped the clock” and kept workers on the job past the midnight December 15 deadline. What they wound up with was the sellout contract that “won” a wage freeze in the first year and pay “raises” in the next two years that were below the rate of inflation. This time Transport Workers Union must turn its long-standing principle into reality: “No contract, no work!” As we said in a chant that was picked up by hundreds of transit workers as they marched across Brooklyn Bridge in December 2002, “Screw Mayor Mike, For a solid transit strike!”

The MTA management’s usual pleas of poverty won’t cut it this time. After they cooked the books to justify a whopping fare increase from $1.50 to $2 a ride, it was revealed that they were hiding their income with two sets of figures. This year, after claiming they faced a deficit for 2005, they announced that they have a ballooning surplus, currently estimated at over $1 billion. So now they are claiming they will have a deficit next year. Meanwhile, the MTA chiefs tried to sell off prime Manhattan real estate for a pittance to Bloomberg cronies in order to build the failed West Side stadium. And MTA chief Peter S. Kalikow, former owner of the notorious labor-hating New York Post, tools around in his Ferraris. ­Transit workers should demand to open the MTA books for union inspection to expose the wholesale looting.

Transit management is trying to break union solidarity by demanding that newly hired workers would be stuck with a big pay cut. “New hires would fork over 2% of their wages for health insurance and 3% for pensions. And they would have to wait until they're 62 to collect full pension benefits - seven more years than current workers,” reported the Daily News (8 December). They are also trying to get conductors out of their booths to walk through the train, supposedly as an “anti-terrorist” measure. In reality, this would be the first step toward the MTA’s longstanding drive to cut train crews to a single person, who would have to act as driver and conductor. This would turn into a calamity the first time there was a serious accident, or trains were stuck in the tunnels, as they often are with the aging transit system. In addition, management bargainers are pushing for “broadbanding” with a vengeance, forcing subway and bus workers to do multiple jobs for which they are not trained. This is asking for a disaster, but safety is no concern of the MTA bosses.

The system chiefs are planning a multibillion dollar expansion, paid for through bond issues which pour billions in interest into the coffers of Wall Street banks. Meanwhile, the subways are in still in terrible condition. The switching system in many cases dates from the early years of the last century, the pumps are inadequate to stop flooding, the wiring is so antiquated that it periodically results in fires (which they then blame on train operators or the homeless), and many stations are overrun by rats on the platform late at night. Kalikow & Co.’s contempt for their “wage slaves” was gruesomely demonstrated this week when a worker, Lewis Moore, was found unconscious on a work train in the Bronx. Instead of taking him to a nearby station to the south, which would have delayed traffic, they drove the train seven stations north. Moore was dead by the time it reached 180th street. Meanwhile, the capitalist bosses try to terrorize the heavily black, Latino and Asian work force with “plantation justice,” writing up workers on disciplinary charges more than 15,000 times last year.

Rather than confronting the anti-union offensive head-on, the leadership of Local 100 talks of being “partners” with the MTA bosses. Toussaint last time around gave up the “no layoffs” clause and this year his list of contract “demands” accepts the Authority’s supposed right to get rid of “excess” employees as long as it offers them transfers first. Toussaint came to office as part of the New Directions slate following the debacle of the 1999 contract fight. But these “reformers” have played ball with the bosses. The former ND leaders who fell out with Toussaint have since wandered off to form a bloc with the old conservative Sonny Hall gang, and together they are suing the union leadership in the capitalist courts. This is crossing the class line, appealing for aid from the enemy. We say that the workers must clean their own house, and replace the sellout misleaders with a class-struggle leadership on a program to fight the capitalists down the line.

Such a program would include fighting for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay to greatly increase the number of jobs. At present, the greatly increased ridership is being carried by a workforce that is smaller than five years ago, and cutbacks in service on the weekends have infuriated the public. All hiring should be done through a union hiring hall, and with union-run training programs at full pay to enable transit workers to move up to more skilled positions. Instead of constant fare hikes, the TWU should fight for free mass transit – rip out the turnstiles. Transit workers should demand an end to all drug and alcohol testing and establish union safety committees with the power to shut down unsafe operations. Rejecting the MTA’s attempts to gut health care and retirement programs, the union should insist that there be full medical coverage at no cost to workers, and that pensions be fully funded with no cutbacks. And instead of leaving control of this fight in the hands of pro-capitalist bureaucrats who seek an illusory “partnership” with the MTA bosses, there should be an elected strike committee made up of delegates who can be recalled at any time.

It is key for workers facing a tough battle to be clear on who are their friends and who is the enemy. Toussaint and his “team” love to stage photo ops with Democratic Party politicians like Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson. Yet Clinton is a certified warmonger, demanding more troops be sent to Iraq, and supported use of the strikebreaking Taylor Law against the TWU in 1999. The MTA chiefs try to use “terrorism” as an excuse to gut union jobs and harass passengers with a barrage of absurd rules, while the NYPD rips up the Fourth Amendment with their bag searches. Yet the TWU leadership has tried to outbid the bosses at this game, calling in Israeli “anti-terrorism experts” last summer to train conductors. Instead, a class-struggle leadership would make it clear that the war on Iraq and Afghanistan and the whole “war on terror” is in fact an attempt by U.S. rulers to impose their imperialist hegemony on the world, and that this is part and parcel of the capitalist bosses’ on working people, minorities and immigrants in the U.S. And they should make it clear, as we wrote at the time of the last TWU contract battle: “You Can’t Run the Subways with Bayonets!” (see The Internationalist No. 15, January-February 2003).

Mobilize NYC Labor to Bust NYU Union-Busters!

If transit workers do go on strike, they will immediately come up against the power of the entire capitalist state apparatus, from use of the Taylor Law to attempts to send the National Guard into subways. To defeat this threat, it is necessary to go beyond simple business unionism and place New York transit workers at the head of all the working people, poor, oppressed minorities and immigrants facing relentless attacks by the ruling class. Right now, New York University graduate students are on strike against a haughty administration which refuses to recognize their union, part of the United Auto Workers. While there have been gestures of solidarity, what it will take to win that strike is the mobilization of thousands of union workers from all over the city to shut down NYU so that it cannot function. Meanwhile, City University teaching personnel in the Professional Staff Congress have been working without a contract for over three years. The PSC should strike together with the transit workers. If the Taylor Law is used against the TWU, all public employees unions should walk out.

TWU leaders remarked after getting the MTA demands that this was a “declaration of war” on the union. True enough. But to fight this war it is necessary to have a program to mobilize labor’s power. That means, no more capitalist politicians on labor platforms, and no more representatives of police or detectives’ “unions” either. We say: cops out of the unions – they are the armed fist of the bosses. And that means getting the revenue and “property protection” cops out of the TWU. The next time cops gun down an innocent person, like African immigrants Amadou Diallo and Ousmane Zongo, for which no cop has done a day of jail time, the unions should mobilize their power in the streets and the TWU should shut down mass transit against police terror. Democrat Freddy Ferrer, who was backed by the TWU, said that the 41 shots fired at Diallo were “not a crime.” We say a union leadership dedicated to winning the class war would break with the capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans alike (as well as their satellites like the Working Families Party and Greens), and build a revolutionary workers party to fight for a workers government.  n