A modest victory

New York's Transport Workers Union, Local 100, scores a partial victory in its strike against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and rejuvenates itself to fight another day.

Well, I got me a job in this man's town On this subway train down under the ground; My pay's so low I went in the hole, And I can't get out, folks, to save my soul. Wages on the floor, prices on the ceiling You got to join the union, got to pay your dues, Got to shake hands and stick it through, I'm a union man in a union war, And it's a union world I'm-a-fightin' for.

- Woody Guthrie, Talking Subway, early 1940s.

EACH day, seven million residents of the greater New York area use public transportation to get to and from work. They are an unusual people. Most Americans drive their own cars to work. This is why one in three Americans who ride public transportation do so in New York. Six thousand subway cars and four and a half thousand buses carry these people to work and home, or elsewhere. To manage this enormous infrastructure, the city government created a corporation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in 1967. The MTA hires 34,000 workers, who are organised into the Transport Workers Union, Local 100 (TWU).

In early December 2005, the MTA offered a new contract to the TWU. Modest wage increases combined with a reduction in health care benefits, and a new policy on pensions defined the MTA proposal. The United States economy faces a grave challenge with escalating retirement and health costs. Their combined costs in 2005 are about 8 per cent of the gross domestic production, and according to Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, "as long as health care costs continue to grow faster than the economy as a whole, they will exert budget pressures that seem increasingly likely to make current fiscal policy unsustainable".

In October 2005, the United Auto Workers and General Motors agreed that the workers would also pay for their health care, and that they would be responsible for any increase in costs. Richard Wagoner, chairman of GM, hailed the agreement as "the single biggest cost reduction we've probably ever been able to announce in a single day in the history of GM." The company's health care costs fell by $15 billion. The workers picked up the bill.

The new head of the MTA, Peter Kalikow, would have liked to emulate what GM had achieved. Kalikow, former owner of New York Post and a millionaire Republican operative, told the media before the strike: "Making money is no longer paramount. I do this because I want my legacy to be something other than money." One aspect of Kalikow's legacy was to break the TWU. The contract proposed by the MTA held the seeds to this. The company asked current workers to pay 2 per cent of their wages towards their pension, but it would demand that new workers pay 6 per cent towards their retirement. Such a two-tier system would create the objective basis for disunity within the union. Not only would the MTA seek to pass off health care and pension costs to workers, but in doing so it would find a way to weaken the hands of the workers in future contract talks. The proposal, then, was both economic and political.

The TWU anticipated the poor contract. Indeed, it had been on the verge of a strike in 2002, and it had prepared for a contract fight this time as well. Such distrust of authority is a gift of the union's history. Members of the Communist Party and of the Irish Republican movement founded this union during the 1930s. Mike Quill, the union's first leader, led the transport workers in its first citywide strike in 1966. A year later, in fear of Local 100, the State legislature passed the Taylor Law that outlawed strikes by a public employees' union. The undaunted union struck again in 1980 for better benefits, but it lost. In the aftermath of that strike, the city managers went after the leadership and created strict rules for the workplace. The union bowed to the managers and increasingly became its enforcers. During the 1980s and the 1990s, more and more black and Puerto Rican workers began to drive the buses and trains. Many of them had little appreciation for the business unionism of Local 100. In this context, a group of radical unionists formed the New Directions slate and they eventually took over the union in 2000. The leader of the union was now Roger Toussaint, a track worker who had migrated from Trinidad.

In 2003, Toussaint wrote in the union's magazine: "We are working for a massive change in the MTA - which is to create a culture where the worker is valued, rather than seen as an enemy to be resisted or a tool to be used and then cast aside."

The animus during this strike is a consequence of the divergent views held by the MTA and the TWU. Neither sought to bend to the other. The MTA mobilised its resources against the union. A State judge invoked the Taylor Law and fined the union $1 million a day of the strike. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire, called the workers "selfish". New York Daily News editorial on December 20 put the onus for the strike on Local 100. "Toussaint rejected every reasonable proposal out of hand. Now he's about to lose a fight he never should have picked. And, tragically, transit workers are going to suffer the worst consequences." New York Post, Kalikow's former newspaper, called Local 100 "rats" and demanded that the leadership be jailed.

In 2001, at a shop steward training, Toussaint had anticipated this sort of problem. "You could never match the bosses dollar for dollar or lawyer for lawyer. And the rich control the media. So labour unions have always had to rely on organising for their strength - so that the boss understood that if they messed with the union, there would be consequences." Toussaint called upon other labour unions to stand with Local 100, but the reaction was mute.

Leaders of the two largest unions in New York, the unions of service workers, attempted backroom deals for the Mayor. The national office of the TWU denounced the strike as illegal. No senior Democratic Party official joined the workers on the picket line. The New York Taxi Workers Association, which had closed down the city in 1998, offered strong support to Local 100, but this was not sufficient. Toussaint and the workers had little left to win against a mighty coalition of the entire political establishment.

Nevertheless, because of the great difference between the MTA and the TWU, the union voted unanimously to go on strike on December 20. Toussaint offered the media the union's view on the strike. For Local 100, the strike is "a fight over whether hard work will be rewarded with a decent retirement, a fight over the erosion, or the eventual elimination of health-benefit coverage for working people in New York, a fight over dignity and respect on the job, a concept that is very alien to the MTA. Transit workers are tired of being under-appreciated and disrespected".

The word "respect" introduced another important, and perhaps unsolvable, matter to the negotiations. In 2005, the MTA supervisers gave out 16,000 notices to workers for disciplinary actions. These included the case of the five Sikh workers who received actions for wearing turbans to work. The case of the workers, cited with violations to the uniform code, is now pending. In addition, the supervisers began to claim multiple violations for a single incident. According to The Chief-Leader, the journal of public sector employees, all public agencies have harsh rules, but the MTA's "seems the most draconian of all of them". The TWU indicated that they would forgo wage increases if the MTA scaled back on the work rules, to no avail.

The strike bore modest fruit. Sixty hours after the workers silenced their motors, they went back to work. The union and the MTA continued to work out the details, but Toussaint called off the strike. Local 100 won substantially higher raises than in 2002, and they stopped the bifurcated pension scheme. The losses came on two fronts. First, the workers would have to contribute toward their health care plans, and they would still be liable for the enormous fines levied as a result of the Taylor Law (more than $1,000 a head). Second, Local 100 agreed to a 37, rather than a 36-month contract, which would mean that their next bargaining period would be after the holiday shopping season in 2008. To close the deal, the union had to forgo the political impact of a strike during the Christmas season.

The Wall Street Journal clearly identified the weakness of Local 100 as a political instrument: "The fact that the Transport Workers Union Local 100 had to return to work without a contract or amnesty from massive fines showed the weakened hand of union officials. The fight shows how employers are willing to confront unions to seek concessions in pension and health care benefits, risking damaging strikes. The challenges facing a weakened labour movement, which is suffering from declining membership and often receives ambivalent support for its battles, are stark."

In 2003, Toussaint had carped about the lack of militancy among the workers. "The minute you inconvenience them by telling them they have to come to a union meeting or they have to do without a pay cheque for a week, it's a whole other thing." But Local 100's strike in 2005 proved its leader wrong. The workers held fast, and they seemed disappointed to go back to work. But with no national support and with a failure of nerve from the major national unions, Local 100 had no choice. It won some gains, and lived to fight another day, when it might be forced to stop the city once again.