Last December, a labor struggle dominated New York City’s headlines and conversations in all five boroughs.  For the first time in decades, the men and women who operate the biggest mass transit system in the country, who drive the trains and buses, maintain and repair the tracks and the cars, clean the system and staff the stations, had voted in a mass meeting called by the local leadership to authorize a strike.

Only days before the old contract expired, the Metropolitan Transit Authority made a proposal to Transport Workers Union Local 100.  It was a horrible offer, increasing annual health care premiums, co-pays and pension payments by about $1500, while not offering a wage increase except one linked to productivity improvements.  On December 7^th, an overwhelming majority of workers in attendance at a mass meeting authorized the local leadership to call a strike.  But striking is illegal for public-sector workers in New York City, and after the vote, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki sought an injunction against the union, threatening to levy massive fines. The New York Post hit new rhetorical lows, accusing the union’s leaders of waging “jihad” on New York City.

In the end, there was no strike.  Under pressure from the union, the Metropolitan Transit Authority put hundreds of millions of dollars into the health plan, eliminating the need for higher payments from workers.  It also radically revised the grievance procedure, disciplinary policy and safety rules, and took the pension giveback off the table.  The union accepted three percent wage increases for the second and third years of the contract, and a one-time bonus payment of $1,000 in the first year (not factored into base wages).  Debate raged throughout the union and the city’s labor movement.  Was the contract concessionary, as critics within the union charged?  Would the limited wage gains pave the way for givebacks throughout the public sector workforce?  Should the union have challenged the legal prohibition on striking and gone out despite the risks?

In an era when labor is invisible, and when the market alone is supposed to magically create wealth, the mere threat of a transit strike forced the city’s attention to 34,000 men and women—70 percent of whom are people of color—without whom nothing in the city moves.  Not for more than twenty years had the transit workers seriously threatened a strike.  (In 1999, activists pushed for one, but the union’s leadership enforced an injunction obtained for the MTA by Mayor Rudy Giuliani that prohibited the union from even talking about striking).  This time, a strike seemed imminent—and it was a visceral, exhilarating demonstration of power.  The strike threat was able to win a far better contract than workers otherwise would have received.  At the same time, the contract was not as good as it could have been, containing major concessions on wages—even though a later audit would show that the MTA had been lying about its finances, so higher wage increases might have been possible.  The limitations of the contract suggest the distance the transit workers still must go, both in terms of internal organizing and political outreach, to win a transit strike in the heart of global capital.  It was no accident, after all, that the Post raised the specter of jihad.

What happened during December 2002 was the culmination of a change in power within the union that began at the end of 2000, when a dissident faction known as New Directions was elected to the leadership of the local.  Roger Toussaint, a Trinidadian immigrant, headed the ticket, and he steered the union through the negotiations.  The victory of New Directions in Local 100 marks one of the few times in recent history that a group of union rebels has successfully taken over such a large and powerful union.  How did radicals rise to control the union that runs the New York City transit system? 

TWU was founded during the Great Depression by Communist Party members and Irish workers, many of whom had been active in the Irish republican movement and in the secret revolutionary group, Clan na Gael.  Mike Quill, the union’s first president, was a daring, radical and brash Irish immigrant.  In 1966, Quill led the union in its first city-wide strike (he died shortly after it ended).  One year later, the state legislature passed the Taylor Law, establishing a legal process of union recognition for public workers, but making strikes illegal.  After this, the fortunes of the union went downhill.  Like all the city’s unions, TWU Local 100 suffered in the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s.  In 1980, following another strike (which dissidents in the union had pushed for, but to which the union’s leadership had not given full support), the MTA management installed a harsh disciplinary system.  The confrontational verve of the union’s early years gave way to a union leadership willing to make concessions and afraid to rouse the membership—which was increasingly black, Hispanic and immigrant, instead of the white ethnics that had formed the original base of the union and that continued to comprise the local leadership group.  The leadership of the union during the 1980s and most of the 1990s was inert and undemocratic—leaving plenty of room for New Directions to grow.

New Directions began in the wake of the 1980 strike.  Its leaders were younger workers, many of whom had been activists in the antiwar movement and the civil rights movement.  Two train operators, Steve Downs and Tim Schermerhorn, started to put out a newsletter, Hell on Wheels, which advocated around transit worker grievances on the job.  Downs (who is a train operator today) says, “The preponderance of our work was on the newsletter, challenging the leadership to be accountable for things.”  But while people liked the newsletter, the activist cadre working on it remained quite small.  So in 1988, the group—by this time calling itself New Directions, though it was not institutionally linked to the dissident organization of the same name in the United Auto Workers—ran candidates for local-wide offices, in an effort to give the group a higher profile.  They were amazed when Tim Schermerhorn, the presidential candidate, won 22 percent of the vote.  (Sonny Hall, the incumbent local president and president of the international TWU as of 1993, had said he would view it as a defeat if Schermerhorn got more than 10 percent of the vote.)  Throughout the 1990s, New Directions continued to run candidates in elections, bring delegates to the international’s meetings, and organize hard in contract battles to push the leadership and engage members in the union.  They were remarkably successful in building an organization within the union, and in encouraging ever higher turnout in union elections and local politics.

New Directions was devoted to a politics of member mobilization and empowerment, building the union as an effective, powerful organization.  The group concentrated its energy on workplace issues, and while it criticized, for example, labor’s dependence on the Democratic Party, the organization primarily used the newsletter to agitate around concrete issues on the job.  The leaders believed in creating internal union structures that empower members, and were strongly committed to union democracy.  Queens College labor historian Joshua Freeman says, “The bulk of its activities and literature were directed towards making TWU an effective union, resisting arbitrary discipline, fighting for health and safety.  They set out to be crackerjack trade unionists.”

But the activist group based around Hell on Wheels was not the only force mobilizing in the union.  Roger Toussaint, a track worker (doing maintenance work on the city’s rapid transit system) led another pocket of activism in the track division.  Toussaint also had a background in radical politics.  Born in what he describes as “the ghetto section” of Trinidad, one of nine children raised by a single mother, Toussaint (along with one older sister) was politically active from the age of 11 or 12, taking part in the resistance of the late 1960s to the neo-colonial Trinidadian government.  Inspired in part by the American civil rights movement, in part by May 1968 in France and Italy, and in part by the Cuban Revolution, students and workers joined together to fight unemployment and economic inequality in Trinidad in a movement that became known as the Black Power Movement (it incorporated Indians as well).  At the movement’s climax, in February 1970, several army troops were told to suppress the riots and the enormous demonstrations that were sweeping the cities.  Instead, they mutinied and joined the protesters.  With support from British and American troops, the government declared a state of emergency which lasted until 1972, imposing a curfew, censoring the press, imprisoning leaders of the movement and suppressing political and individual freedoms.

During this period, Toussaint says that he worked with “the left wing of the trade union movement” in Trinidad, as well as student groups.  He was arrested in late high school for painting slogans on the school walls (one of which was “Free Education Means Free Books”).  In 1974, he moved to the United States, where his mother had emigrated a few years before.  He attended Brooklyn College, at the height of the city’s fiscal crisis, and demonstrated against budget cuts.  Toussaint returned briefly to Trinidad in 1976, to participate in an organizing drive among school construction workers, but soon came back to Brooklyn, where he went to work as a shipbuilder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  After the yards closed, he worked briefly in the mailroom at Teachers College, before taking the civil service exam to become a transit worker.  He started as a cleaner in 1984, and moved to being a track worker one year later. 

Toussaint’s early union activism was directed equally against the union and management.  He says, “One of my very early observations was that the union was very detached from the rank and file, and that it was closer to management than to the members.”  He was especially incensed by the union’s refusal to confront management harassment of co-workers.  “One of the earliest things that I did was participate in the removal of a corrupt shop steward who was working with management in a shop I worked in.”  He worked on safety issues: Kevin Barnes, a conductor who has worked for the MTA for 18 years and is a longtime union activist, says, “He would find asbestos that was exposed, and let people know what was out there.”

Unlike New Directions, which focused on local-wide activism, and which began as a group putting out a newsletter, Toussaint’s union activism in the 1980s and 1990s was based in the track division, where he sought to build an organization capable of protecting workers on the job and fighting management abuses.  Any time he or other track workers saw a safety violation they would halt work.  Any time a track worker was hit with disciplinary action for a protest or for not doing work deemed unsafe, Toussaint would organize people to fight back through appeals.  The result was that there were far fewer write-ups for disciplinary problems in the track department than elsewhere in the system, since management knew that the workers would fight.  According to Dave Katzman, the union’s communications director, workers in track were winning more than 90 percent of cases in arbitration. 

Track workers are in some ways the most invisible workers in the transit system.  They do not drive trains or buses; they do not interact with the public.  They are people who have made their way up from minimum-wage jobs and poverty though the civil service, rising from being cleaners to become track workers.  Out of the range of occupations in the MTA, track workers most closely resemble industrial workers—working hard in extremely dangerous conditions, never recognized, acknowledged, or even seen.  More than train operators, bus drivers or station agents, this is Toussaint’s base.

Track workers elected Toussaint to represent the 1,800-member track division in 1994 (three years before he joined New Directions).  In 1998, the MTA fired him, saying that he had been in an unauthorized car during working hours (in fact, he was on union business when his car was hit in an intersection—Toussaint suffered neck and back injuries).  After firing Toussaint, the MTA hired private investigators to follow him—to union meetings, to his son’s nursery school, even to hearings where he fought for union workers.

While Toussaint’s activism focused on shop floor issues and on building the union in the track division, it was driven by a deeper politics: resistance to the authoritarian discipline of the MTA.  Under the disciplinary system that had been established after the 1980s strike, about half the membership—16,000 people—was written up each year on disciplinary charges.  There was no first stage of the process where complaints or problems could be dealt with informally. Hearings could be held on the worker’s time off, so there was no incentive for supervisors not to file grievances.  In addition, workers on sick leave had to call the MTA every time they left their homes.  They could be subjected to unannounced home visits from the MTA.

Toussaint says that he believes that he became a symbol to transit workers of the degradation they all faced working for the MTA, and the union’s unwillingness to confront it.  “Transit workers perceived my own situation as the epitome of the existing union,” he says. One story told around the union is that during the 2002 negotiations, Toussaint brought about 200 workers into the bargaining room.  At one point, discussing the grievance procedure, he asked them how many of them had ever been suspended by the MTA.  Every worker stood up.  “That’s why I got elected,” Toussaint said to the crowd.

Because Toussaint was a worker until the time that he was suspended by the MTA, he remained very close to the day-to-day reality of life as a transit worker.  And perhaps because of his early political involvement in resistance to a repressive political regime, he was sensitive to repression on the job, willing to describe the arbitrary system as “plantation justice.”  Even more than economic issues, his activism focused on fighting grievances and on the MTA’s harassment, surveillance and discipline of transit workers.  Even today, workers’ struggle for dignity—to not be treated, as one issue of the union’s newspaper put it, as “second-class citizens or slaves”—infuses Toussaint’s language and philosophy.

Out of the dissident groups organizing in industrial unions following the 1960s and 1970s—New Directions/UAW, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement, and the dissident factions in the steelworkers and the mine workers—Local 100 is one of the only ones to come to power (TDU, of course, could not hold onto it).  The new leadership in Local 100 is indeed very different from the old.  It’s a radical organization that controls the country’s largest transit system.

Toussaint joined New Directions in 1997, by which point the group had clearly emerged—as Toussaint puts it today—as “the only refuge for people who were concerned about the union.”  He ran for Recording Secretary in a slate headed by Tim Schermerhorn.   In 1997, the election was dominated by red-baiting from the incumbent leadership, and the New Directions candidates lost narrowly in an election marred by various improprieties on the part of the local leadership.  But by 2000, the old leadership was internally divided, marred by financial scandals and bad contracts, with the International president backing a challenger to the incumbent leadership.  And Toussaint was elected in a New Directions caucus meeting to head the ticket.  After the incumbent and the international-backed candidates split the vote, Toussaint and New Directions won handily.  “If they hadn’t been so incompetent, we might not have been so successful,” says Downs. 

As soon as New Directions came into office, the leadership took a 25 percent pay cut (Toussaint is paid $84,000) and eliminated old perks like extra pensions and health benefits.  The local began training shop stewards, and about 800 members became stewards.  It fired old arbitrators perceived as being pro-management.  It started cultural events—Women’s Day, Hispanic Day, Family Day, Black History Month, and Irish Day—at the union hall open to the entire membership (John Sweeney—whose father was a New York City bus driver—spoke one Irish Day).  The local now publishes its own newspaper.  It has struck three times in the past three years—a one-day strike on the Liberty Lines in Westchester, a one-day wildcat action at another private bus company, and a seven-week strike at the Queens Private Lines buses over the summer of 2002. 

But the contract for the city’s transit workers is the true gauge of Local 100’s strength.  Although the union ultimately accepted lower wages than members would have liked, the contract contains significant and important economic gains. Winning MTA investment in the health plan and scuttling the proposal for higher payments to the pension plan are victories that would not have been achieved without the threat of a strike.  Given that the union also won new benefits—such as prescription coverage for retirees, health benefits for part-time traffic checkers, child care, an education and training fund, the elimination of minimum wage jobs for workers in training, and health benefits for domestic partners—the economic side of the contract offers substantial gains. In part they are defensive—resisting major givebacks in health coverage and benefits—but they are victories nonetheless.

The contract also gives employees greater rights on the job.  Punitive practices like home visits and sick leave check-in have been eliminated for most workers.  The new grievance procedure mandates that all grievances be handled on company time, and creates a first informal step for settling problems on the job.  The union won dramatic improvements in safety regulations, giving workers the right to refuse to perform tasks that they deem unsafe and in violation of Authority rules.  Finally, the union is seeking to create staffed offices at all points where transit workers must interact with their employer—where disciplinary hearings are held, where injured workers go to the doctor.  All of these changes empower workers on the job, and will make it easier for the union to mobilize in the future. 

As Toussaint wrote in the Local 100 Express after ratification of the contract, “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.”  Next time, he says, with health benefits shored up and the disciplinary procedure reformed, the union will focus on addressing “the disparity between the economic treatment of transit workers in the city and those on the Long Island Railroad and Metro North.”  Workers on the suburban rail lines are paid $4 to $6 an hour more than city workers who do the same jobs.  

The leadership of the union is actively encouraging participation in the union—organizing, demonstrating and enforcing the contract.  According to the Local 100 Express, at a 2001 shop steward training, Toussaint spoke to the members: “You could never match the bosses dollar for dollar or lawyer for lawyer.  And the rich control the media.  So labor unions have always had to rely on organizing for their strength—so that the boss understood that if they messed with the union, there would be consequences…In this life, working men and women almost never get what they deserve. They only get what they fight for.  They only take you seriously if you organize.”  He spoke about the backgrounds of the division vice-presidents: “Darlene was selling Metrocards.  I was an unemployed track worker.  Eddie drove a bus.  Tim drove a train.  We know we can do it.  We know we can face the unrelenting write-ups, management’s disrespect for members’ rights on the job…Management only takes you seriously when the union is a constant presence and a part of daily life at each work location, when we are in every single part of every property.  And we are preparing for this tonight, because this is the first time that the union put workers from 15 different divisions together, to talk a common language and share a common knowledge—that the union is theirs.”

Creating a union culture of mobilization where one has not previously existed takes both “passion and perspective,” to quote Max Weber.  Toussaint has lately sounded depressed about the difficulties of encouraging activism.  At an early June forum at New York City’s Central Labor Council on the Taylor Law, he spoke about the frustrations of organizing.  According to The Chief, a newspaper for the city’s civil service workers, he said that while workers liked acting militant, “the minute you inconvenience them by telling them they have to come to a union meeting or they have to do without a paycheck for a week, it’s a whole other thing.”  But the job of the union is to convince the member that it is worth his or her while to come to union meetings and be active in the union—activism doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it a question of innate consciousness. 

And despite the daily struggle of turning dispirited members into strong activists, there are signs of hope.  Conductor Kevin Barnes, who “shop-gated” (spoke to workers) during the ratification campaign, says that the contract struggle was exhilarating.  “All of a sudden, the MTA had to deal with a man spitting fire at them instead of taking pellets from them, saying that we want changes and we are not settling for anything less,” he says.  For the first time in years, the entire membership got to read the contract before voting on it, and Toussaint went to barns and depots across the city, arguing the contract in division after division, shop after shop.  When Barnes was out talking to members, he says, “One man told me, ‘This is the first time I felt proud in 23 years to be a transit worker.’” 

This fall, Toussaint will face re-election, and his leadership will face its greatest internal challenge.  On the one hand, TWU Local 100 is an industrial union that contains within itself many different kinds of workers.  The base of New Directions has always been in the subway divisions, while the bus lines supported the old leadership more strongly.  Over the past year, workers on the private bus lines threatened to secede from the union and form a new local—voting in early December, right before the MTA contract deadline (the secession movement lost).  Workers in surface transit and craft workers in the union may mount a challenge to Toussaint in the upcoming election that echoes the old redbaiting campaigns that the leadership used to run against New Directions. 

But at the same time, the divisions within New Directions that were submerged when the group was a dissident faction mounting a challenge to established power have emerged now that New Directions runs the local.  Many longtime New Directions activists—including the Recording Secretary of the local, Noel Acevedo—are furious at Toussaint.  Some of the splits in the group go back years.  Toussaint says that he used to think of New Directions activists as “paper tigers,” while Downs claims that he voted against Toussaint’s candidacy in 2000 (Downs was nominated as well).  Toussaint, he says, has never really been committed to mobilizing members (citing a local-wide meeting around the contract in 1999 that Toussaint did not want to help to build).  He claims that Toussaint did not adequately organize for a strike in 2002, instead hoping against hope that Albany would fund wage increases.  Downs also charges that Toussaint has created a political culture within the union that is hostile to debate: “Disagreement with the policy of the leadership is not tantamount to treason of the union.” 

Downs and Acevedo campaigned against the 2002 contract, telling members they could get a better deal.  They weren’t alone in thinking so: 40 percent of the membership voted the contract down.  (Toussaint, for his part, says that the “old guard” in New Directions simply resents that he won support within the group.)

Members of the faction gathered around Downs are now putting out a new newsletter, called Rank and File Advocate.  And they are meeting with people who did not support Toussaint or New Directions in the past—the traditionally conservative wing of the local—to talk about joining forces in the upcoming elections.  The old TWU leadership, Downs says, was incompetent, but not corrupt.  This alliance is still in formation, and it is not clear that it will work.  But New Directions and the old conservatives in the local would make strange bedfellows.  New Directions and the old local leadership spent years attacking each other.  Even though Downs and Acevedo campaigned against the contract (and presumably for a strike), International President Sonny Hall refused to give his support to the threatened strike last year.  (In fact, when Toussaint challenged Hall for the presidency of the International in 2001, anonymous leaflets appeared at the convention accusing Toussaint and New Directions of being affiliated with Osama bin Laden.)  Allying with conservatives in the union—especially ones known for redbaiting—might seem a surprising place for labor dissidents to wind up.  But Downs says, a little wistfully, “We are finding that on some things we have more in common than we had thought.”

The tensions within New Directions—and the near-certain split in this fall’s elections—reveal the difficult relationship between dissident groups and union leadership, even when it is progressive. There is, of course, plenty of room to disagree with various strategies of membership mobilization.  The leadership could have started to prepare for a strike much earlier.  It could have tried different tactics to organize members.  But Toussaint’s leadership has been so different from that of the old guard that it is hard to know what to make of the claim, especially when the radicals making it are starting to join forces with more conservative groups within the union.  For some activists, any formal leadership seems suspect—what matters is mobilizing the members, and it is impossible to do this from the top, since once you are a leader you are no longer part of the rank and file.  But member mobilization must be a project of the top and the bottom of the union together—creating a union culture of opposition and activism.

On the other hand, although it is always hard to accept criticism—especially when strongly worded, as it usually is in union battles—progressive union leaders should strive to treat opposition and disagreement in the union, as much as possible, as healthy, productive and necessary.  Otherwise, the union risks becoming brittle and defensive, and it risks losing longtime activists.  Often, leaders blame dissidents for criticizing them instead of doing “real work” in the union.  But whoever bears responsibility for the sad developments within New Directions, the burden of building relationships and developing leadership in the union must fall to the people who have been elected to run it.  Leaders must find ways to bring dissident activists into the union, instead of denouncing them.  In the end, this only builds a stronger union.

Some might view Toussaint’s success as a question at least in part of ethnic and racial identification.  But Toussaint’s appeal to his members is far broader than a simple question of identity politics.  Transit workers are drawn to him because of his sensitivity and outrage at the daily humiliations, trials and indignities that they face on the job, and his ability to describe these in terms of political rights.  His vision of the struggles of workers in terms of political liberty may come, in part, from his own personal history as a revolutionary in a Third World country, fighting for liberation and independence.  The repression he faced at home must have been echoed by the repression he faced at the MTA.   But whatever its source, this sense of the politics of the workplace makes Toussaint an oddly appropriate leader for the labor movement in an age of reaction—when the very right to organize is challenged everywhere.  

Finally, the rise of Toussaint and New Directions in TWU Local 100 is of great importance for the larger labor movement in New York City.  Numerically, public workers make up a large proportion of the city’s unionized workforce.  Strategically, transit is the key industry in New York.  And politically, public employees are on the front lines of budget cuts and service cutbacks that determine living conditions for all working people.  That one of the city’s most powerful public unions is controlled by a progressive leadership may help, over time, to transform the whole labor movement in the city and the state, if the people who run the local continue striving to build a radical, militant union. 

For in the end, the challenges that TWU Local 100 faces are intimately linked to the basic struggle for the welfare state and a more equal society.  Here, too, the union does not shy away from the magnitude of the conflict.  “The fight right now,” Toussaint says, “is over whether the labor movement, the student movement, the community organizations accept the perimeters of so-called reality.  It is whether they meekly accept the rolling back of three decades of gains under the excuse of the fiscal crisis that policies of tax cuts to the rich in the past two decades have created—or whether real alternatives will be suggested that do not involve giving up these vast gains, or retreating from our civil liberties.”  By placing issues like universal health coverage at the heart of electoral politics, the labor movement has the chance to “turn the challenges of the present into the opportunities of the future.”  The willingness to fight hard, instead of rolling over to make deals; the need to create a new culture within the union, and to bring the union’s power to bear everywhere throughout the workplace; and, finally, the need to reframe the basic perimeters of reality—these are the values that a once-revolutionary brings to the labor movement.  The whole labor movement might learn from Roger Toussaint and Local 100 to embrace the depth of the struggle that confronts us all, and to find inspiration in the revolutionary character of seemingly ordinary demands.