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    

Labor’s Gotta Play Hardball to Win –
Workers Action Can Smash the Taylor Law!

Strike to Shut Down All New York City Transport!

Striking transit workers at Triboro Coach picketing on Monday, December 19. All
mass transit workers must go out together. (Photo: Jason DeCrow/AP)

MTA Subways and Buses, Private Lines, LIRR, Metro North, NJ Transit, PATH, Taxis, Livery Cabs, Ferries: Everybody Out!

DECEMBER 19 – Midnight December 16 came and went, and the workers of the Metropolitan Transit Authority are still on the job. Drivers and mechanics at the Queens private lines (Triboro Coach and Jamaica Buses) walked out this morning and a new strike deadline has been set for 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. It’s time to hold the line. “A Deadline Is a Deadline,” as the Transport Workers Union Local 100 T-shirt says. “No contract, no work,” as thousands of TWU members chanted at the union meeting December 10, and again at union rallies last week outside the “negotiations” charade going on at the Grand Hyatt on 42nd Street. Over and over, TWUers shouted “We have the power, union power!” Right, and now we must use that power –or lose it.

This is a showdown – everyone go out together! And not just the members of TWU Local 100. If subway and bus workers go on strike, they should be joined by the ATU drivers of the “private” commuter bus lines, by the Teamsters at Metro North, the UTU and BLE at Long Island Railroad, the unions at NJ Transit and the Staten Island ferry, as well as by taxis and livery car drivers. All working people will be affected by the outcome of this battle. With their demands to take away hard-won pension, health care and job rights, the MTA bosses and their bosses in city and state governments are putting the union and mass transit riders up against the wall. The capitalists and their politicians want to bust the union, but together we can bust the union-busters!

“Take it or leave it” is the arrogant line coming from the city rulers. MTA chief Peter Kalikow, the billionaire real estate mogul, showed his disdain for transit workers by finally showing up at the bargaining table one hour before the contract deadline and tossing in his “final offer.” Governor George Pataki skipped the state to hold a fundraising rally in New Hampshire. Multi-billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg had his legal hired guns announce a lawsuit against the union and the workers, demanding a $1 million fine against the TWU and a $25,000 fine for every striker on the first day of a walkout, to double every day after that. An 11-day strike as in 1980 would leave every worker liable for $25 million and the union for $1 billion! The bosses are playing hardball, the union must also if it wants to win.

The MTA management, city hall and state house figure that by talking tough they can make the union eat it. But New York City is a union town, and we have the power to make the bosses eat their words. They threaten the TWU with the state’s Taylor Law banning strikes by public employees. That law was passed in 1967 following the successful transit strike the year before. But the 1966 strike shredded an even harsher anti-strike law, the Condon-Wadlin Act. TWU leader Mike Quill declared, “The judge can drop dead in his black robes. I don't care if I rot in jail. I will not call off the strike.” To win against the Taylor Law will take a mobilization of tens of thousands of union members in the streets of New York City, not just a few “labor leaders” on the platform.

The MTA chiefs are pleading poverty while rolling in dough. The official estimate for the Authority surplus is currently $1 billion, but with their funny money accounting, it’s likely $2 billion or more. And the day before the contract was due, they approved a new budget throwing away hundreds of millions on Christmas fare discounts and other gimmicks. Remember, this is the gang that cooked the books during the last round of negotiations and fare hike, claiming they had a $2.8 billion deficit when later audits by the city and state comptrollers showed they were sitting on a $500 million surplus. Now they are claiming that even though there is a surplus in 2005, they will have a deficit in 2006, or else in 2007, or maybe in 2008 or 2009. This is an old, old shell game.

Double-talking MTA negotiator Gary Dellaverson claims that they are not asking for any givebacks from any presently employed workers and this is not an attack on the whole labor movement. Nonsense. The MTA “final offer” is the opening wedge for a wholesale attack on city unions. They want to start by gouging 2 percent out of the wages of new hires to pay for pensions and medical coverage and raising their retirement age to 62 from 55. If they win that, the next step will be to reduce the benefits of retirees, claiming that the pension is “underfunded.” Meanwhile, they will go after the wages and benefits of other city workers with a vengeance. The time and place to stop this capitalist looting is here and now.

The bosses figure that TWU Local 100 leader Roger Toussaint doesn’t want a strike, but is under pressure from militant ranks. When union dissidents called for a 10 percent yearly raise, Toussaint responded by raising his wage demand to 8 percent a year. Yet already he is offering to settle for much lower, if only the MTA tops will give him some crumbs to toss to the membership. “The whole city will shut down” in a transit strike, Local 100 Vice President Neil Winberry said Saturday. But to do that means not only stopping the subways and MTA buses but every other form of transportation. During the 1980 strike, no subways or buses ran. In narrow trade-union terms, the walkout was effective. But the TWU tops under president John Lawe didn’t want a strike, and didn’t wage it politically. They let Mayor Koch whip up yuppies trooping across Brooklyn Bridge.

Bloomberg and Kalikow calculate that in a strike they can paint the TWU as “the grinch that stole Christmas.” Yet there is wide support in New York City’s population for the transit workers. Many know how hard, dirty and dangerous TWUers’ jobs are. The city has worked up an elaborate emergency transportation system, calling for car pools, taxis, livery cabs and vans taking on extra riders, etc. But that will all fall apart if the commuter rail and bus lines go out, if there are no taxis, livery cabs and vans available. Already there is talk of a walkout at Metro North, where union workers have been working without a contract for three years.

The Taxi Workers Alliance put out a press release calling on drivers to refuse to take extra passengers. This is not enough. Meanwhile, Fernando Mateo, whose New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, organizes mainly livery drivers is preparing to act as a scabherder. Organizations of taxi, livery cab and van drivers should declare a strike to shut down all forms of public transport in New York in support of the TWU, and for their own demands. Among those should be repeal of the “Real ID,” the immigrant-bashing law which threatens the livelihoods of thousands of taxi drivers in New York.

Various left groups active in and around the transit workers have written about the current contract showdown. For the most part they have had little more to offer than pro-labor reporting and empty encouragement: “N.Y. Transit Workers Authorize Strike” (People’s Weekly World, 17 December), “Transit Union Seeks a Decent Contract” (Workers World, 22 December). Workers Vanguard (9 December), newspaper of the Spartacist League (SL), publishes an article headlined, “NYC Transit Workers Must Prepare to Strike.” But what does this strike preparation consist of? The article is silent, with no program for winning the transit workers struggle. Thus the only meaning of the SL call to “prepare” a strike was not to call now for a strike.

In contrast, in our December 10 leaflet, headlined “Shut Down NYC With an All-Out Transit Strike!” The Internationalist put forward a whole program calling for the formation of elected strike committees, to take the bargaining out of the hands of the sellout bureaucrats; for union action to open the MTA’s books, demanding a shorter workweek in no loss in pay; a union hiring hall and union-run training programs; for free mass transit – rip out the turnstiles; for an end to all drug and alcohol testing; for full medical coverage at no cost to workers, and for fully funded pensions with no cutbacks. We called for cops out of the unions and for capitalist politicians and representatives of police “unions” off of labor platforms. If the Taylor Law is used against the TWU, we called for a walkout by all public employees unions.

An opposition group in Local 100 that puts out the “Revolutionary Transit Worker” and is politically supported by the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) put out a leaflet last week (December 13) following the Local 100 meeting headlined: “8%, 8% and 8%, No Givebacks or Strike!” This is pure economism, reducing the struggle to a fight over a few dollars, rather than a full fledged class battle. It is part of the LRP’s whole program of pressuring the pro-capitalist union leaders like Toussaint. In the 1999 elections, the RTW gave “critical support” to Toussaint as part of the New Directions “reform” slate. Now it says that “Toussaint still hopes to reach a sellout deal,” but declares “the ranks must pressure Toussaint to keep his promises.” Rather than economist pressure politics, what’s needed is to forge a class-struggle union leadership.

At bottom this is a class battle, and as Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto more than a century and a half ago “Every class struggle is a political struggle....a more or less veiled civil war.” That is certainly how city rulers are approaching it, and this is how transit workers must wage the battle. The enemy is not just Republicans Bloomberg, Kallikow and Pataki, with Bush behind them in the White House. The strikebreaking in the 1980 strike was led by Democrats, Mayor Ed Koch and Governor Hugh Carey. Today Democrat Jesse Jackson speaks from TWU platforms, leading call and response phrases like “job security is national security.” Yet a transit strike is already being attacked as threatening “national security,” by tying up the center of international finance capital.

In the countdown to the 2002 contract, the big business press accused the TWU leadership of being “terrorists” and today they will attack the union as threatening the “war effort” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The response of the workers movement must be to forthrightly fight to defeat the U.S. imperialist war in the Near East which is the same as the bosses’ war on working people and on democratic rights here in the U.S. Hillary Clinton, the favorite Democrat of Local 100 president Toussaint, is a tub-thumping warmonger over Iraq and last time around supported the use of the strikebreaking Taylor Law against the TWU. Transit workers and all working, oppressed and poor people must break with all the capitalist parties, and take up the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party that fights for a workers government.  n