DECEMBER 28 – Nothing so concentrates the minds of Wall Street bankers, you might say, as much as the prospect of a New York City transit strike. So when the 33,700 workers of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hit the bricks December 20, shutting down the largest mass transit system in the country, the reality of the walkout by Transport Workers Union Local 100 certainly got the bosses’ attention. And everyone else’s.

For two and a half days, the TWU strike was 100 percent effective. No subways or buses with passengers moved. The seven million riders who normally take the MTA daily had to scramble to find some other mode of transport. Or not. Many trudged on foot for miles. Even with elaborate emergency transportation plans, enforced carpooling and the like, Midtown Manhattan was tied up for hours with monumental traffic jams where nobody moved. There were scenes of mass chaos at Grand Central, Penn Station and Jamaica Station in Queens.

The union picket lines were large, spirited and solid, at more than three dozen sites in all five boroughs. At least a dozen locations had more than a hundred picketers each of strikers who came out every day. Holiday shopping took a nosedive and economists reported hundreds of millions of dollars a day in losses. Yet in spite of the hardships, and partly because of the racist vituperation against “greedy” and “thuggish” transit workers spewing out of the mouth of the billionaire mayor, the transit workers continued to enjoy wide public support.

According to an NY1 poll on December 22, more New Yorkers blamed the strike on the MTA than on the TWU, 54 percent thought what the union was asking for was fair, 51 percent though Mayor Bloomberg’s handling of the strike was not so good or poor, and 69 percent gave Governor Pataki thumbs down. While white middle-class suburban commuters groused about the strike in TV interviews, nearly three-quarters of blacks and Latinos, overwhelmingly poor and working-class, supported the TWU demands.

And yet, on Day 3 of the ’05 New York transit strike, TWU Local 100 president Roger Toussaint caved in, called it off and ordered the strike lines taken down. TWU picket signs proclaimed, “No Contract, No Work,” yet Toussaint sent strikers back to work without a contract. Other signs proclaimed, “TWU Says: No Givebacks.” But yesterday, Toussaint presented a giveback contract which was rubber-stamped by a Local 100 executive board dominated by his supporters. It was a sellout of the transit workers by their leadership.

Bosses press was in foam-flecked frenzy over powerful NYC transit strike, calling here to jail Transport Workers Union Local 100 president Roger Toussaint.

Sure, due to the strike, the MTA dropped its demand that newly hired transit workers pay 6 percent of their wages into the pension fund that management has underfunded for years. There’s no two-tier contract with lower pay for new hires. Toussaint brags that they got “lifetime medical,” and “no broadbanding.” We’ll see. The 3 percent, 4 percent and 3.5 percent annual pay hikes barely cover inflation. But now all union members will pay 1.5 percent of their wages for health care, previously entirely covered by the MTA. Plus $1,000 fines for every TWU member under the anti-strike Taylor Law. All this, even though the MTA is sitting on a $1 billion-plus surplus.

This is the proverbial camel’s nose inside the tent. It’s the opening wedge to stick transit workers with skyrocketing health care costs. Already, the New York Post (28 December) reports that the contract includes a clause saying “the union will have to kick in the difference if the cost of health care increases at a higher rate than their salaries do.” Soon Bloomberg & Co. will be demanding that all city workers be saddled with escalating medical insurance costs, and weaker unions will feel they have to follow the TWU’s lead.

But transit workers do not have to take this betrayal lying down. Today’s New York Times reported: “Earlier yesterday, negotiators from the union and the authority were discussing ways to sweeten the deal because of fears of widespread rank-and-file opposition. If the members vote down the settlement, it will put Mr. Toussaint and the transportation authority in a difficult position.” It sure as hell will. But pushing for a big “no” vote in a mail ballot is not enough. TWU Local 100 members must prepare for an all-out struggle to win!

A mail ballot is anti-democratic, isolating union members in their homes where they are subject to the blaring anti-strike propaganda from the capitalist media. Instead, TWU militants should demand that Local 100 call a mass membership meeting to discuss and vote on the contract. But this time, unlike December 10 at the Javits Center, the ranks should control the discussion instead of having a rally for the union tops. Bottom line: no givebacks, period.

If the giveback pact is voted down, an elected strike preparation committee with hundreds of members representing every subway yard and bus barn should be formed on the spot. This should be repeated at every union shop, electing delegates to a central strike council who can be recalled at any time, and forming local committees to mobilize the membership. But beyond the question of organization, what’s key is to have a class-struggle program going beyond demands for a few dollars more.

There was quite a lot of opposition in Local 100 to calling off the strike and there are several clots of dissidents in the leadership. This is not surprising since Toussaint was first elected in 2000 at the head of the New Directions “reform” slate, ousting the openly pro-management Sonny Hall/Willie James gang. The opposition groups which purport to be a more militant alternative to the present Local leadership actually share the basics of its program – they just ask for “more,” like Toussaint did until he took office and began negotiating contracts for “less.”

Toussaint’s betrayal is not personal, it is a direct result of the nature of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, which seeks to act as a buffer between the union ranks and the bosses, and actually serves as the “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class,” as American socialist Daniel De Leon succinctly put it over a century ago.

Mike O’Brien, president of the TWU International, who showed up on the scene to denounce the strike and side with MTA management against Local 100, is an outright labor traitor who should be run out of the union movement. But even left-talking out-bureaucrats like New Directions end up carrying out pretty much the same program of cutbacks when they get into office. Soon they hang up their windbreakers and don expensive suits so they can socialize with Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Freddy Ferrer, who are all for using the Taylor Law against the TWU. These labor fakers are agents of the bourgeoisie within the ranks of labor.

Look at the programs of the union dissidents. The Rank and File Advocate put out a four-page tabloid earlier this month calling for a larger raise, better medical benefits, an improved pension, no givebacks, etc. Local 100 executive board member Steve Downs (a supporter of the social-democratic Solidarity outfit) wrote that “Toussaint cannot be trusted.” Local 100 E Board member Marty Goodman (a supporter of Socialist Action, another reformist outfit, and the moribund Transit Workers for a Just Contract) has put out several contract bulletins which “Demand 10, 10 and 10%! It’s Payback Time!!” Goodman and John Mooney, Local 100 vice president for stations, put out a flyer for 10-10-10%, as did United for a Better Contract.

10-10-10%, “just contract,” “better contract” – these are all just economist demands, begging for a few more crumbs from the table of MTA chief Peter Kalikow. Can’t trust Toussaint? They should know. They all supported him for Local 100 president, and ran on the same slate with him in 2000. They sued the union in the bosses’ courts back then, when the Hall-James crowd was running the local, and several of them are doing the same now with Toussaint, dragging the union into federal court over the undemocratic way Toussaint runs the union. This is crossing the class line to appeal to the enemy. We say: Labor must clean its own house.

An occasionally more militant-talking outfit is the Revolutionary Transit Worker, supported by the centrist League for the Revolutionary Party. RTW bulletins sometimes talk about socialism and revolution, but in practice, their program is the same as the leftovers from New Directions, only one step removed. While they [remnants of ND] ran on the same slate with Toussaint, the RTW and LRP gave “critical support” to ND, trying to pressure these dyed-in-the-wool social democrats slightly to the left. This time around, the RTW continues this pressure politics by calling in a December 13 leaflet to “Hold Toussaint to his promises” and headlining: “8%, 8% and 8%, No Givebacks or Strike!”

Most of the reformist left (Communist Party, Workers World, Socialist Workers Party, International Socialist Organization) was hardly seen at the strike. One ostensibly socialist group with supporters in transit is the Spartacist League. The SL, which played an active role in the 1980 NYC transit strike, has been notably passive in recent years, flinching before threats of repression and tailing after the union bureaucracy (while making pro forma criticisms from the left). In the 1999 showdown, when there was a big push for a strike, the SL at first called for a strike; then, when a judge issued a blatantly unconstitutional ruling banning even calling for a strike, these pseudo-“revolutionaries” knuckled under and issued a leaflet for the “right to strike.” In 2002, they didn’t call for a strike until after Toussaint had a union meeting vote to authorize one.

This year, the SL didn’t actually call for a strike until after it was launched, finally issuing a leaflet, “Victory to the Transit Strike!” on December 20. Its earlier article urging transit workers to “Prepare to Strike” (Workers Vanguard, 9 December) had zero specifics about what such preparations might consist of, making it clear that the real content of this call was not to call for a strike now.  During the strike itself, teams of a couple WV salesmen would occasionally drop by a picket location, stand around selling their paper for half an hour and then depart. This pathetic response was hardly the action of an organization seeking to build a real proletarian vanguard.

In contrast, over the course of the strike, three different teams of Internationalist Group supporters went to several key picket lines each, marching for several hours and distributing 1,000 to 1,500 Internationalist leaflets daily with updates and lessons from the strike events, while talking with picketers. We were universally well-received, and our leaflets were eagerly snapped up and read from beginning to end by strikers who got almost no information from the union about was happening in the strike. We met little overt anti-communism, and instead a good deal of curiosity about what “reds” had to say. On the third day of the walkout, at the 207th Street/Kingsbridge picket line of several hundred strikers, an IG supporter and activist in the Professional Staff Congress (the City University faculty union), got rousing applause when he told workers they were making history and argued for a joint strike to smash the Taylor Law.

Instead of tailing after the TWU tops, saying “Toussaint and his cronies on the Executive Board are vulnerable to pressure” even after the Local 100 president refused to strike after the December 15 contract deadline (RTW bulletin, December 19), what’s needed is an open fight to oust the sellout misleaders and forge a class-struggle leadership in the powerful transit union. Such a leadership would put forward a program going beyond economic issues to raise a series of transitional demands to serve as a bridge leading from the present struggles of the workers to a revolutionary fight for power, extending from the industry to society as a whole.

In transit there should be a fight for workers control. During the brief strike there were lots of chants about “union power,” about how the TWU is a “mighty, mighty union, a kick-ass union.” That power must be used or it means nothing. Take the linked issues of disciplines and safety. Bringing in an outside consultant to review disciplinary procedures won’t be any more effective in putting an end to the “plantation justice” than Toussaint’s earlier call for MTA execs to promise to cut down on disciplines. The union itself must act to protect its members, not through endless grievance procedures but by organized action on the job.

MTA management fired a union rep at the 240th Street barn after a supervisor claimed he was anti-Semitic for saying, “What am I, chopped liver.” When subway conduct Janell Bennerson was killed after her head slammed into a fence as she leaned out of the cab as the train was leaving a platform, the MTA blamed her for her death. When a track worker, Joy Antony, was killed while trying to flag and work on signals at the same time, under orders from management who sent out a three-man crew instead of the necessary four, the MTA tried to blame the supervisor instead of inadequate staffing. The examples of such victimization are endless. So how do you fight it?

Local 100 members should form union safety committees and insist that they have the power to shut down unsafe operations. The way to do that is to actually shut down a dangerous site, and bargain about it later. The TWU should also demand an end to the “random” alcohol and drug testing, which is a vehicle for arbitrary management harassment and victimization. Instead of trying to outdo the MTA and New York Police with scare propaganda about “terrorism” in the subways, as Toussaint has been trying to do, the union should demand an end to the NYPD bag inspections which are a blatant violation of the Bill of Rights “guarantee” against unreasonable searches as well as inevitably involving racial profiling. Class-conscious militants call for cops out of the unions – they are the armed enforcers for the bosses against the workers.

The Internationalist has called for the TWU to open the MTA books so that everyone can see the financial shenanigans being carried out by the bosses to disguise huge surpluses as losses. This is not one more in a long list of empty bargaining demands, but something that should be implemented by a union committee. The Authority’s finances are, after all, supposed to be public. With a 40 percent increase in riders in recent years and no increase in the number of workers, there should be a fight for thousands more transit jobs, through a shorter workweek at no loss in pay, with hiring to be done exclusively through a union hiring hall, along with union-run training programs at full pay to enable transit workers to move up to more skilled positions. It would be possible to win wide public support by calling for doubling the workforce on weekends, when trains are impossibly crowded and infuriatingly late.

Various left groups proposed to win public support for the TWU strike by calling for “No fare hikes or service cuts” (RTW) or to “roll back the fare to $1” (Socialist Alternative). But why stop, or even start, there? The TWU has long had a paper position for free mass transit – that demand could be dramatized and popularized by literally ripping out the turnstiles in some prominent location in the middle of a hard-fought strike. Most importantly, it is vital to wage a campaign to get rid of the strikebreaking Taylor Law through union action. A week ago there should have been a mass mobilization by all of New York City labor in support of the TWU strike. Today, as transit workers face $1,000-plus fines and Local 100 was hit with a million-dollar-a-day fine, while its leaders still face potential jailing, there should be a union-based mobilization in the streets to demand the Taylor Law fines be cancelled.

The deficits looming a couple of years from now are not the result of rising health and pension costs, but of the ballooning MTA debt to pay off the bonds for its ambitious expansion program while subway maintenance is a mess. The MTA bosses could double transit workers wages and the additional cost would be less than the cool $1.5 billion a year they are paying to the banks in debt service. By 2020, one-quarter of all MTA revenue will go to pay off Wall Street loans. The Internationalist Group calls to repudiate (refuse to pay) the debt, and for massive federal and state financing to fill any real deficit in the transit budget. But we also point out that it will take a socialist revolution to establish a modern, efficient, comfortable and free mass transit system. Then the MTA debt will be worth about as much as old tsarist bonds after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, or Confederate bonds after the end of the U.S. Civil War.

New York City transit workers have real power. A strike shutting down the subways and busses can tie up the center of international finance capital, in this city where 54 percent of families do not have a car (far less than anywhere else in the United States) and 72 percent of people entering Manhattan come on mass transit. The bourgeoisie knows this and fears it. Yet they took the measure of the Local 100 leadership, which also knew the potential power of the union and was terrified of using it for fear that the ranks would get out of control.

In the end, the MTA deliberately provoked the strike (what else could it mean for Kalikow to show up an hour before the contract deadline and suddenly make a take-it-or-leave-it “final offer” including a 6 percent pay cut to pay for the existing pensions?) in order to drain off militancy among the union ranks. And that was what the Toussaint leadership of Local 100 ended up doing, as it sent the membership back to work without a contract, and then agreed to a giveback pact demanding that union members pay for health care. This necessarily had a demoralizing effect on the ranks, but the Local 100 membership still has plenty of fight left in it. As Yogi says, “it ain’t over till it’s over,” and this fight isn’t over yet.

There is no reason why TWU Local 100 couldn’t have won this battle hands down, except one: it was saddled with a leadership that was not prepared to do what it took to win. The first step in overcoming this crisis in working-class leadership is to draw the lessons of the setback. Lenin called the unions “schools for socialism,” and strikes a “school for (class) war,” because through these experiences, workers can draw conclusions about what’s necessary in order to win. And as the German communist Rosa Luxemburg wrote in her last article before she was assassinated in January 1919, “a revolution is the only form of ‘war’ ... in which final victory can only be prepared through a series of ‘defeats’.”

As in 1966 and 1980, a transit strike that could win has to be fought politically. Toussaint capitulated before the bourgeois offensive not because the union was overpowered – quite the contrary, the strike threw the city into convulsion – but because he, like all pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats, aspires to travel in ruling-class circles, to hobnob with the filthy rich and powerful, while helping the capitalists resolve their “labor problems.” A class-struggle leadership of the unions would oust the pro-capitalist bureaucrats, break with the Democrats (and all bourgeois parties), and fight to build a revolutionary workers party. That is the program of the Internationalist Group, and we encourage interested transit workers to join with us in studying the history of struggles of workers and the oppressed, in order to prepare for the coming rounds. n