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    

The Real “Thugs”: Bosses’ Courts and
Politicians Try to Bankrupt the TWU

New York City transit workers shut down the U.S.’ largest transit system Tuesday.
(Photo: Gregory Bull/AP)

DECEMBER 20 – Day One of the first New York City transit strike in 25 years has been a lesson in class struggle. As soon as Transport Workers Union Local 100 president Roger Toussaint announced at 3 a.m. that the strike was on, and picket lines went up around NYC, the city’s rulers rushed to court. They are relying on the state apparatus to try to crush the walkout. They imagine that cops, courts, jail threats and whopping fines against the union can defeat the TWU. But the union is not bank accounts – it is the workers who make it up. And the transit workers showed today that they have the unity and strength to tie up New York in knots. The people who run this city and this country think they are the masters of the universe. They want to bust the union, but New York is a union town and together we can bust the union-busters!

Billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg grotesquely accused transit workers of being “selfish.” He claims the TWU is attacking the people of New York by defending its half-pay pensions and health benefits from attempts by the Metropolitan Transit Authority bosses to gut them. This takes a lot of gall from a Wall Street tycoon who literally bought his office, twice, the last time around for a cool $80 million. He called strikers “cowardly” and “thuggish” for refusing to bow to his threats to use the strikebreaking Taylor Law to bankrupt the union and its members. Now they’re threatening to throw union leaders behind bars. Who’s the greedy thug attacking the working people of New York? We say: Screw Mayor Mike with a solid transit strike!

In state court this afternoon, a judge imposed a fine of $1 million a day on the TWU, charged with contempt of court for violating a Taylor Law injunction. Tomorrow he will rule on escalating $1,000 a day fines on every member of the union leadership. Meanwhile, the state Public Employment Relations Board refused the union’s request for an injunction against the MTA to stop it from requiring changes in the pension system in its “final offer.” Yet that is explicitly barred by the same anti-union law. The MTA has requested that the PERB declare an impasse in the negotiations, which would allow it to order binding arbitration. But as a spirited group of 150 picketers chanted this evening at the East New York depot, “The Taylor Law is just a piece of paper, tear it up!” and “Workers’ power!”

All around town today there were militant mass pickets, the likes of which haven’t been seen here for years. At the huge Coney Island Yard at Avenue X in Brooklyn there were upwards of 500 strikers. TWUers angrily said that instead of the constant bashing from the bosses, workers “ought to be commended for years of hard work in unsafe conditions.... This has been coming for so long.” At the Jerome Avenue yard in the Bronx, 50 picketers kept up chants and songs in the bitterly cold early morning hours. “We move New York, we can stop New York,” they repeated proudly. Over at the 207th Street yard at the upper tip of Manhattan, some 200-300 strikers kept a boisterous and vociferous picket line moving for hours, demanding respect from bosses who don’t know the meaning of the word. Passing trucks and cars honked their horns in solidarity.

The Internationalist was on the lines distributing over 1,000 leaflets which were snapped up and read on the spot by strikers eager for news and support from the rest of the labor movement. The night before we handed out hundreds more at a 3,000-strong union solidarity rally outside Governor Pataki’s office in Midtown Manhattan. Naturally, the bosses’ press and TV showed almost nothing of this, and instead focused on Bloomberg prancing across Brooklyn Bridge in an expensive leather jacket and jeans, his latest attempt at a “man of the people” image (after the fiasco of his $633 bike in 2002). But there was no stampeding herd of yuppies in the 25° winter weather as there was during the balmy 60° April days of the 1980 strike. And despite the media frenzy being whipped up against the TWU, transit workers have wide support in New York.

Transit workers warned they mean business. Today, there were four-hour waits at the Jamaica LIRR station in the a.m. getting into Manhattan, some 50,000 commuters stranded on the Penn Station platforms in the p.m. and a near riot at Grand Central. And city authorities say that New York businesses lost $400 million today, as Christmas shopping and income from tourism plummeted. Meanwhile, the big business press is screaming for transit workers’ blood, and not just the rabid labor-hating New York Post. The liberal Newsday ran a banner headline declaring the strike “Midnight Madness.” Today’s Daily News published a snarling editorial calling to “Stop the Strike Dead in Its Tracks” and to to “Jail Toussaint and his bull-headed lieutenants.” It accused the TWU of “irresponsible lawlessness” for “shut[ting] down the transportation system that is New York's lifeblood.”

The more they scream, the more it shows the bosses are hurting. Our leaflet yesterday called for a “Strike to Shut Down All New York City Transport!” Not just MTA subways and buses, but also the private lines, LIRR, Metro North, NJ Transit, PATH, taxis, livery cabs and ferries: “This is a showdown – everyone go out together!” Metro North and LIRR should be picketed out. Taxi drivers’ organizations should urge their members to stay home. Wall Street bigwigs who want to head to Midtown, “and step on it,” should get the answer, in the many languages spoken by the heavily immigrant drivers, “Fuggedaboutit!” At the Jackie Gleason bus terminal on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn where 40 strikers were picketing this evening, one TWUer said: “Somebody had to start it off, so it’s us.” “Everybody should be out,” added the picket captain.

For all the hollering about transit workers’ “lawlessness,” the MTA bosses blatantly lied and violated fiduciary laws to hide the money during the 2002 transit negotiations and hearings on the fare hike. Yet no one has ever been tried for that, nor was the fare hike reversed or the first-year wage freeze for transit workers lifted. The capitalist rulers “break the law” all the time. Last night, President George Bush went on national television to declare that he had given himself the authority to order domestic spying, brazenly violating a slew of laws, not to mention the Bill of Rights – as does the U.S.A. Patriot Act.

The fact is, “the law” reflects the balance of class forces. As Marxists have explained, the government is the executive committee of the ruling class, and the capitalist state machine –police, army, prisons – is the instrument of the bourgeois rulers to keep those it exploits and oppresses under its heel. When it is convenient for the bosses to ignore or rip up the laws, they do so without hesitation. Since the 1980s and before they have been on the warpath, trampling on workers rights, trying to crush the unions. If the TWU caves in before these threats, it will embolden the billionaires who govern the country to pass more anti-labor laws and destroy more union gains. Social Security is next on the chopping block.

The machinery of repression in the U.S. is inherently racist. The more than two-thirds black, Latino and immigrant transit workers know this well, as they face the brutal “plantation justice” of the MTA which hands out more than 15,000 disciplines a year and “says the way to get an employee to work is to stand with a whip over them,” as Toussaint remarked in an interview with the Amsterdam News (13 December). This is the same racist system that was laid bare following Hurricane Katrina. The government, from the Republicans in the White House to the Democrats in the Louisiana state house and New Orleans city hall, abandoned 100,000 black and poor people to die in the flood (see our article, “New Orleans Police State: ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ American-Style,” The Internationalist No. 22, September-October 2005).

At the same time as these would-be slave-masters are destroying the livelihoods of working people and the poor in the United States, they have launched an imperialist war to subjugate the world to their dictates. The bloody colonial occupation of Iraq is partly aimed at ensuring U.S. control of the Near East oil tap. Working people must fight to defeat this bosses’ war, both “at home” and abroad. The NYC transit strike is taking place in wartime – there is no getting around this fundamental fact. The capitalist media are already harping about the police having to guard empty subway stations against the threat of “terrorism.” Yet it is the U.S., state and city governments and the MTA that are trying to terrorize transit workers into submission.

To prevail against the capitalist state and its apparatus of repression requires a leadership with the program and determination to wage the class struggle through to victory. Since the very beginning, the unions were built by “reds,” including the Transport Workers Union. As the strike heats up, the press is once again red-baiting TWU founder Mike Quill, trying to tar the present Local 100 leadership with the same brush, including both Local 100 president Toussaint and “radicals” on the executive board. Outrageously, the TWU International has offered its services to the union-bashers, stabbing Local 100 in the back by refusing the sanction the strike. But there is widespread support for the transit strikers among New York unions.

In fact, Toussaint and his former allies are not fire-breathing radicals but came to office as a “reform” slate that only wanted a slightly more militant policy than the previous Local 100 leadership. Because they don’t challenge the basics of capitalist rule, they are locked into a framework where a slave-driving management and their overseers are constantly seeking to undo hard-won union gains. The 2002 sellout contract Toussaint rammed through was the product of this program. An all-out fight to defend union pension and health benefits and lower the retirement age, to prevent dangerous “broadbanding” and other measures aimed at intensifying the exploitation of transit workers, requires a class-struggle program down the line.