www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, April-May 2006NYC transit workers stay militantNew York--Subway and bus workers, who nearly paralyzed the city during a three-day strike just before Christmas (see February-March N&L), are still without a contract as of mid-March. The leadership of Transit Workers Union Local 100 capitulated to pressure and called off the strike without obtaining a contract. They did negotiate a contract in the next few weeks, only to have the union membership vote to reject it in January. Two-thirds of the 33,700 members voted, and they defeated the contract by just seven votes. On March 17, the local's executive board ordered a re-vote on the defeated contract which management insists is now off the table. Management has offered a worse contract and called for binding arbitration (which can be forced on the parties by the state’s anti-public worker Taylor Law), and the union has faced continued legal threats of devastating fines and loss of dues check-off as punishment for the strike (illegal under the same law). No resolution is in sight. Having failed to eviscerate the Taylor Law’s restrictions on public employees, the transit workers may be fated to join other municipal workers, who sometimes work for years without a contract. At a meeting of some 200 TWU members and their supporters, sponsored by LABOR NOTES on Jan. 27, Steve Downs, a transit worker, described what happened: “The Metropolitan Transit Association had a billion dollar surplus. There was never any reason for it to demand give-backs as it did. We were hurt when other unions who had pledged support for us in pre-strike rallies, then stood on the sidelines instead of defending our strike. “The union leadership undercut the strike by not using all its options, such as calling out the commuter railroad workers who are under the same management and who were just waiting for us to put up picket lines. The lack of pre-strike planning hurt too--the union didn’t even organize picket captains or locations until the day the contract was up. The workers had to organize our own picket lines. “The self-organization forced on the workers during the strike has helped us to be organized since then. First we formed a Vote No Campaign, and since we defeated the contract, that has become the Committee for a Better Contract. We are pushing for more participation by the members through rank-and-file meetings, mass rallies and such. There will not be another strike, however, because the workers are afraid they would be brought back prematurely again. ‘I’m not striking for [union president] Toussaint,’ they say. “The contract had some good points, but on balance it was bad because it began to shift the costs of health insurance and pensions to the workers. Maternity benefits were only $200 a week for four weeks. Toussaint called that ‘getting a foot in the door,’ but if that is so, then the MTA got a foot in the door by having us pay a percent of our wages for health insurance, with no limits.” Other transit workers spoke from the audience, representing various dissident groups within the union. One man called for a TWU membership meeting to elect a new negotiating committee. Another contrasted the union’s failure to prepare for the strike to the UPS strike some years ago, for which that union had prepared for a year. Many workers complained about lack of democracy within the union. A young woman supporter introduced her grandmother, whose husband had been a transit worker during the union’s militant era in the 1960s. In those days, she said, the union went into communities and educated people before strikes. Members of other unions spoke about the need to work together to end the Taylor Law and to support each other’s struggles. Striking NYU graduate assistants called for a defense committee to defend the seven students who had just lost their grants. A public school teacher contrasted rank-and-file support for the transit workers--teachers in her school raised money for the strikers--to their union leadership’s condemnation of the strike. The meeting ended by discussing plans for a city-wide labor support organization. --Anne Jaclard |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
