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Support New York Transport Workers Union Local 100

We call on the good will of all New Yorkers, the labor community, and all working people, to recognize that our fight is their fight, and to rally in our support with solidarity activities and events: show the MTA that TWU does not stand alone.  -- Roger Toussaint

Toussaint to Bloomberg: You are Shaming NYC

Dec. 21- Yesterday you used your position as Mayor of New York to call us "thuggish" and "selfish." How dare you?

Our children turn on the TV to see the Mayor denouncing their parents as "morally reprehensible." Have you no shame?

As you know better than most, this strike was forced on us by the MTA. You know this because you share much of the blame. It is your provocative rhetoric about what givebacks we transit workers must accept for the next generation of transit -- our children and new immigrants -- that has pushed our members beyond the limits of their patience.

You all but demanded this confrontation, and now you act angry and surprised. You owe all New Yorkers an apology for poisoning the atmosphere around difficult labor negotiations.

You call us “irresponsible.” New York City and New York State have slashed their subsidies for mass transit. Mayors and Governors have created a seemingly permanent Structural Deficit for transit which much be filled by costly borrowing. Wall Street has profited, but Main Street has suffered. But you knew that already from your previous career. Now that the debt-servicing bill has come due, the MTA demands that we pay the price: worse health care and worse pensions.

But what about our conducting an "illegal" strike? What about the law? You are all over the media with high-minded talk about "illegal" behavior, castigating criminals and screaming that no one is above the law. Your hypocrisy knows no bounds. You must hope everyone has forgotten your biography: "Bloomberg on Bloomberg." You boast on Page 59 on how you started your rise to great wealth, great enough to enable you to buy the Mayor's office twice. You set up your office "...all without permission, violating every fire law, building code and union regulation on the books."

I guess illegality is in the eye of the beholder. A confessed lawbreaker has the gall to lecture 34,000 hard working people whose only crime is standing up for their families and for dignity and respect on one of the toughest, most dangerous jobs in New York.

Stop using transit workers as a punching bag to undo decades of pension gains for city workers. Stop demonizing transit workers in the eyes of the public.

Stop bullying and start acting like the Mayor you promised to be.

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New York Times Reports (excerpts)

"We thank riders for their patience and forbearance," President Roger Touissant said outside union headquarters this afternoon. "We will be providing various details regarding the outcome of this strike in the next several days."

In a speech that belied the union's tenuous position - it is already being fined $1 million a day - Mr. Toussaint seemed to cast the conflict in a social-justice context. In describing the struggle of his largely minority union, he invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, saying: "There is a higher calling than the law. That is justice and equality."

The transit strike, the first in a quarter century, began at 3 a.m. Tuesday after negotiations between the union and the transit authority broke down over the authority's last-minute demand that all new transit workers contribute 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions - up from the 2 percent that current workers pay.

The authority has said it needs to rein in its soaring pension costs. Mr. Toussaint has argued that, under state law, it is illegal for the authority to insist on including a pension demand as part of a settlement.

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Not only that, but the mayor, the governor and editorial writers are denouncing the union as greedy and showing contempt for the law. The front page of The New York Post screamed, "You Rats." And the transit workers' parent union has come out in opposition to the strike.

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Mr. Toussaint also sought to throw Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. George E. Pataki on the defensive by asserting that the dispute was essentially a showdown between hard-working New Yorkers struggling to make ends meet and a moneyed establishment. At the head of that establishment, Mr. Toussaint said repeatedly, is a billionaire mayor, out of touch with working-class New Yorkers.

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(Seventy percent of the employees of New York City Transit are black, Latino or Asian-American.)

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Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Tuesday (December 20) that union leaders had "thuggishly turned their backs on New York City" . . . minority leaders and union members attacked the mayor's conduct as objectionable, or worse. "There has been some offensive and insulting language used," said Roger Toussaint, the union leader. "This is regrettable and it is certainly unbecoming for the mayor of the city of New York to be using this type of language."

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The Rev. Al Sharpton, who called an evening news conference to blast Mr. Bloomberg, said in an interview: "How did we become thugs? Because we strike over a pension?"

"I do not think the language would have been used in a union that was not as heavily populated by people of color," he added. "And whether he intentionally did it or not, he offended a lot of people of color and he ought to address that, and come to the bargaining table."

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Mr. Toussaint  . . . cast the strike as part of a broader movement for social justice and invoked the civil rights movement, as he often does in his calls to respect the dignity of his workers. "Had Rosa Parks answered the call of the law instead of the higher call of justice, many of us who are driving buses today would instead be at the back of the bus," he said.

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Mr. Toussaint, who is originally from Trinidad, leads a union, now dominated by blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans, whose members were once mostly of European descent. 

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Mr. Sharpton made the civil rights connection explicit, noting that when Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, he was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike, a strike also held to be illegal.

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Toussaint: TWU Local 100 on Strike
Tuesday, December 20, 2005 at 3:00 AM

With a one billion dollar surplus, a contract between the MTA and Transport Workers Union Local 100 should have been a no brainer. Sadly that has not been the case.

Our contract expired on midnight Thursday. In an attempt to save mass transit and in deference to our riders, we postponed our deadline and attempted to continue talking to the MTA.

From the beginning, the MTA approached these negotiations in bad faith: demanding arbitration before even trying to resolve the contract. And hours before our contract expired, the MTA voted to spend its one billion dollar surplus -- a surplus which we believe continues to be understated by some one hundred million dollars.

The MTA knew that reducing health and pension standards at the authority would be unacceptable to our union. They knew there was no good economic reason for their hard line on this issue - not with a billion dollar surplus. But, they went ahead anyway, supported by the Bloomberg administration, which wants to overrun municipal labor unions and all city workers with down pressed wages and gutted health benefits and pension plans.

This has been combined with continued attempts by the MTA, joined by the Governor and the Mayor, to intimidate and threaten our members and their families.

This is a fight over whether hard work will be rewarded with a decent retirement and over the erosion or eventual elimination of health benefits for working people.

It is a fight over dignity and respect on the job; a concept that is very alien to the MTA.

Transit workers are tired at being under appreciated and disrespected.

The Local 100 Executive Board has voted overwhelmingly to extend strike action to all MTA properties effective immediately.

All Local 100 representatives and shop stewards are directed to report to their assigned strike locations picket lines or facility nearest you immediately.

To our riders, we ask for your understanding and forbearance. We stood with you to keep token booths open, to keep conductors on the train, and to oppose fare hikes.

We now ask that you stand with us.

We did not want a strike - the MTA, the governor, and the mayor did.

We call on the good will of all New Yorkers, the labor community, and all working people, to recognize that our fight is their fight, and to rally in our support with solidarity activities and events: show the MTA that TWU does not stand alone.  

Source: http://www.twulocal100.org/

posted 24 December 2005