Anyone who has experienced such concerted refusal to live and work as the employers and the authorities tell them knows the joy of assertion and camaraderie and the extraordinary ingenuity which well up from those taking the risks and sacrifices of the struggle … that experience is freedom.
DAVID MONTGOMERY1
…
An oligarchical [union] leadership is one which is immune to the pressure and deaf to the opinions of the working–class militants who carry out the struggle on a day-to-day basis.
MARIAN SWERDLOW2
∵
During the summer of 1982, protesting Transit’s efforts to impose “flexible work targets which they can increase at will,” John Lawe boldly declared this would never work: “the day of the whip is over.”3 Just 18 months later, though, when Ronald “Bullwhip” Davis arrived at the 207th St. Overhaul Shop, he prominently mounted a bullwhip in his office, then proudly showed it off to a New York Post reporter. Shop lore said that he had been given it as a going-away present by his staff in the Philadelphia transit system, in recognition of the way he drove workers there. Whether Davis specifically understood this or not, the bullwhip was a provocation in a shop where a majority of workers were African-American.
Ronald “Bullwhip” Davis brandishing his whip for New York Post reporter and photographer, June 5, 1984
ILLUSTRATION REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF MICHAEL SCHWARTZ
By 1984, RTO had been largely tamed.4 Leftists just entering transit and eager to fight management alongside this potentially most powerful group of workers noted demoralization, demobilization, and lots of individual deal-making.5 Stations, where workers sat, singly, in hundreds of token booths, had never been a bastion of worker resistance. The Bus departments – the political base of Local 100’s leaders – were maybe too hard a nut to crack at first; they could wait until a pattern had been set elsewhere. Gunn might have targeted the skilled crafts of Maintenance of Way, who traditionally set and defended their own work outputs. But with so many workers sent out alone, in pairs or small crews, without immediate supervision, it must have seemed just too difficult to light the fuse there.
So, Car Equipment became the target; and within Car Equipment, one of the two overhaul shops, each with well over a thousand workers.6 And of the two, 207th St. was the obvious choice: the workplace where it was widely understood the union still had unusual power, and was still in the hands of 1980–era militants. In the 1980 and 1982 contracts, Transit had won, respectively, the elimination of 20 minutes of break time, and the work quota system which it claimed led to unproductive workdays; but workers at 207th St. simply ignored both agreements. If Gunn and Bullwhip could crush the union there,
1 The Fight at 207th St.7
In December 1979, while McDonald and Cherry ran separate Local-wide slates, the two factions united in 207th St. section elections. Each contributed two candidates to a four-person slate which ousted a do-nothing committee. Headed by Cherry supporter Walter Humphrey, that new committee re-built union organization in the shop in the months before and after the strike. Depending on its size, each work crew or “gang” elected one or more shop stewards shortly after section elections; now the committee strove to have stronger, more militant ones elected. Stewards handled job-related issues and were also responsible for ensuring the equitable distribution of overtime. Above the stewards stood seven “delegates.” Drawn from the different craft titles working at 207th St., they were the committee’s brain-trust. Some of them were long-time activists; others had been schooled in the preceding two years of dissident efforts against Lawe. It is likely that a few had been involved in the civil rights and anti-war struggles. These were the organic leaders so rarely engaged in union work in Local 100’s subway divisions.8
Between 1980 and 1983, the committee more firmly established control over production in the shop; by strictly enforcing each worker’s job selection rights it could also police the pace of work. Following a semi-annual system-wide seniority job pick, some work crews held a one-time “shape-up.” For example, a Car Maintainer A (metalworkers) might pick the job “207th St.; Sheet Metal
207th St. Overhaul shop union committee with a shop steward and a worker being congratulated on his retirement. Walter Humphrey is third from right
ILLUSTRATION REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF ARNOLD CHERRY
A gang’s steward ran that daily (or pick-long) seniority shape-up, based on a list of work given to them by supervision.11 Much of the work in the shop ran by long-established routines, and worker, union, and supervision understood the stint, the amount of work that was expected. Foremen mostly facilitated production, addressing bottlenecks, acquiring needed supplies, coordinating with supervisors of other gangs.12 But sometimes, in a steward’s or worker’s opinion, a job was understaffed. This was especially likely for new or unfamiliar work, or at the start of a long repair program when the timing of a job was first set. If a steward could not resolve this with the gang’s supervisor, the problem went up to the delegate and then to a member of the committee; at each level, the union had a management counterpart. If the dispute still could not be fixed, the steward or the committee might ask the whole gang to slow down; under Humphrey’s committee this happened more frequently – fewer little disagreements were allowed to slip by or fester.
So, trouble over one job would spread to ten; suddenly, cars that had been scheduled to leave the shop that afternoon were not ready. Or the pain could be spread even further: the union could find a work location elsewhere in the shop where management was offering overtime work to meet service needs, and ask the entire work crew to turn it down.13 This type of gang or shop solidarity allowed Humphrey’s committee to enlighten management to the error of its ways. Here, in practice, is Marian Swerdlow’s observation in Chapter 1 that “the union” was necessary to elaborate demands and protect workers from
Slowdowns and refusing overtime could also be applied to the problem of a confrontational supervisor, perhaps someone who had transferred in from another shop where management had more power, and expected men to jump, or work faster, just because they were being watched. Or suppose a foreman dropped Singer’s brake job and sent him to fill a day-long vacancy in a different work crew. Suddenly, half-way through the day, a car might need a piece of metal bent to specification. The foreman would ask another worker to fabricate that piece. Sometimes a work crew would let little violations go – one hand washes the other. But what if the job actually took several hours? Or the foreman did not seem to be acting in good faith? How do you teach him a lesson? Perhaps the whole crew has to stop work and have a long meeting to discuss the matter with the steward, then cluster around the steward and the foreman. A steward too willing to let little violations go would be challenged by angry co-workers and soon voted out. Maybe Humphrey would come down from the union office and fetch the foreman’s supervisor to make the point that, now, all production had come to a halt. Usually, the foreman would get, and remember, the message.
Workers enjoyed this, and they benefited from the power of their union. For those who shaped up daily, the 60 minutes between the start of each shift and coffee break were spent picking a job, assessing it, and acquiring the right tools and parts.14 In reality, that 15-minute break often ran twice as long as scheduled; some workers went outside to a coffee truck, but most bought their food from co-workers who had set up refrigerators and grills in the shop to make a few bucks on the side. Lunch also ran long, and usually workers had finished their work an hour or so before the end of their shift.
The key to enforcing these working conditions was union power – a combination of organization, planning, history, and volition (of the committee and workers) to wield it – and an understanding of the pressure points on management priorities. In the early 1980s, worker power was augmented at 207th St. because the subway system was falling apart. Old cars were patched up.
For management, a policy of cooperation with union expectations ensured that the expected quota of cars was ready to go into service each afternoon.15 They were willing to throw more manpower at that problem, to be “wasteful” of productivity, to avoid delays. Repairs on trucks – the wheeled undercarriage of a subway car – had to be finished early enough for them to be transported across the shop by overhead crane operators and set under the cars by a specialized crew, all of whom worked only intermittently, but always expeditiously. Work underneath the car needed to be complete before it could be “dropped” back onto the trucks; then, another specialized crew had to hook up and test the compressed air and electrical systems linking these two components. That crew was unusual in that it worked hardest at the very beginning (“breaking”) and end (“making”) of each day. Any delay in this “assembly line” of the production of repaired subway cars could throw sand in the gears, but – like Mike Tutrone, driving across 14th St. with no windshield – in a crisis the union often cooperated to make sure the job got done. In turn, what the union defended, what most fights with management were about, was the right to not be assigned other work – to be left alone – when the picked job was complete – for the jobs that could not disrupt production, as well as those that could.16
This is what union democracy and industrial democracy looks like on the shop-floor – it is a highly participatory activity because workers learn that their involvement very concretely affects their working conditions.17 The steward or
That meant workers were not necessarily so keen on fighting all the time. During a slowdown, reciprocity went out the window, and workers had to stay on their job locations until the very end of the shift, even if they were only pretending to work. Refusing overtime took money out of people’s pockets. Refusing overtime to help a different work crew is a harder matter still. The committee needed to explain to the stewards what was at stake. Then they needed to explain to their gang. Perhaps the explanations did not seem good enough a few times. Or a strong or strategically-placed gang got tired of sacrificing for weaker ones. Or some of the men in the crew did not really like the steward. Or a few management flunkies started complaining to other members of the gang about the committee, spreading demoralization.18
One of the most important skills of any shop-floor trade unionist is to gauge the temper of the workers they represent. How much can you ask of them? When are they invigorated, and when exhausted? In December 1983 section elections, the union committee split when the McDonald faction saw an opportunity to counter-pose themselves to Humphrey. “Guys were tired of fighting all the time,” my shop steward told me. Walter Humphrey lost and went back to repairing trucks. That, in itself, was not the problem; new Chair and Vice Chair Bob Kuefner and Tom McLaughlin were militants determined to defend union prerogatives. But the other two members of their committee were far weaker; one, Cono Gallo, was even a retread from before Humphrey, offered a spot to send a message to, and attract the votes of, the least union-conscious workers in the shop, the grumblers.
After a few days of reconnaissance, Davis ordered the removal of every grill, refrigerator, and coffee-maker in the shop.19 The union responded by asking all the workers to stand on line one morning during coffee break at the shop’s one remaining “official” concession stand, a small two-man facility now completely overwhelmed. When this work action was over, 200 workers found they had been disciplined for being away from their assigned work location. In the next few days, hundreds more disciplines followed for sometimes imaginative infractions: not being at work locations bell-to-bell, listening to the radio, washing their hands above their wrists. This was not completely unusual. In past fights, mass write-ups were a tool management had deployed. The union and members were largely unfazed, though. In their immediate experience, when a fight was over, all the write-ups accumulated during its course disappeared. Delegates and stewards held meetings with angry workers, plans were set, and a war of attrition began.20
Production in the shop slowed past a crawl. Routinely, the shop sent out 30 cars a day; now, perhaps four or five a day were ready for the road, while cars waited for repair in the adjacent train yard. Workers sat or stood at their work locations and flagrantly did nothing. Or, like Homer’s Penelope, they worked (like molasses) when watched, then undid the work as soon as the supervisor moved on. Shop-wide, workers refused all offers of overtime-for-production.
What was the balance sheet? On the one hand, Davis seemed unmoved and unconcerned by the lack of production. Over the course of several months, perhaps several thousand disciplinary notices were written for “malingering” and “loitering.” When workers appealed these write-ups, they found Transit’s labor relations officers increasing the penalties at each step on the disciplinary ladder.21 Calls for help to the union’s leadership brought no relief. No top officer
Still, by May, a crisis loomed for Transit and its new president. To meet service needs, management ordered unrepaired cars “flagged” – sent out on the road, pulled along as dead cars, carrying passengers but not providing power or braking. That put increased stress on the other cars in the train, especially going up and down grades. Overheated components led to breakdowns and train fires, putting passengers at risk and creating a domino effect of delays.22 David Gunn had been touted as a “railroad man” who would fix the system; instead, to the public and politicians, it seemed to be getting worse. Meanwhile, despite lack of support from the union’s leaders – in some ways because of it, because they felt unconstrained and in control of their own struggle – workers’ sprits remained high and they were confident of ultimate victory. This is the type of exhilaration from the exercise of collective agency that Montgomery refers to in the chapter’s epigraph. Whenever Davis walked the floor, a cacophony of noise erupted. In the relative darkness of the night shift, workers hid behind cars and threw nuts and bolts at him when he patrolled the shop. Management was faced with a dilemma: it either had to back down or turn the screws even tighter, hoping the union at 207th St. would break.
Either provoking or taking advantage of a dispute, management charged McLaughlin with aiming ethnic slurs at a particularly hated foreman.23 Kuefner had witnessed the incident and, ordered to write testimony, he was faced with a Hobson’s choice: lie, or refuse a “direct order” to provide evidence. (He chose the latter course.) Transit’s proposed penalty of firing was disproportionate to the crime (particularly for Kuefner), but it enabled management to fraudulently impose “pre-disciplinary suspensions” on the pair, barring them from the shop until the disciplinary process was complete – months. Here is a good illustration of the problem “comply and grieve” presents to workers.24
Except they were not; in fact, they were out of the shop for months.
Today, it is impossible to reconstruct the telephone conversation. Did Lawe, or the Car Equipment VP, lie to them, undercutting the struggle at a decisive moment to prevent an overt violation of the Taylor Law? Did the union’s leaders overestimate their influence with David Gunn? Would a Humphrey-led committee have been less likely to consult with the union hall or believe its promises? These are unknowns, but what was clear, the next day and thereafter, were the ramifications of these suspensions.
No top officer of the union came to 207th St. the next morning to show support and rally the membership, let alone close the shop. (The union organized a lunch-time picket-line outside the shop a month later.) That was bad enough, but now leadership of the union at 207th St. fell to Cono Gallo, a man dispositionally unwilling to fight Transit (or buck union leadership) and incapable of heading the ongoing struggle. That summer, management posted a pick just for truck mechanics, moving half to the night shift, to punish the most militant work crew in the shop. Then, it declared an “emergency” and demanded mandatory overtime – seven-day-a-week, twelve-hour-a-day shifts – from a cadre of low seniority workers, utilizing new language conceded in the 1982 contract. In both cases, Gallo and the Car Equipment VP shrugged and affirmed Transit’s contractual right to give these orders. In fact, to refuse mandatory overtime, Local 100 noted in its newspaper, would be a Taylor Law violation! Here was a sea change from Humphrey’s overtime boycotts of just a year before. The union was acting as the “contract policeman” of Transit’s rules.25
Already, in May, Lawe had waved the white flag of surrender in the TWU newspaper: he was “disappointed,” he wrote. It was “truly unfortunate that they [Kiley and Gunn] do not see the good sense and productive possibilities of cooperation.” While “we made it clear to management that TWU is not about to sit idly by while our members are harassed on the job … The last thing we at TWU want is an all-out confrontation with management, especially with our contract due for renegotiation next year.”27 That fall, Lawe met with Gunn and Mayor Koch at Gracie Hall, the Mayor’s residence. Over “coffee and cookies,” according to the New York Times, he agreed to drastic changes in the contractual seniority rights of 1,400 car inspectors who worked in the smaller repair barns and 1,000 car cleaners who worked mostly at terminals. Both groups had their previously highly detailed job pick descriptions replaced with fewer and far more generalized ones. If a job description now said “car body” – or even worse, “as assigned” – instead of the more specific “doors,” that gave supervision much greater power to retaliate against a militant worker or crew, or simply to dangle the prospect of a better job in return for more work. Every time you went to a staff rep, Joe Campbell remembered, “they told you to shut up, you’re lucky to have a job.”28
There were good shop stewards too, who could sometimes change the culture of a work crew and temporarily shift the balance of power. Yet Louis Russo, a master at uniting his crew and fighting management’s transgressions against enshrined practices, once bitterly told me, “In the old days, we didn’t even know what a grievance was.” That is, a steward never had to write down on a piece of paper what rule was broken or go to hearings. They just dealt with the problem, and knew that, if necessary, they would get enough backing to win any important fight. That is what David Montgomery meant when he optimistically wrote that “spontaneity and organization are not mutually-exclusive polar opposites. They are dialectically inseparable.” Workers who took on their bosses “were those who felt themselves part of strong unions, unions which could realistically be aggressive.”29 The reverse is true too: without a strong union, spontaneity, though not impossible, must shoulder more burdens.
“Bullwhip left a mark,” said shop steward Tony Feliciano, a Russo protégé, who came to the shop just before Davis, and spent almost his whole career there. “To this day that mark is still there. His scars are on the wall of the shop.”30
That is how a worker remembered Davis: before and after. From the union hall, though, the perspective was bizarrely different. Sonny Hall, VP for OA during the 1980 strike, became Local 100’s president in 1985. As one of his first actions, he recounted later, “I went to David Gunn and said, ‘I can’t live with this guy [Davis], you got to get rid of him.’ He eventually got rid of him … I took that on and that helped me build some credibility with the TA side of the
This mindset, and less dramatic defeats, soon proliferated around the system. Although mistreatment varied by job title, virtually any transit worker could recount how work life became less pleasant during the 1980s and 1990s: more work, more routine harassment, less union protection, less industrial democracy. At first, only some of this was due to contractual changes; indeed, for almost four years after 1980, 207th St. workers had effectively ignored the new limitations on break time. It was more about which side of the class war could and would exercise power. But as worker power was replaced by shop-floor passivity at 207th and elsewhere, the effects of contract language that increased management control of the workplace were magnified. That had begun two years earlier, when Lawe connived with Ravitch to open the fire-hose of work-rule concessions full blast.33 In six subsequent bargaining rounds, Transit improved its right to manage at will, and the fall of Local 100 accelerated.
2 Management’s Agenda, Union Complicity, 1982–1999
The pathway to concessionary contracts was first accomplished by guile, smoothed by lingering demoralization about the 1980 strike. Later, the union sacrificed one or another section of the workforce in contracts approved as a whole by the entire membership, with both officers and workers abandoning notions of solidarity. For a time, workers became resigned to mediocre contracts, while the union used the prospect of a strike, if a contract was rejected, as a cudgel against its members, not management.
But a thematic examination reveals management’s agenda better than a chronological one. Mediocre wage increases – so different from the pre-fiscal crisis years or even 1980 – were, of course, most notable to workers. Forays to limit workers’ rights and protections on the shop-floor were constant. Systematic efforts drove down the pay and benefits of the “unskilled” and the
“A Generation of Givebacks,” New Directions leaflet
ILLUSTRATION REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF TAMIMENT LIBRARY/ROBERT F. WAGNER LABOR ARCHIVES, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
A resolution dealing with the Taylor Law was also passed. It called for an end to the unfair penalties. It eliminated the “No contract – No work” policy and called for establishing a “procedure for impartial resolution of contract issues.” After determining that the right to strike would still be available to us and despite my reservations on binding arbitration, I voted in favor of this because I felt that taking a stand against the Taylor Law penalties was more important.36
That is, to implement this startling policy change, TWU leaders packaged it together with a toothless denunciation of the Taylor Law.
Lawe explained to the New York Times, “I think maybe our old policy of no contract, no work has more or less outlived its usefulness.”37 Even if Quill’s histrionics with Wagner had mostly been for effect, the notion that contract expiration mattered provided a little extra leverage at the bargaining table. Now, the belief that “a deadline is a deadline” disappeared for almost two decades. By 1988, the Local casually announced in its newspaper that contract talks “could be a drawn-out affair that might go well past expiration.” The 1991
Exploiting worker resentment of the 1980 Taylor Law fines, Lawe wrote to members that the “better way” between “management’s best offer or strike” was binding arbitration. Transit dissidents denounced the idea in the run-up to the 1981 election, but to little effect. The 1978–80 dissident movement was in steep decline, unable to stir much outrage.39 That gave Lawe a free hand to conspire with Ravitch – more successfully than in 1980 – and the arbitrators.
Today, reading their 82-page “award” from 1982, knowing their function was to impose the terms already agreed to by Lawe and Ravitch is … humorous? heartbreaking? The three arbitrators carefully parsed the reality of their actual role, noting only that “the panel met informally and jointly with the parties on a number of occasions before and during these proceedings … these informal discussions met with some success.” Lawe boasted he had foiled the “MTA Big Takeaway Attempt … It was fortunate that we submitted our contract demands to the arbitrators … with the volumes of counter proposals that they had prepared, a strike would have been almost inevitable.” But Ravitch got what he wanted.40
Compared with the two-year municipal contracts negotiated a few months later, which raised wages 15 percent for non-uniformed and 16 percent for uniformed workers, Local 100 got a bit less: 20 percent over three years.41 The third year was important to Ravitch and especially Lawe. Beginning in 1985, the TWU negotiations would follow rather than precede the municipal unions, so that a wage “pattern” would have been set by the time TWU bargained. Union leaders – not just Lawe – embraced and appreciated “pattern bargaining.” It took the pressure off them to win better contracts. When members griped, they
Alongside the lower costs and longer length, the key victory for Transit (completed in 1985) was the elimination of informal work quotas tied to “past practice.” Few of the scores of localized, but longstanding work methods, rules, and procedures – like 207th St.’s rules on backfilling – which workers had won over decades through shop-floor battles, were memorialized in the contract. Arbitrators would nonetheless often protect them if the union could show they had been accepted and uncontested by management for years. Now, even practices “long and mutually accepted as binding” or previously sanctioned by an arbitrator were subject to unilateral change under the broad “management rights clause” of the contract. Only what was specifically protected in the contract mattered.43
Because no specific practices were contractually eliminated, it was hard for most workers to understand what was at stake, but just weeks after the 1982 award, Transit implemented higher workload expectations in the Structure department. That was the occasion of Lawe’s “the day of the whip is over” comment; a few weeks later, the Local ate humble pie when the contractual arbitrator upheld management’s new right to “establish production standards and to require employees to submit time records,” while urging it “to resort to reason in the exercise of their management rights.” Meekly, the TWU Express claimed, “That was basically what the Union was seeking.” Workers who were paying attention became familiar with this sequence of bluster-arbitration-compliance. When formal quotas returned in the 1990s, they were a Transit demand, and were far more onerous.44
So, hard-won practices were lost piecemeal, location by location, title by title, precluding system-wide opposition or disruption. The union leadership
Attacks on worker wages and benefits were most concentrated in the lower wage, lower skill titles; gradually, Transit developed a cadre of truly second-class workers. Starting pay rates for cleaners were frozen for three years and their progression to top pay was lengthened from three years to five.46 Transit had long wanted to stop hiring cleaners through a civil service test, which qualified them to subsequently take promotional tests for conductor and train and bus operator. Inexplicably, the union agreed to this change, leaving cleaners stuck in this low pay title for their entire transit careers.47 In 1996, the union allowed “WEPs” – welfare recipients mandated to work for their welfare check – to mop subway cars in terminals, eliminating a fifth of all cleaner jobs.48
Two new titles received cut-rate wages. Bus operators and dispatchers working for “Access-A-Ride” – nominally, a separate MTA entity providing service to city residents whose disabilities made it difficult for them to use the regular transit system – were paid substantially lower wages than their Transit counterparts.
Even worse was the treatment of traffic checkers, who counted passenger loads, timed routes, and assisted customers. “We intend to bring these workers union wages, benefits, and job protections,” Hall announced. But when the dust settled, their pay rate was so low the Local, presumably embarrassed, did
“Cleaners (CTA s): An Endangered Title,” New Directions leaflet.
ILLUSTRATION REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF TAMIMENT LIBRARY/ROBERT F. WAGNER LABOR ARCHIVES, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
The unborn, those who had not yet been hired – who, of course, did not vote on contracts – were also frequent victims. Wage progression to top pay was
Higher skilled workers were not immune to attacks either. Transit pressed to implement “One-Person Train Operation” (OPTO), eliminating the conductor, who works from the middle of the train, opening and closing the doors, making announcements, and generally being in charge of passenger safety. 1994 contract language, negotiated without the knowledge of the RTO division committees, provided a pathway to this goal, but fierce resistance from RTO workers and rider advocates, and Transit’s ineptitude in demonstrating its safety, limited this to one four-car subway line and a few short shuttle routes.51
A huge triumph for Transit came in 1999, when Car Equipment’s shape-up rights were wholly eliminated and seven repair titles were combined into just one (“broadbanding”) in return for an extra $1/hour – a bit more than a four percent increase in wages.52 A worker might still pick “Sheet Metal,” but the foreman, not the crew, would decide who worked the brake, and who the grinder, breathing steel dust all day. “It was a seniority garage sale,” said Joe Campbell, who watched it unfold in his shop. “The staff reps told us ‘nothing’s going to change,’” Tony Feliciano bitterly recalled, but management could now assign the worst jobs to perceived militants, stewards, and other shop-floor leaders, and use that threat to speed up the pace of work. Seniority is not just a reward for longevity, but a safeguard against discrimination and abuse. In return for a little more money, Transit gained a lot more control.53
Years later, CED Executive Board member Grigory Dunichev ruefully reflected on the results. “A strong union has the neck of management in their hands. I’d like every member, when they pick a job, they know exactly what the job is and none of the management can say, ‘regardless of what you picked … you’re at my discretion.’” But with broadbanding, car inspectors “have been taught … you can do any kind of work – they’ve been brainwashed; they have
Alongside new contractual language came changes to shop-floor supervision meant to beef up their enforcement of Transit rules. Because workers took a promotional civil service test, within their own craft, to become foremen, many supervised their old buddies – from upper management’s standpoint, a big problem. And foremen had their own union. That did not change, but a second higher-paid tier was created, with appointment and retention at the discretion of their bosses, focusing their attention on Transit’s goals. The “lead man” function of foremen did not disappear, but it was incrementally subordinated to command, control, and discipline. Above them, shop-floor-level bosses were reclassified out of civil service, making them “at will” employees, easier to fire, and therefore more responsive to their superiors.55
Still, production-level managers were often inclined to overlook rule violations or engage in reciprocity deals if the work got done.56 So, Transit expanded its Labor Relations staff and gave it control over the initiation of many disciplinary charges and all disciplinary hearings in most departments. Workers lost their right to contest disciplinary charges through civil service procedures and the courts, which generally produced more worker-friendly results than arbitrators who heard hundreds of cases a year, and quickly became inured both to Transit’s extraordinary culture of discipline and penalties.57
Harsh discipline had always been a feature of transit work, but the growth of Labor Relations made it more punitive and systematic. At location-based disciplinary hearings, both the manager and union rep knew the worker, the quality of their work, and how changing work and life circumstances – broken-down childcare, a family member with a health crisis, a new supervisor – might
A Labor Relations hearing officer handling cases at Transit headquarters did not know or care who was a good worker; all they saw was the print-out of charges and the prior record; all they had in their head was the disposition of previous comparable cases. Since shop-floor managers were now relieved of the nuisance of holding hearings (or the potential consequences of imposing penalties), and Labor Relations had an institutional interest in generating more business for itself, the sheer number of formal disciplines exploded.58 Since new bus operators, conductors, and station agents were all hired at 70 percent of top pay – and cleaners even less – Transit had a financial incentive to fire rather than correct. Meanwhile, union representation at Transit hearing sites was more depersonalized than at a work location. At best, the union response became “all discipline is wrong” rather than a more discerning “this is bullshit,” “he was just having a bad day,” or even, “I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.”59
In all of this, Transit was following trends in the private sector. The era of “compromise equilibrium” between management and unions – of workplace rights in return for consent to workplace rules – was ending. In its place came what Michael Burawoy calls “hegemonic despotism.” Coercion, not consent, was the flavor of the era. Meanwhile, unions’ tendency to mitigate was described by Alex Wood: “The union’s representatives and officials … came to see their role solely as ensuring the company policies (many of which were effectively decided unilaterally) were followed. The focus on policing the company’s policies, therefore, came at the expense of … questioning whether these policies were just in the first place.”60
That same year, “progressive” discipline – penalties that started small and grew with every subsequent charge – was formally incorporated into the contract. That was meant to prevent worst-case scenarios of overt victimization, but it validated and sanctioned the principle that petty mistakes (if repeated), or personal or family crises that resulted in a quick flood of attendance problems, would end in termination. Fear of climbing the disciplinary ladder encouraged workers to challenge even small penalties.63
Similarly, the 1991 contract allowed a worker facing a no-pay/no-work suspension to instead work those days at 70 percent of their normal salary. That change put some money into people’s pockets and mitigated some level of financial distress. But since this created a source of cheap labor and meant Transit did not have to find workers (often paying an overtime rate) to fill those “lost time” suspension days, it only encouraged more write-ups and harsher
The phrases “guilty until proven innocent” and “plantation justice,” common among transit workers, were cries of despair, but indicated no remedy.
3 Conclusion: Neither the Army Nor the Town Hall
Is “fall” too harsh a term for the experience of transit workers in the quarter century after the fiscal crisis? After all, Local 100 was not PATCO, or Hormel. The union was not busted; workers were not thrown on the unemployment lines as plants closed to reopen in Mexico; there is no dramatic story of despair and ruin here. Yet this era of Local 100’s history is representative of what neoliberalism looked like in the aggregate for the American working class. As New York City “recovered,” the affluent prospered and inequality grew. Most transit workers tread water on wages; others fell behind, and virtually all suffered worsened working conditions.65
My first year at 207th St. shop still informs my ideas today. I saw a large group of workers of diverse crafts but in a single work location, dictate much of how work was organized. Under attack, and holding only a reasonably strategic position in the “production” process, they fought management to a draw over months and months, and held at least the prospect of a complete victory. Often, workers can fight successfully, if they are united and can grasp the strategies and tactics that suit their particular conditions. At the decisive moment, they had their legs treacherously cut out from under them by their own union. More instances of the leadership abandoning and even impeding fights against management are recounted in Chapter 5. At least in transit, where worker power still potentially meant something, there was nothing inevitable about this backsliding.
If political and economic conditions beyond the control of Local 100’s leadership played a part in the decrease of union power, so too did its choice to give up on class struggle. John Lawe boasted about cooperating with management
Increasingly, the union leadership lurched from one crisis to the next, less proactive, and less in control of the course of events. They promoted successors with similar attitudes; such was the process of Darwinian natural selection in Local 100. When this leadership was ultimately ousted in December 2000, the Local’s Secretary-Treasurer, two Vice Presidents, and the Chief of Staff, became Transit managers.67 Which side are you on, indeed!
There was a legacy of second-class citizenship and discrimination against specific groups of workers. And there was a legacy in the union of going along [with this] … The culture inside of the union was one where
workers inside of the union were not being taught to defend each other, to look out for each other. As long as you weren’t attacking my title, I didn’t care if you had traffic checkers being treated like slaves.
Local 100 had become, he said, “a me union and not a we union.”68 This book now turns away from union failure to the opposite – the attempt to reverse it. But it is worth considering how failure established a culture, and a setting, in which attempts at revival took place.
Division and section committee elections remained a place where workers could best express their anger with their deteriorating working conditions. Even if they doubted their own ability to fight back, they hoped someone else would do it for them. Chapter 5 returns to the shop-floor, to watch four variations on a theme: lower-level officers trying to rally workers from their slumber to fight the boss. They met with some success, yet “the foot in the back” of union leadership repeatedly hampered their fight against management.69 In Chapter 6, some worked to eliminate that foot entirely – fight the union to fight the boss – through a new round of Local-wide oppositionist efforts meant to oust the incumbent union leadership.
David Montgomery, “Spontaneity and Organization: Some Comments,” Radical America, 7 (1973).
Marian Swerdlow, “The Breaking of the Iron Law: A Critique of Michels’ Theory of Political Parties,” The Human Factor Vol. 12, No. 1 (1973): 9.
“Make Strong Fight on Subway Work Speedup,” TWU Express, July–August 1982.
A one-time spasm of anger, discussed in Chapter 5, had erupted the previous year, but it was preceded and followed by years of dormancy.
Swerdlow, Underground Woman; Downs-Kagan; Schermerhorn-Kagan; Irving Lee-Marc Kagan interview, Feb. 13, 2015.
That winter and spring, the New York Times carried a spate of articles highlighting the newly-ensconced Gunn’s critique of poor shop-floor management; simultaneously, in front-page news, the MTA inspector general reported that in “subway car maintenance and cleaning shops … management had not made employees put in a full day,” Edward Gargan, “Wanted: An Overlord For The Underground,” New York Times, Jan. 1, 1984; Suzanne Daley, “Gunn Needs Some Links For His Chain Of Command,” New York Times, May 6, 1984; Suzanne Daley, “State Finds Short Workdays at Subway Shops,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 1984. While my claim that Car Equipment was targeted is ultimately conjectural, it should be noted that Davis had run a bus depot in Philadelphia, yet was sent by Gunn to a subway repair shop in New York.
The following pages are largely drawn from my observations as a 207th St. worker in the immediate moment described, and for 16 years thereafter. My memory is supplemented by newspaper articles, interviews, and leaflets produced contemporaneously by the Marxist-Leninist Party (most written or co-written by me), and three reports on transit from a 1986 MLP conference, which I played a part in drafting, MLP folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Only the Section Chair was on union release time. “Attention! 207 St. Shop Members,” George McDonald folder, Box 3, MKPTL; “Civil rights and antiwar” from Cherry-Kagan.
The shop; the work crew within the shop; the shift; and the days off.
Shape-up and backfill rights are discussed in a 1985 arbitration decision, John Zuccotti, “C.M.E. Bid,” and Lars Updale, “Statement of Preferance [sic] After Pick, Feb. 28, 1989,” 207th St. folder, Box 4, MKPTL; Wellman, The Union Makes Us Strong, about San Francisco Bay longshoremen, provides an excellent account of a union-run shape-up system; Toni Gilpin, The Long Deep Grudge and Roger Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight also detail how strong stewards can dictate the pace of work.
In some work crews, the supervisor read off the list, while the steward watched; it amounted to the same thing.
Peter Armstrong, “Class Relationships at the Point of Production: A Case Sudy,” Sociology Vol. 17, No. 3 (August 1983): 345, makes this distinction: “how far the supervisors’ task has become part of the function of the workforce (to produce surplus value) rather than part of the function of capital (to appropriate surplus value).” A typical foreman has two functions: “assisting the workforce in the technical or administrative senses or … management in the task of extracting a profit from the workforce.” Managerial changes described below were meant to incentivize supervisors to extract surplus value.
Cherry-Kagan. Note that mass refusal of overtime is a Taylor Law violation. Here, it did not matter.
The brief description of a workday in the next few paragraphs is, by definition, a generalization, cobbled together from different parts of the shop, the various crafts, hard jobs worked by junior men and light jobs picked by old-timers. Work in the sheet metal, machine, or carpentry shops, for example, where jobs proceeded from a pile of submitted orders, was steadier than the work described here.
“In a transit system where the cry of ‘no stock, no stock’ can be heard in some shop on any day … ‘What happens in the shops,’ said Nick Bouboulis, a union section chairman at the Coney Island repair shop, ‘is that a supervisor who doesn’t have parts will simply say: See what you can do Joe. We’ve got to get the car out.’” M.A. Farber, “Inefficient Ways Of The Past Still Hamper Transit System,” New York Times, July 31, 1984; “Just before Charles Kalkhof suddenly retired this month as the Transit Authority’s vice president for subways … he fired off a memorandum … to A. Richard Goodlatte, a transit consultant whom Mr. Gunn had named chief of the car maintenance department in April. ‘The job is to get 557 safe, clean trains on the road each A.M.’” M.A. Farber, “Transit System Is Facing A Troubled Future,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1984.
For Tutrone, see Chapter 2. On how outsiders saw this organization of work, see Daley, “State Finds Short Workdays At Subway Shops”.
Writing about this type of worker “self-help,” George Strauss, “Union Democracy,” 12 was unsure whether it “contribute[d] to democracy. Certainly, they provide opportunities for individual members to participate. On the other hand, is it democratic for a small group to act in its own self-interest, perhaps defying agreements ratified by the union as a whole?” Other case studies of shop-floor activism raise the same issue: Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home; Gilpen, The Long Deep Grudge; Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006). I address this problem in the next paragraph.
Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight, 215 makes a similar point: “Work stoppages and slowdowns generally emerged out of a process of negotiation between individual work groups and the local union. Union officials have to be careful in evaluating the extent to which an aggrieved department could or should receive support from workers elsewhere in the plant”.
Here was the inverse of Joshua Freeman’s anecdote, recounted in Chapter 2, where Eddie Cabral “ended a ban on having coffee in work areas by simply arriving one day with a coffee pot and giving out coffee, mocking the foreman who challenged him,” In Transit, 118.
Marxist-Leninist Party, “Down With the TA Terror Campaign!,” May 14, 1984; MLP folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Edward Gargan, “Transit Union Head Says Labor Relations Have Deteriorated,” New York Times, May 7, 1984 reports on, but grossly underestimates, the number of write-ups; Marxist-Leninist Party, “Beat Back The T.A. Attacks in 1985!”, Jan. 16, 1985; MLP folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Gunn noted this practice, and even personally witnessed an explosion underneath a car he was riding in. “David Gunn’s Underground, From His Notes,” New York Times, April 15, 1984; Marxist-Leninist Party, “Transit Workers: Step Up The Fight Against the TA Attacks!,” July 16, 1984; MLP folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
This was entirely possible. McLaughlin was alleged to have been one of George McDonald’s John Birch Society members in 1980. Goldberg-Kagan and Scott-McAnanama-Kagan.
Fraudulent because, contractually, “pre-disciplinary suspensions,” are supposed to be used only when it is potentially dangerous to leave a worker on the job while their termination penalty is appealed.
For Truck Shop, and Taylor Law, see MLP, “Transit Workers: Step Up The Fight.” Warnings about the Taylor Law in “Blast N.Y.C. Transit Authorities ‘Gestapo’ Tactics,” TWU Express, May 1984. The “emergency” language said that under “the provisions of the management rights article … management must have the right to require employees to perform work.” Arvid Anderson, Daniel Collins, and Milton Friedman, “In the Matter of the Impasse between New York City Transit Authority and the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority and Transport Workers Union Local 100, AFL-CIO and Amalgamated Transit Union, AFL-CIO, Locals 726 And 1056,” April 19, 1982, 1982; Contract folder, Box 4, MKPTL. For the idea of a “contract policeman,” see Glaberman and Lynd, Punching Out.
John Lawe, “Local 100 Report,” TWU Express, June 1984.
John Lawe, “Local 100 Report,” TWU Express, May 1984.
The existing job picks rights had just been reaffirmed by arbitrator Ted Kheel when Lawe abandoned them. Eighteen car inspector job descriptions were trimmed to three (the Times erroneously said six), and car cleaner job descriptions were entirely eliminated, Suzanne Daley, “M.T.A. and Union Reach Repair Pact,” New York Times, Oct. 30, 1984. About these changes Lawe wrote, “We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we did firmly establish our members’ rights to bid for jobs in seniority order,” John Lawe, “Local 100 Report,” TWU Express, November 1984; Joe Campbell-Marc Kagan interview, Feb. 13, 2020.
Montgomery, “Spontaneity and Organization: Some Comments,” 74.
Anthony Feliciano-Marc Kagan interview, December 13, 2019.
Hall-Kagan.
Marxist-Leninist Party, “Report on New York Transit Work,” October 1986; MLP folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Mikell Hyman, “When Policy Feedback Fails,” Theory and Society Vol. 49, No. 4 (2020): 639–40.
The Local had by-laws; the International, a constitution.
Mike Scott, “TWU Convention’81: Report Back,” Dissidents 1981–82 folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
John Lawe, “Local 100 Report,” TWU Express, September 1981; Damon Stetson, “Union Chief Plans for Transit Talks,” New York Times, December 27, 1981.
“TWU, NYCTA Open Contract Talks,” TWU Express, Feb. 29, 1988.
John Lawe, “Local 100 Report,” TWU Express, March 1982; “Arnold Cherry announces his ‘Unity Team,’” Dissidents 1981–82 folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Anderson et al., “In the Matter of the Impasse”; “Tough NYC Transit Talks Heading For Contract Deadline,” TWU Express, March 1982; John Lawe “Local 100 Report,” TWU Express, April 1980, 1982 Contract folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Robert McFadden, “City Contracts With Unions Faulted in Study,” New York Times, Nov. 9, 1982. For Lawe’s determination to follow rather than lead, see Lardner, “A Reporter At Large: Painting the Elephant”.
For a broad discussion of the value of pattern bargaining to the City, see Stephen Greenhouse, “Panel Urges End to City’s ‘Pattern Bargaining’ With Unions,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 2001.
Anderson et al., “In the Matter of the Impasse”; 1985 Contract, 1985 Contract folder; Marxist-Leninist Party, “Transit – Its Importance,” October 1986, MLP folder, both Box 4, MKPTL. See the three John Zuccotti decisions: C.M.E Bid, Feb. 21, 1985; C.M.E. Bid Part II, March 28, 1986; C.M.E. Bid Part III, May 27, 1986 which, collectively, substantially limited pick and backfilling rights in a 1000-person title, 207th St. folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
“Arbitrator Upholds TA ‘Targets’: Urges Union, Worker Inputs,” TWU Express, September 1982. In 1994, procedures for establishing new “norms” were written into the contract. Between 1996 and 1999, and formalized in the 1999 contract, “flat rate times” were set for most bus repairs, 1991–99 Contracts folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Many dissident publications describe such negative developments, but for these specific changes see Roy Schulman, “Arbitrator to TA Workers: Drop Dead,” Voice of Rank and File In Transit, Vol. 5, No. 3 June 1990; Ken Carl, “Put the Heat ON,” Voice of Rank and File In Transit, Vol. 2, No. 2 November 1986; “Car Wash and the Respirator,” Voice of Rank and File In Transit, Vol. 1, No. 9 June 1986, CP folder, Box 4, MKPTL; “T.A. Work Rule Changes: Squeezing The Workers To Pay The Banks,” Jan. 20, 1986 and “Transit Workers Need United Action,” June 29, 1986, MLP folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
While other workers entered at no less than 70 percent of top pay, cleaners entered at a bit more than 60 percent.
See Dom Seda letter to Carmen Suardy, June 28, 1995, TWU folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
1996 Contract, 1991–99 Contracts folder, Box 4. A few dozen jobs were created to supervise these workers at slightly higher rate of pay.
Sonny Hall, “Local 100 Report,” TWU Express, February 1987. On not reporting those rates see, for example “Wages Increased 5%,” TWU Express, May 31, 1989. In 1999, traffic checkers maximum pay rate was $11.48/hr, compared with over $18/hr for cleaners, 1991–99 Contracts folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
1985–88 and 1991–99 Contracts folders, Box 4, MKPTL.
1999 Contract folder, Box 6, MKPTL.
Campbell-Kagan; Feliciano-Kagan. For a fuller explanation see Before Impartial Arbitrator Carol Wittenberg, April 18, 2000, where the arbitrator ruled that “these positions are subject to assignment, reassignment and backfill pursuant to the Car Equipment Agreement … The Authority has implemented the $1.00 per hour increase and is entitled to the benefit of the bargain,” 1999 Contract folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Dunichev-Kagan.
Suzanne Daley, “Transit Unit To Hire 700 Supervisors,” New York Times, May 17, 1984. For more discussion of the advantages to management of broadbanding supervision, see Anderson and London, “Collective Bargaining and the Fiscal Crisis in New York City,” 401–04.
Since they continued to be evaluated on production-based metrics.
Previously, the first four steps of a six-step process were in front of departmental management. See the 1974 Contract, 1974–76 Contracts folder, Box 2. The eliminated system was appeal to New York’s Civil Service Trial Board, then the Civil Service Commissioners, and finally to NYS Supreme Court. “The Trial Board is no more,” Voice of Rank & File In Transportation, Vol. 1, No. 3 December 1985, CP folder, Box 4, MKPTL. At each step in this procedure a worker had the right to a transcript, to subpoena witnesses, and to challenge submitted evidence. Transit Workers Defense Fund, “Section 75, 76 & 77 of the Civil Service Law,” Dissidents 1983–85 folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
In 2001, 16,000 disciplinary charges were initiated. At the top step of the appeal process, there were eight rotating disciplinary arbitrators and, on average 45–50 cases were scheduled every week.
At worst, a jaded union rep just went through the motions, Joe James-Marc Kagan interview, May 19, 2020.
Michael Burawoy, “Between the Labor Process and the State: The Changing Face of Factory Regimes Under Advanced Capitalism,” American Sociological Review Vol. 48, No. 5 (Oct., 1983): 587–605; Alex Wood, Despotism on Demand: How Power Operates in the Flexible Workplace (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020): 44.
According to RTO staffer Chris Fox, “we would spend 85–90 percent of our resources on only 5–10 percent of the members,” Fox-Kagan. Even if an exaggeration, this was a useful representation of the union’s perspective.
See Chapter 2 for more detail about beakies and sick abuse. There were smaller payouts for workers using 1–5 sick days per year; 1988 Contract, 1985–88 Contracts folder, Box 4, MKPTL; Clarence Little-Sarah Goldstein interview, Sarah Goldstein Interviews Oral History Collection OH 047, Tamiment Library and Wagner Archives, New York University discusses the arbitration and result.
In 1996, president Willie James wrote to Transit Labor Relations complaining of a drastic increase in the number of disciplinary cases heard at arbitration, necessitating 5–6 “calendars” of cases a week, up from 2–3, the result, he said, of increased proposed penalties, leading to more appeals of “what is perceived to be unjust and excessive penalty,” Willie James to Carmen Suardy, May 30, 1996, Discipline folder, Box 7, MKPTL. For a useful review of the history of contractual progressive discipline language through 1995, see the Daniel Collins arbitration at pp. 425–434 in the 1999 contract, https://www.twulocal100.org/sites/twulocal100.org/files/contract_v5.pdf.
1991–99 Contracts folder; “Facts, Not Fiction: About ‘Fines in Lieu of Suspension,’” TWU Literature folder; Robert Mesnard, “Memorandum,” March 31, 1993, 1991–99 Contracts folder, all from Box 4, MKPTL.
Freeman, Working-Class New York, 291–337.
As late as 1975, the Local boasted of graduating 600 shop stewards from “an intensive educational course on the history of trade unionism, political action, handling of grievances, policing of [the] contract, civil rights and community action, the Union’s Constitution and By-Laws, health and welfare programs and Workmen’s Compensation to prepare them for a key role in keeping the Union strong,” “Local 100 Shop Stewards Class Graduates; New One Starts,” TWU Express, January 1975; Ellis Van Riper, “Local 100 Report,” TWU Express, June 1975. A program in 1985–86 was more limited in content and numbers, and one in the early 1990s more limited still, and the last of the decade. The bulk of the 1992 “Local 100 Grievance Guide,” is about filing grievances. Steward Training folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Lawrence Reuter to Roger Toussaint, May 24, 2001, Miscellaneous folder, Box 4, MKPTL.
Tramell Thompson-Roger Toussaint interview, https://progressiveaction.info/2020/03/08/progressive-action-interviews-former-local-100-president-roger-toussaint-on-the-issues-with-twu-local-100/.