Since the leaders need the adherence of the people so that the revolution can be achieved (but at the same time mistrust the mistrustful people), they are tempted to utilize the same procedures used by the dominant elites to oppress … By advancing along these paths, the paths of oppression, they will not achieve revolution; or if they do, it will not be authentic revolution.
PAOLO FREIRE1
∵
Over 50 years ago, the NYC fiscal crisis marked the unfolding of the neoliberal era. This half-century-long assault on the never-very-great economic and political power of the American working class has only occasionally, and temporarily, been checked by a few spasms of collective effort and solidarity. The most organized part of the working class, its unionized sector, has proved incapable of mounting an effective national response or, even, largely, protecting its own members. Union membership, then still over 25 percent of the workforce (down from 30 percent in 1960 and 35 percent in 1950) has virtually disappeared in many parts of the nation.2 Public-sector unions have done better numerically, although the long-run effects of Janus v AFSCME are not yet clear. But insofar as New York City, a “union town,” is an example, they have failed to adequately protect their members from austerity economics. In 2023, New York’s largest union, AFSCME DC37, proudly announced that it had achieved the startlingly low wage-floor of $18/hour for its members, just two dollars above the state’s minimum wage.
There are no particular mysteries about the fall of the house of labor, private or public-sector. Attacks by employers and the state have been constant. Alongside them came a series of mistakes that further weakened unions. They.
For a quarter of a century, Local 100 was largely typical in the choices its leaders made to respond to neoliberalism – and then for several years, it attempted to blaze a different path, to operate more effectively and powerfully. The labor movement needs many more such efforts. Insofar as unions – or insurgents within unions – try to rouse themselves, it is worth looking at the history of New Directions, out of and then in office, and identifying some of the dilemmas that it faced. In broad strokes, if not in Local 100’s particulars, they recur in trade union practice, and often – too often – unions and activists fail to consider the consequences of the choices they make.
Labor activists and well-wishers of the American working class have spent decades prescribing remedies against the fall of the house of labor and searching for glimmers of hope. Early in the neoliberal era, Local 100’s 1978–80 insurgents briefly seemed a possible guiding light. Four years of calamitous real wage cuts (1976–79) led to growing rank-and-file unrest over lost ground, and then oppositionist organization to a docile union leadership. Although dissident leaders failed to unite, and pointedly refused to advocate a strike during their election campaigns, a large handful of rank-and-file members, elected to the union’s Executive Board, did both. Held together by a few leftists, they blocked an agreement providing an inadequate wage increase, and precipitated the 1980 transit strike. Their efforts led to a much-improved wage package; but lacking control over the apparatus of the union or the bargaining table, the immediate outcomes of the strike – a disputed agreement, followed by Taylor Law fines – demoralized and embittered a whole generation of transit workers. With the activists most resistant to union cooptation seemingly discredited, the ranks of the “militant minority” quickly thinned.
From a nadir in the late 1980s, a slow but potentially more thorough-going rise began. A new generation of transit workers was unscathed by the memory of 1980 and angry about mistreatment, a diminished pension, and lackluster raises. A new generation of radicals and militants – some indigenous, others
Still, “bottom-up change from the top,” a synthesis of army and town meeting, was not out of the question when 15 years of work culminated in the electoral victory of New Directions in December 2000. During its first two heady years in power (2001–02), much was achieved, despite the fierce resistance of Transit and the institutional constraints set in place to thwart union power. For the first time in decades, Local 100 took the fight to Transit. The spirits of the membership were lifted by a charismatic leader who eloquently voiced their frustrations and ambitions. Seeing industrious new officers providing more vigorous representation in locations, and on shifts, where they had been heretofore absent, workers began to imagine change was in the air, and a thousand workers stepped forward to become shop stewards. The union’s new slogan, We Move New York, also suggested the ability to stop it, to disregard the web of rules. This was the apogee of the new Local 100’s rise. The 2002 contract curbed some of the worst indignities transit workers faced.
Simultaneously, though, the officer corps efforts revealed reluctance to shift from representing the membership more vigorously to organizing it – encouraging and supporting the worker initiatives and actions necessary to wrest shop-floor power from management. The leadership was disinclined to diffuse voice, decision-making, or responsibility outwards and downwards, either to lower-level staff or toward better workplace organization. Those attitudes were mirrored, then reinforced, by a closed-door contract negotiation process. In the face of rear-guard action by Transit and ambivalence by too many union officers, contractual provisions meant to increase workplace union structures and power sputtered, then stalled. Stewards demobilized, and much of the union’s staff and officer corps remained tied down in servicing.
As a result, Transit was able to return to its decades-long offensive. The promise of 2002 was to demonstrate union power, and lay the contractual, institutional, and cultural foundations for more of it in the future. The 2005 negotiations and strike, in comparison, revealed the backward steps the union had taken during the previous three years. Although Transit overestimated the extent of the union’s disarray – thereby precipitating the strike – it still won concessions that left many workers questioning the walkout. Even worse, the way the strike ended – with a lie to the Executive Board – exposed all of Local 100’s worst top-down tendencies. The ensuing contract rejection left the union more divided than ever, with a demoralized president doubling down on unilateral control. The era of New Directions, and then Toussaint, ended mostly with a feeling of exhaustion after the whirlwind. Even before Toussaint’s departure, Local 100 was returning to the business-as-usual service unionism so common in the labor movement. 2001’s golden opportunity was heartbreakingly squandered.
But “opportunity squandered” suggests that more, far more, was possible. Indeed, when former New Directions activists meet today, the word “tragedy” repeatedly comes out of their mouths.
How was it that such well-meaning intentions, apparently grounded in theories of union revitalization, came to so little? What lessons does the New Directions experience hold for future efforts of radicals seeking to transform moribund unions? It turns out it was not enough to prescribe what should happen, without taking account of the political, cultural, and psychological constraints that bend well-intentioned and militantly motivated activists away from sweeping change. Force of will alone was not sufficient to dismantle the minefields and booby-traps that tend to frustrate a different type of unionism.
The goal of this book has been to elucidate some of those dangers – but also to see many of them as genuine dilemmas, where the benefits and costs of a range of responses must be analyzed, assessed, then weighed. The militant minority, whether facing abusive management or a moribund union leadership, must thread its way through Scylla here and Charybdis there.
I identify eight necessarily interrelated dilemmas that Local 100’s militantly-minded activists and union leaders grappled with, and the solutions they (consciously or unconsciously) chose. New Directions had to decide how to apportion its finite amount of time, energy, and resources, and what tasks to take on. Meanwhile, choices about whether, and how, to enlarge its reach and activist core might modify its founders’ original vision of caucus and union. These decisions shaped the mindset of the officers that came to the union hall in January 2001, and the expectations of the membership about how the “new” Local 100 would fight Transit.
Three more dilemmas address the appropriate level and structure of participatory democracy and decision-making: first, within the voluntary organization New Directions; then, at Local 100’s union hall; finally, the role of the caucus after electoral victory. In varying ways, these speak to the relationship between leaders and rank-and-file.
Finally, there are questions about style and priorities in the union’s work. Unions traditionally seek better wages and benefits. The new Local 100 sought to curb egregious abuses, but should it go further to try to limit management control of production and build workers’ sovereign power? How should activists and union officers balance urgency in action and introspection, the short and the long-term? How to weigh tolerance for risk against ambitions for change? Ultimately, these are about the type of goals a union sets, and how to measure success.
In general, New Directions/Local 100 activists opted to resolve immediate difficulties, mitigate risk, and ease decision-making. They opted for the army over the democratic town meeting. They increasingly opted for what they knew, trying to work better and harder. I will point, instead, to the need for longer-term vision, which demands more introspection about the effects of decisions, and a default-orientation toward, rather than away from, more voice and participation, more shop-floor organization (enabling more spontaneity), and more aggressiveness and risk-taking. My purpose is not to run speculative counter-histories, but to look forward, to provide today’s and tomorrow’s activists with the better tools and insights necessary to build more worker dignity, agency, and power.
1 Dilemma: Fight the Boss, or Fight the Union to Fight the Boss
Although the employer is the class enemy. a union leadership may enable management, and even collaborate with it. This was the view that transit militants
The 1957 “power-sharing” By-law revisions, which left some limited space for continued divisional and sectional militancy through committees elected directly by members, had a paradoxical effect. They encouraged rank-and-file activists to channel their anti-management sentiments, firstly, toward winning lower-level union office, instead of directly against Transit. Labor educator Mark Brenner has noted that a particular “hallmark” of Local 100 “is the degree to which people think of engagement in the union through an electoral lens. It’s partly structural, you have more elected positions by light-years than many unions your size … it creates this sort of short circuit of ‘the way we change things is we run [for office].’”4 Fight the union to fight the boss became the customary response of activists and workers to management abuses. The solution to workers’ problems was, first, “to throw the bums out.”
That meant that leftists who had entered transit advocating shop-floor struggle – and who at first debated whether communists could hold union office without being inextricably drawn into unacceptable compromises and cooptation – quickly faced pressure from co-workers to run in elections. Fortuitously, an analysis gradually embraced by much of the left, Kim Moody’s “The Rank and File Strategy,” gave this ideological sanction: the traditional method, he wrote, “of letting the bureaucratic old guard get caught in the cross fire” of fights with management needed to be updated. “The bureaucracy is far more omnipresent and in the way these days than in the early 1930s, so that there is no hope of avoiding internal union conflict if any progress is to be made.”5
On its face, running for office was not necessarily a problem: those bums did have to go, and even lower-level office made it easier to mobilize members accustomed to waiting for the union’s call – and to locate and develop new activists. That was the theory behind “bottom-up change from the top,” where officers (even just at the division level) would support a program of
Among the rank-and-file, though, swapping out a do-nothing committee for a better one often simply reaffirmed their learned tendency for top-down solutions. When, after years of shop-floor organizing, Toussaint and his comrades became the Track division committee, their reach and effectiveness broadened. Yet even in Track, the activists observed later that too many crews still waited for them to parachute in to fix problems.
Gradually, the existing culture changed New Directions far more than vice versa. Its earlier emphasis on workplace action – already counter-intuitive to so many workers – faded.6 Running for office became its primary raison d’etre: the means became an end, a goal, and electoral success further heightened support for, and reliance on, electoral methods. Increasingly, efforts became focused on identifying and rectifying the misdeeds of the union. That even fit well with the skill set of many of the left activists who were better at polemics than at organizing workers for a direct fight against Transit. They sharpened their quill pens, denouncing Sonny Hall or Willie James in the pages of Hell on Wheels, and debated union officers at union meetings. Fighting the boss, direct class struggle, was mostly set aside until after victory, barely taught or learned.
New Directions came to power in 2001 because it had prioritized fight the union to fight the boss; here was a benefit. But there was a cost too: because most of its activists had never practiced fight the boss, few of the new officers knew how to organize a fight at the point of production, and few of the workers that voted for it had ever experienced taking initiative and responsibility for fixing workplace conditions.
2
The bums had to go; but what would take their place? Perhaps the tilt toward electoral work could be counter-balanced, or mitigated, if there was a clear understanding among the new officers of the union, and its members, of what fight the boss would mean in practice. Yet as shop-floor work was de-emphasized in ND’s daily work, its importance also ebbed in the minds of many of its candidates who would soon run Local 100. Even for those in line for top-level union offices, only lip-service adherence to workplace militancy was required.
In 2003 interviews, several New Directions leftists discussed the distinction between running “educational” campaigns that explained how the union’s work needed to change and running campaigns specifically to win – what they called electoralism. All agreed that as a new breed of activists entered New Directions, drawn by the prospects of electoral success, that tendency grew.7 In between, though, in an intermediate step, the caucus’s leftist founders and other early members decided to prioritize expansion over adherence to original aims and ideals.
Years later, Steve Downs cited a lesson from Ken Pfaff of Teamsters for a Democratic Union: “Run the person who can do the job.”8 As internal pressure to win mounted, success was measured by vote totals, and good candidates with little or no inclination toward dramatic changes in union practice, or a shop-floor-oriented set of priorities, were welcomed in. They brought a different definition of how to “do the job” with them. They raised their hand to officially approve the more militant parts of the caucus’s program they neither practiced nor actually subscribed to.
The leadership of New Directions – first the Downs/Schermerhorn core and, later, Toussaint’s one – had militant and transformational goals. Both had at least a vague understanding that electoralism, as practiced, impinged on necessary culture changes among the officer corps and the membership. Yet once on the electoralist path, any substantive deviation from it seemed to raise real dangers. Downs spent years anxiously worrying about the half-life of the caucus. Its work relied on a remarkably small number of activists, most of whom were drawn to New Directions by its electoral success. If they became disaffected, or were wooed away by the incumbent leadership – as happened with Corine Scott-Mack and a whole cadre of RTO officers in 1997, perhaps costing ND victory that year – a once-in-a-generation opportunity would be
Each leadership opted, therefore, for the coalition-building that would bring electoral victory, and neither actively shared their concerns with the larger activist core. Keeping it off the meeting agendas avoided debates that threatened splits. First, win. Once down at the union hall, the new leadership could implement their agenda.
The cost of the road not taken was steep. It precluded the necessity for a specific and insistent “left” explanation of the importance of rank-and-file organizing work, immediately and in the future. It meant ND’s activists were mostly oblivious to the ways in which their daily practices were at odds with the more difficult, and less familiar, half of the supposed dual strategy of electoral and shop-floor work. Neither they nor the members were prepared to implement those tasks after victory. The similarity to the 1979 dissidents’ decision to avoid advocating strike readiness is apparent. Workers relearned the lesson that the solution to their problems was to be found at the union hall and achieved by casting a ballot, rather than through their own efforts before and after elections. Most activists understood little more.
Later, the failure to change the culture of the union and its members gnawed at some activists. Julio Rivera called the changes the New Directions leadership applied a “cosmetic face-lift.” Anita Clinton said, “It didn’t get into the marrow of union members.” Joel Frederickson bemoaned the difficulties when the union officers themselves have no “broader perspective that your union is a social force … you don’t get enough people with that kind of awareness to staff a union, so how do you work with people who don’t see it that way at all?”10
Just as fight the union turned New Directions toward electoral work, the alliance politics of first, win made victory more likely, but watered-down transformative ambitions. Once at the union hall, overthrowing the top-down culture and the prevailing institutional structures of service unionism, and encouraging bottom-up change, would have required a focused and persistent
3 Dilemma: Leadership, or Participatory Democracy, in the New Directions Caucus
The 1960s New Left, out of which most of the New Directions leadership was drawn, had contradictory views on the importance of participatory democracy. Some believed that “by ‘prefiguring’ within the current practices of the movement the values of freedom, equality, and community that they wanted on a grand scale, activists were helping bring them about.”11 Even if there were costs in immediate efficiency on urgent matters, allowing, even encouraging, potential activists to participate in decision-making and leadership would school them in self-reliance, confidence, and initiative on the shop-floor.12 “What distinguishes revolutionary leaders … is not just their objectives but their procedures,” declared Paolo Freire. “They must believe that the people are capable of participating in the pursuit of liberation … [and] initiate the experience of learning how to name the world.”13
A counter-posed view questioned allowing a show of hands to set crucial policies, which should be settled quietly in the backroom by experienced revolutionary leaders.14 This is little different from David Montgomery’s observation that, by the 1960s, most workers were in thrall to “the cult of the expert,” whether on the factory floor, the union hall, or even in a dissident organization of supposed equals.15
Yet, meetings were largely utilized for discussion about tactics; debates about the underlying strategies of the organization were rare, set aside as either too divisive or too difficult to discuss. One example was the rejection of Sonny Hall’s offer of trusteeship and power-sharing – perhaps the single most crucial decision ND’s leadership ever made – without allowing the entire New Directions membership to weigh in. Participatory democracy only went so far; those outside the inner circles complained about this on the sidelines of the organization; that was another big question that was only rarely addressed head on.
The de facto decision not to confront controversial issues also derived from the nature of New Directions’ leadership, both apparent and invisible. In theory, New Directions was a complete democracy; all members had an equal vote; there was no executive committee or formal chair. In practice, everyone knew who the leaders were; and the leaders acted that way despite their lack of any official status. While ducking formal accountability, they received informal deference based on their founder status, their perceived knowledge and expertise, and because American society is hierarchical; “leaders” are another default mode, even stronger and more familiar than electoral work. Maintaining that de facto control was easier, though, if the strategic administration of the caucus, which guided its overall path, took place outside the meeting hall.16
As the organization grew beyond its leftist origins, different power centers emerged, grumbling increased, and avoiding debate proved more difficult. When it finally emerged, though, it was personalized rather than political – more a revolt against, or adherence to, particular leaders, than about the policies and practices they advocated. Scott-Mack criticized Downs and Schermerhorn as “cappuccino socialists” and she was rebuffed, in turn, for disloyalty; that contest was never about competing visions of New Directions leadership at the union hall. Downs was unseated as editor of HoW because members grew tired of him running the show.17
The top-down culture of Local 100 (and Transit) was thus partially replicated even within the far more participatory New Directions. All this augured badly for the prospects of debate, discussion, and participatory democracy in more formalized circumstances. Leadership or participatory democracy? To answer “yes, both” it was necessary (although not sufficient) to have a more open and honest discussion about how, and on what terms, they might coexist; that would have been easier to begin in the caucus than at the union hall.
4 Dilemma: the Army or the Democratic Town Meeting at the Union Hall
I understand the need for discipline – take and give orders – to deal with management that’s fierce … Where Roger excelled, he was very good as a general; he saw a fight, he went into it. He knew how to organize it, to get the right people … You need to say, “Hey, JP, you need to mobilize some people and you’re not, so I’m going to put someone else [in your place]” … sometimes when people are elected, they feel, “Well, I’m elected so I can do whatever I want.” … [Yet] you need checks and balances in the union.
You need officers who can tell the president … there needs to be a change, without fear of retribution.18
And, on the shop-floor, what is needed are stewards and workers who get support when they tell the president, or their representative, “this is important.”
One distinction between “participation” in New Directions and at the union hall was that the former was a small voluntary organization whose members might choose to upend procedures and processes at any time. Local 100, on the other hand, was a mass organization with established practices and hierarchies, and rules which gave great power to a single individual. There was necessarily going to be an army fighting Transit, but would its general lead by fiat or in consultation with the other officers? Would the army leave space for the voice of the democratic town meeting – the broad membership and the militant minority among them? As it turned out, autocracy increasingly prevailed on both counts; Toussaint dragged the union along his chosen path. Goals and success were defined out of the president’s office.
Consider the formal and informal processes which converted even a powerful shop-floor action like Chapter 7’s 126th St. Depot fight into a top-down exercise, undermining, in part, a victory. Of course, Transit did not want workers in the room when it struck a deal to end the job action. But why did the union agree? And most union work is inherently more exclusionary unless conscious efforts are made otherwise: a grievance arbitration; the contract negotiating table; the union’s safety expert at a job site; a PERB hearing on an employer violation; health benefit plan funding allocation; communication between union president and individual members – so easy in one direction and so torturous in the other.
At its origin, Local 100’s workplace leaders grasped their potential to act and make change. They were certain of their agency – and eager to maintain it from both employer and union leadership. Even later, that attitude was sometimes in evidence. At the 207th or 240th St. shops, a confident workforce believed they had the right to decide their own fate, and that it was the leadership’s responsibility to support their decisions. Systemwide, though, by 2001, that perspective was largely lost. To rebuild it required prioritizing industrial democracy and workers’ control at the bargaining table – and in the methods of the union hall. That would have required deep ideological work to implement in its details and particulars, and the bravery to build the plane while flying it.
Instead, stewards were only given tasks, rather than voice or shop-floor leadership. Linda Markowitz calls this, “pseudoparticipation … when there is no actual change in an authoritative organizational structure, but simply an alteration in the level of participation within it … [as] when members take part in a group activity that has nothing to do with decision-making … or sit in on a meeting without having a say in its conclusion.”20 That led to demobilization. The opportunity to involve the membership in the life and ownership of the union and create an empowered rank and file was lost.
The officers and staff were treated similarly. Those who tried to speak their minds about strategic, administrative, and management concerns were branded enemies.21 Discussing the United Farm Workers, Frank Bardacke might have been describing Local 100: “It was easier to maintain unity” – of a certain kind, he might have said – “through orders given to an appointed staff rather than to persuade a group of local officials … but politics cannot be wished or ordered away. Instead of democratic politics, the union was left with a palace politics of the most intense variety, complete with the alleged
Less dramatically, officers abandoned initiative, learning it was wiser to wait for instructions. Those tendencies were embraced more than imposed, reflecting the culture of Transit, where future union officers first observed how to manage. Toussaint “didn’t try to break with it, and the majority backed him,” observed Marian Swerdlow. “He was just following a model. It wasn’t just the personality of Roger Toussaint.”24 Neither the Executive Committee of the ten Local-wide officers nor the Executive Board ever exercised their constitutional powers to superintend Toussaint. The Negotiating Committee twice allowed Toussaint to flout the mandated forms of consultation and participation during contract negotiations. In the third contract round, it was not even called into existence. Manifestations of authority and obedience pervaded the Local. Entrenched deference was a collaborative effort.
Certainly, the union must be ready to mobilize as an army. Yet a well-working army blends obedience with dialogue, advice, and spontaneous initiative within the context of an overall plan. Besides, even the fiercest union-management fights are not really analogous to actual battle. There are few occasions when it is not possible to provide more time for education to expand horizons and understanding: for training and tools on how to fight, for two-way exchange of ideas and consultation, and to strengthen steward networks and union presence on the shop-floor. Even in the midst of the 2005 strike, it should have been possible to gather workers together to discuss and vote on the actual outlines of an honestly explained deal. If it seems likely that such an assemblage would have sent Toussaint back to the bargaining table, would that have produced – forced? – better results?25 At the least, workers would have felt they decided the outcome before their most potent weapon was blunted. The class struggle is not only about who wins how much, but the nature of the battle, whether workers see themselves a part of it, with a voice about their own well-being.26
After a time, the diminishment of participatory democracy at all levels of Local 100 made it difficult to maintain a strong army, despite a militant leader with radical objectives. As the union became increasingly undemocratic, demobilization spread, and the union’s power to make transformative change faded. Abandoning all the forms of the democratic town meeting, Toussaint’s Local 100 tried to settle for a better brand of militant top-down service unionism; that proved a flawed strategy for any more than limited gains, and an enticement for the MTA to attack.
5 Dilemma: the Union Caucus after Victory
Might participatory democracy still be nurtured among a militant minority within the caucus, even if the union’s hierarchical structure and a still pervasive service culture inhibited the practices of participatory democracy there? New Directions had never discussed whether it would continue after electoral victory, yet for that reason simple inertia kept it meeting in the months after victory, albeit on a more irregular schedule. That might have led toward an eventual clarification of a valuable long-term role. Various studies and less formal observations have pointed to caucuses which provided a setting for
It was not unreasonable to think that, in the aftermath of victory, and with the active if informal support of the new leadership, New Directions might have grown in size (as the Coalition of Radical Educators did, after its Chicago Teachers Union victory), and attracted new activists who wanted to influence union practices and gain a route to union office. Or that New Directions might have filled another of the many possible roles of a caucus. It was also not unreasonable to think a leadership with a thousand tasks on its plate, and an officer corps that did not need bi-weekly meetings to keep up-to-date, might see many of the caucus’s activities as a drain of time and energy, or even as potentially disruptive. Given a modicum of good faith, the answer to this dilemma, which might differ depending on the circumstance, could have been worked out over time, then revisited again and again.30 Instead, ND’s factional infighting, which had intensified in the second half of 2000 into a more-or-less open Toussaint-Downs factional split, left good faith in short supply.
Some splits, about irrevocable political differences, are unavoidable. The internal infighting that destroyed New Directions only required some restraint from either or, ideally, both leaders, some sense that the value of saving ND was more important than pre-empting challenges to his authority (Toussaint) or poking the bear (Downs). Or, it might have been saved by its 30 or 40 constant
New Directions had never truly developed a theory of what a transformed union looked like and how it might be achieved. Its demise, though, was another factor that allowed the ideas of workers’ control on the shop-floor, and greater participatory democracy within Local 100, to be irrevocably abandoned with hardly a whimper of protest or dismay.
6 Dilemma: Things, or Industrial Democracy
The unionization drive of the 1930s and the wartime years won workers more money in various forms, but also more industrial democracy, more workers’ control of the production process, more autonomy. In its first years, Local 100 had made significant inroads on militarist management control – contractually, and wrested from it in workplaces through collective action; then, Transit spent decades rolling that back, coinciding with national trends. The 1980s was a particularly fruitful period for that effort, but as recently as 1999, Transit gave a four percent wage increase to 3,000 subway mechanics to virtually eliminate their job assignment protections. That remained a hot-button issue in Car Equipment when New Directions took office, but in general, many workers – particularly in the subway departments – had resigned themselves to having little or no say in the organization of work. In a 2002 pre-contract survey, half rated divisional issues, where most of these matters were addressed, 10th or lower of 12 categories of demands. Alongside the withering of shop-floor power came a loss of imagination about what might be remedied. It seemed the union only existed to bargain about wages, while Transit demanded that any changes the union wanted in divisional language must be “revenue neutral.”
Still, if pressed, transit workers knew very precisely what could be made better about their jobs. That varied by division and job title, but included stronger seniority systems; a greater voice or even veto over work procedures, including ability to stop a bad pick, shut down an unsafe job or fix unrealistic routes and schedules; making sure you got your lunch relief; the right to take a sick or vacation day, perhaps on Christmas or Thanksgiving; more “real” weekend days off; and the equal distribution of overtime. It meant an end to onerous and often arbitrary discipline, and curbing abusive managers.
Those were among the specific changes, but from a more birds-eye-view, the management rights clauses of the contract needed to be hemmed in or eliminated, and the contractual recognition of all existing “past practices” – rights won on shop-floors – resecured. More intangibly, it meant mechanisms
To accomplish all this, the union needed contractual remedies but also a cultural shift among both workers and their leaders: encouraging workers to believe they had power, could take initiative, and become agents of their own destiny. That is what Nick Unger hoped his “dirty bathroom fights” would begin to teach, creating “a little space between you and management so that you can breathe and stand up straight … a dignity fight, a humanity fight.”31 Instead, the union leadership almost wholly slighted the project of culture change, worrying instead that successful shop-floor leaders might become their opponents in the next election, and jealous of the time and effort this training might take.
At the bargaining table in 2002, when the union was most powerful, some gains were wrested from Transit. Life off the job was made better for most, through changes in the sick abuse system. The safety dispute resolution form undoubtedly increased “workers’ sovereign power,” although later evidence suggests that fear of retribution made rank-and-file members reluctant to use it. That is what a stronger steward system might have prevented. The one contractual change in that direction, to create institutional legitimacy for stewards by empowering them to handle all first step disciplinary hearings, across the table from the workers’ production manager, was never utilized by the union. Toussaint’s failure to restore seniority rights in Car Equipment, essential to sustain bottom-up fights in that whole division – a demand which management strenuously resisted – indicated the balance of priorities on each side. This was just another case in which he was guided by his inclination for the army, and a paternal role dispensing “things … from on high.”
The dilemma of industrial democracy, or workers’ control – or to more explicitly include white collar workers, autonomy from management dictate – is that most workers have given up on gaining more of it, except by individual and semi-surreptitious means. The train operator who put their brakes into emergency created a little space for themselves, but mostly was seeking revenge for their general powerlessness to fix their schedule or get a day off. Since unions are anyway disinclined to think about the daily problems of the shop-floor, they abandon the fight for what workers do not seem to demand of them, and management is so loathe to concede.
7 Dilemma: Urgent, or Important?
Many urgent problems are important, but often, urgency is mistaken for importance. Then, matters that set a conscious and deliberate path for an organization, rather than leaving it reactive to events, along with a continued re-visiting of earlier decisions, are easy to set aside for another day since they seem to have no particular urgency. “Important” is about understanding what is truly important, but also prioritizing time and methods for dealing with those questions.
Urgent was usually prioritized in New Directions, leaving little time for the group as a whole to engage in introspection. As usual, there were good justifications for this decision. Its bi-weekly meetings were packed with tactical decisions. In between were the exhausting tasks of campaigning and producing and circulating literature. All this, while working eight or ten hours a day and making time for family and personal obligations. Perhaps fight the union or electoralism or “good candidates” would have been chosen anyway; as it was, they were mostly chosen by default, as a result of dozens of smaller urgent decisions which gradually set the course of the organization. There was also little engagement with ideas about top-down and bottom-up – what should constitute its main methods of work – in the moment, or after victory.
Important rarely appeared at the union hall, either. Union leaders (and members) have an inclination anyway toward the issues of “the next five minutes” – whatever fire needs to be fought right now, the next election, the next contract. There were always more problems than staff to do them well; moreover, members suffer when they are not addressed. So, the vast majority of union officers just juggled a seemingly endless multiplicity of urgent assignments – and, sometimes, crises. In those conditions, it was difficult to think ahead – to develop and promulgate a five- or ten-year plan of what the union hoped to achieve, and the strategic plan it needed to implement to get there. The intonation “more power” or “more democracy” simply does not answer the questions of what steps need to be taken now that may take years to bear
The dearth of collective introspection and long-term vision in turn limited the capacities of officers and staff. How well could they work toward an agenda of which they were unaware? How could they engage members in the types of discussions which might lead to a new culture of participation, and a more militant style of trade unionism, when they had, at best, only an inkling what that might be? (Thus, “important” ideas never touched the rank-and-file except as passive recipients of union plans.) Ironically, as the first years – the rise – produced hopeful results, a sort of self-deception developed that the existing practices, structures and mores were largely sufficient – just ever harder work was necessary. So, the staff carried on, as they had, with the familiar methods of work, vaguely aware they were trapped on the hamster wheel, but lacking an alternative or even a vision of an alternative.
It is likely that Toussaint had a personal vision of what he thought important that went beyond platitudes. Especially in his first years, a plethora of projects emerged from the president’s office. But even then, there simply were not enough staff dedicated to unfolding them in a deliberate manner, and little understanding of how the individual pieces of the puzzle might fit together. How could a union of hundreds of officers put into effect what was held in Toussaint’s head alone or, at best, shared with just a few others? Later, in 2004–05, too much time was spent on the urgent task of infighting, and little on what Toussaint himself had defined as the important tasks of contract readiness: 4,000 activists, a dozen battles, etc. After the strike and the loss of dues check-off, when all-hands-on-deck were necessarily thrown into the struggle for the sheer survival of the union – urgent and important – Toussaint completely lost sight of what was important and extended this exhausting and debilitating period by over a year. Toussaint ultimately left little legacy beyond the contractual items won in the 2002 contract, because too much time was spent on fire-fighting – or fighting the fires he had set, out of a misplaced sense of “urgency” – and not enough on union-building projects.32
Urgent or important? Far more “important,” which required an understanding that important was important.
8
In the early morning hours of December 16, 2002, Roger Toussaint decided not to strike despite a high state of union readiness, a first-year wage freeze that demoralized his most militant members (and mediocre increases in the following years), and a reorganization of the bus departments opposed by his own officers. Toussaint assessed that the costs of a strike were too high for its potential benefits. Health benefits had been preserved. It was thought (erroneously, but not without cause) that progress had been made on excessive discipline, and a host of smaller demands had also been won. The threat of Taylor Law fines loomed; so did, more ominously if ambiguously, Patriot Act penalties against any strike, while the hum of 9/11 remained background noise. And perhaps the union membership was not fully and completely prepared for a strike. Explaining disappointing wage numbers to members, Toussaint pointed to 2005, when, he said, political circumstances would be more favorable, the officer corps stronger, and more battles unfolded to give more members the experience of a successful fight. There were good reasons to avoid risk and wait until a more propitious time; there almost always are.
In retrospect, though, the union, fearful of the risks of striking, lost its best opportunity to gain a decisive victory and change the ground rules of TWU-Transit relations. Momentum was lost, workers demobilized. Transit soon returned to the offensive.
Three years later, it was Transit, not the union, that called the strike. Lacking unity and any pivotal demand that might galvanize the membership, Local 100 was undoubtedly less prepared for a walkout than in 2002, and it is unlikely it anticipated one. With Toussaint warning his members that “storybook endings are far and few between,” Transit pressed for a substantial concession on pensions. To Transit’s surprise, the union did strike. It underestimated the visceral experiences of the union’s Executive Board members, the majority of whom had chafed at the lost chance in 2002 and had themselves suffered as the unborn after the pension changes in the 1970s. Personal considerations surely came into play too: how could Toussaint – touted as a fierce militant – be responsible for a groundbreaking concession?
Yet Toussaint managed the strike defensively, minimizing its length and risk – but also potential reward – to the union. To facilitate a later declaration of “victory,” the union never enunciated an offensive demand. The strike’s start date virtually precluded an extended walkout; that meant Toussaint had to accept concessions, then withhold the news about them to ensure approval to end the strike. In the end, those calculations, the determination to avoid the risk of a longer strike with offensive goals, cost the union plenty in the years
Whether or not those particular set of judgments were ill-conceived, union leaders, with few exceptions over the past decades, have opted for the certainty of slowly dwindling power over risk and potential reward. They seek to resolve conflicts rather than win them, and to avoid tests of power. They have trained themselves out of the boldness many of their organizations once possessed. They have embraced a culture of safety, passivity and defensiveness. They prioritize the longevity of their institutions over their accomplishments, and nurture like-minded successors. In so doing, they have foregone not just the possibility of better wages and benefits but the possibilities of empowering workers, encouraging them to take initiative, seize hold of responsibility, try to become agents of their own destiny.
New York’s public employees should be grateful that Local 100 has three times in the last 60 years chosen a riskier path, defying legal constraints. In 1966, it laid the groundwork for half a decade of wage and benefit advances by all municipal workers. In 1980, 23 brave workers, almost by happenstance elected to the union’s Executive Board, stuck together in the face of tremendous pressure, including from their own union leadership, and played a part in ending the severest austerity of the fiscal crisis period. In 2005, the Local fended off a demand for a worse pension plan that likely would have spread statewide.
Yet the nature of the 2005 strike, and the one that did not occur in 2002, also remind us that unions need to be more willing to take risks to win, as well as to avoid loss, if they want to break the curve of decline.
Of course, it is impossible to replay history as though it were a computer game. We cannot see what would happen if the New Directions officers, fresh at the union hall on January 1, 2001, full of exuberance and an awareness of workplace indignities, had gone out into the field and, in a persistent and disciplined manner, created unrest and organized fights, disregarding the Taylor Law and the web of rules, and rejecting the routine accommodations with management. Would it have turned into the sort of magical whirlwind that sometimes happens, calling forth forces seething with anger at Transit, or led to amateurish disasters? Similarly, we can only speculate as to whether 2002 or 2005 might have had a happier ending had the union opted for a more militant, riskier, course.
What we can see, though, is how the implicit hierarchy of New Direction and the explicit one of the union hall, the lack of participatory democracy and voice, the failure to cultivate shop-floor militancy to fight management control
What we can see, too, if we look, is that where activism and militancy were tried, where the army and the democratic town meeting were synthesized, it often worked. Walter Humphrey’s 207th St. committee running a shop for years on workers’ terms; Arthur Goldberg’s structure maintainers boycotting, and stopping, a bad pick; George McAnanama’s gang refusing to work on the Manhattan Bridge in high winds; Tom Doherty’s shop winning back their coffee break; trackworkers defying management and the police to stop work at Bay 50th; train operators slowing down the whole system; all those buses piled up across the Broadway Bridge outside the Kingsbridge bus depot to “fuck with management.” And countless other fights – where transit workers said, enough! – that just have no chronicler.
Workers can fight and win; not always, but often – often enough to try more, so they, and their unions, can rise more and fall less. Workers and their unions need to plan, and plan far down the road. Workers and their unions need to talk and debate among themselves, to develop theories of what they are trying to do, and trying to win, and why, and promulgate them across job titles and work locations. Workers and their unions need to be unafraid to take measured risks. Workers and their unions need to break down hierarchies and division among workers and between officers and members, and build unity and solidarity. Workers and their unions need to act at the point of production, and do it again and again, learning, getting good at it, teaching management some fear. Workers and their unions need to imagine the other world that is possible.
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 166.
See, for example, the state-by-state change over time, 1965–2015, at Quoctrung Bui, “Fifty Years of Declining Union Membership in One Map,” https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-in-one-map.
Freeman, In Transit, 330 identified a similar situation even earlier: “New York transit workers were at least as militant in the 1950s as they had been in the 1930s and ‘40s. In the 1950s, though, militancy was as likely to be manifested in opposition to the TWU as through it”.
Downs-Brenner-Kagan.
Kim Moody, “The Rank and File Strategy,” https://solidarity-us.org/rankandfilestrategy/.
The main written sources on New Directions during the 1990s, other than this work, and my co-authored chapter in Jasper, et al., Gains and Losses, are three pieces by Steve Downs, one co-authored with Tim Schermerhorn. Despite much rhetoric about the need for shop-floor organizing and action, none of them discuss a single work action with New Directions participation between RTO slowdowns in January 1992 and December 1999 – the period of peak ND membership and work. In contrast, there is extensive discussion of the specific tactics used to organize against the union leadership and its policies: see Downs and Schermerhorn, “Hell on Wheels: Organizing Among New York City’s Subway and Bus Workers”; Downs, Hell on Wheels; Downs, “Socialist Strategies in Unions.”
Downs-Goldstein; Swerdlow-Goldstein; Fraidstern-Goldstein. See also Schermerhorn-Kagan.
Downs-Brenner-Kagan.
Downs later argued that he supported Toussaint’s position near the top of the slate to counter-balance this other trend: see Downs-Kagan.
Rivera-Kagan; Clinton-Kagan; Fredericson-Kagan; also Patafio-Kagan.
Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting, 6.
In an entirely different context, teaching hospitals accept the costs of handing over life-changing decisions to interns and residents as part of the price of training a new generation of doctors: see “Education of a Knife” in Atul Gwande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).
Freire, Pedogogy of the Oppressed, 167, 169, 177–178.
Some might call this a “Leninist” view, and perhaps this played a part, but it is typical of hierarchically-based cultures, whatever the particular politics of a movement.
Charles Cobb, a key figure in SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign, gave this answer in a private conversation with the author at a January 2020 American Historical Association conference session, “Education and the Practice of Freedom: Legacies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.” At first Cobb ritually framed SNCC’s mantra, “meeting the people where they are.” Then, pivoting, he described how when SNCC cadres debated Franz Fanon, the discussion went over the head of the indigenous activist Fannie Lou Hammer; but, he said, she still trusted them.
See Freeman, “Tyranny of Structurelessness”.
Undated conversation with Downs.
Patafio-Kagan.
“The President, with the approval of the Executive Board, shall from time to time appoint committees necessary to assist the Local officers in carrying out the functions of the Local to better service its membership, i.e. COPE, Political Action, Membership, etc.,” Local 100 By-laws, XV, Committees.
Linda Markowitz, Worker Activism After Successful Union Organizing (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1999): 43.
For a particularly revealing anecdote, see Joe James’s report in Chapter 9. He could speak his mind to Toussaint in private, but when he did so in a public meeting, Toussaint ripped his head off.
Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage, 521.
Clinton-Kagan.
Swerdlow-Kagan.
“Likely” not just because of the later (close) vote against the contract, but because those who came to a mass meeting would have tended toward the more active and militant.
“Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise, like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making,” Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9, original italics.
Richard Hyman, The Political Economy of Industrial Relations, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989): 61–63.
Darlington and Upchurch, “A Reappraisal of the Rank-and-File Versus Bureaucracy Debate,” 87.
See Nyden, “Democratizing Organizations: A Case Study of a Union Reform Movement”; Gutekanst-Kagan; Potter-Kagan; Sharkey-Kagan for information about the Coalition of Radical Educators, a Chicago Teachers’ Union caucus; Aronowitz-Kagan and informal conversations with Luke Elliott-Negri, Gerry Martini, Pam Stemberg, and Ruth Wangerin have provided information and observations about the “New Caucus” in the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY.
See discussions in Gutekanst-Kagan; Potter-Kagan; Sharkey-Kagan about this tension in CORE, and ongoing attempts to address it.
Unger-Kagan.
In Toussaint’s own list of accomplishments, “TWU Local 100 & You: A Guide to the Benefits & Reforms at TWU Local 100, 2001–2007,” Box 11, MKPTL, 72 of 99 new benefits and reforms were dated 2001–02.