|
Posted by
Gold_12TH
on Wed Mar 14 15:59:30 2012
edf40wrjww2msgDetailB:detailStr fiogf49gjkf0d As leaders of the New York City transit union engage in ongoing contract talks, they are facing a prominent critic from within their own ranks: former union chief Roger Toussaint, who led a crippling three-day bus and subway strike in 2005.
Mr. Toussaint is going increasingly public with attacks on John Samuelsen, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100. He has taken particular aim at what he calls a failure to rally workers in a show of strength, underscored by a decision to allow the current contract to expire on Jan. 15 without a threat to strike.
"The issue is not if they have the [money]," Mr. Toussaint said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week. "It's about getting it from them. And you have to have a real strategy to do that. You can't just make it up as you go along and hope that no one notices."
Mr. Samuelsen said that the union's choice of a new tone was by design. The 2005 strike was held in defiance of state law, and the harsh penalties hobbled the local financially for years.
"The great irony of this is that the strike in 2005 was actually detrimental to the union's ongoing ability to organize members in a fight-back," Mr. Samuelsen said. "There was such a bitter taste left in the mouths of Local 100 members after the settlement of the 2005 strike that the problems still reverberate to this day."
Mr. Toussaint's emergence comes just weeks after he surprised fellow union members by returning from a position in Washington, D.C., to resume his old job as a track-shop worker at a Metropolitan Transportation Authority facility in Brooklyn.
The move has driven a belief that Mr. Toussaint could either seek to wrest control of the union back from Mr. Samuelsen or throw his support behind one of the factions seeking to do so in elections this fall.
Mr. Toussaint, who led the local from 2000 to 2009, declined to comment on his political plans.
He previously ruled out a power grab, including in an open letter to the union's executive board in January. But he recently has taken steps to raise his profile, including appearing at a recent meeting of the executive board at a YMCA in Brooklyn, and conferring with Nelson Rivera, a union vice president who is considered a potential challenger to Mr. Samuelsen.
Mr. Rivera didn't return requests for comment.
Mr. Toussaint is among the most militant—and the most widely known—of a number of critics dogging Mr. Samuelsen and his allies throughout contract talks. Negotiations have proceeded slowly, in part because Mr. Samuelsen underwent hip surgery in February and struggled to recover from a subsequent infection. He has returned to a limited public schedule, including a planned celebration of Irish culture Thursday in Brooklyn and a negotiating session last week.
Still, there has been little indication that the MTA is backing off its demands that the union's 35,000 members forgo raises.
That has created an opening for opposition voices such as Mr. Toussaint, who has resumed the fiery rhetoric that was one of the hallmarks of the 2005 strike.
He said Mr. Samuelsen was "left at the altar" because the union signaled early in the process that workers would stay on the job after the contract expired.
"The union's power lies…in the strength of a mobilized membership—not bluffing, not smoke and mirrors or gimmicks, but mobilization that is observable and demonstrable," Mr. Toussaint wrote in an email to the Journal.
Mr. Samuelsen said his efforts to mobilize members and stage rallies had outstripped anything Mr. Toussaint organized in the years after the strike. After taking office in 2010, Mr. Samuelsen said, he quickly hired his just-defeated rival and former Toussaint ally, Curtis Tate, and set about trying to revive the flagging spirits of his local.
"Roger couldn't mobilize 20 members to do anything after the 2005 strike," he said. "He couldn't mobilize a bunch of kindergarten kids to get online to get cookies and milk, and yet he finds fit to criticize our mobilization in the last year."
The slow negotiating pace, and its relatively peaceful tone, is a departure in strategy for Local 100.
"They're trying something different," said Joshua Freeman, a professor of history at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and author of a history of the TWU in New York. "Whether it pays off really remains to be seen."
The deliberate approach may be a gamble, Mr. Freeman said, that the climate for public sector unions can only improve from the low ebb of last year, when state governments sought to rein in sharply on spending.
"The most recent state worker government contracts were really sort of terrible," Mr. Freeman said, referring to deals struck by CSEA and the Public Employees Federation with the administration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, including givebacks and a three-year freeze in base pay.
"They're not directly a template for the TWU contract, but they're definitely part of the backdrop to it," Mr. Freeman said, adding that TWU officials may hope that an improving economic picture may help soften the MTA's opposition to granting raises.
Mr. Toussaint said the union instead risks ending up in arbitration, where the MTA could successfully argue it can't afford raises.
Mr. Samuelsen said criticism wasn't affecting his determination to strike a better deal for his workers than MTA is seeking.
"It doesn't change the equation," he said.
---http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304450004577279821053283832.html?mod=WSJ_NY_LEFTTopStories
|
