Veteran sellouts George Jennings, Sr., Local 100 Vice-President for Private Lines, and his patron, TWU International President Sonny Hall, are supporting a petition to split the Queens Private Lines from Local 100 and form a separate local. They claim that 90% of Private Lines workers have signed it. Revolutionary Transit Worker appeals to Private Lines workers to reject this move and remain in Local 100. For Jennings and Hall to try to split our union at this critical time is treasonous.
Local 100 President Toussaint and his leadership group say that up to 54% of the signatures on the petition were coerced. Even if that’s true, at least 46% of the signatures are genuine, meaning 40%of the Queens Private Lines workers are angry enough with Toussaint to split from Local 100 at the worst possible time. This anger stems from Toussaint’s misleadership of their seven-week-long strike this past summer.
It’s true that, unlike in the past, Local 100 under Toussaint gave strike pay, took up collections and sent many Local staffers and other members to picket lines. However, they kept the various Private Lines contract fights separate and kept the Queens workers working under an expired contract for over a year and a half before the strike. During the strike, Toussaint held no serious mass rally or other mobilization of the whole Local in support. At a mass meeting on July 14, Toussaint tried to ram a poor contract down the strikers’ throats. The strikers’ resentment boiled over, and VP Jennings demagogically placed himself at the head of the strikers’ near-riot against Toussaint (see RTW Nos. 9 and 10).
But Hall and Jennings presented no alternative strategy for winning the strike and did nothing to mobilize the whole Local or International behind the strikers. In the end, they joined with Toussaint in telling the Queens bus workers that the same contract offer which caused the rebellion was “good.” Exhausted and seeing no alternative, the workers accepted the contract.
Now they are encouraging the Private Lines workers to split from the Local. Their real aim is to shore up their own bureaucratic power and privileges. Hall was stung by the defeat of his hack protege Willie James and is looking to screw Toussaint, and he doesn’t mind screwing all of us in the process. And Jennings and his fellow old-guard hacks in the Private Lines are anxious to protect their positions as well.
This fall, two Queens Private Lines members brought charges against Jennings and Private Lines Chair Curran for their conduct at the July 14 meeting. Toussaint held two long meetings of Executive Board Members to hear and decide on these charges. This show-trial used bureaucratic bullying of misleaders to suppress honest disagreements by the Queens Private Lines rank-and-file. It was a big waste of the EB’s time, when they should be spending every minute to plan mass mobilization for our contract fight.
Predictably, many Private Lines workers felt that this attack on their leaders was an attack on them, and it made them willing to support a split. Revolutionary Transit Worker believes that the trial of Jennings and Curran was, at best, a big mistake. To be sure, Jennings and his patron Hall have inflicted plenty on the ranks. But the way to defeat them is by exposing them to the ranks and encouraging the ranks to throw them out.
Toussaint has belatedly written an appeal to Private Lines members in Local 100 Express (November 2002), asking them not to split from the Local. It’s instructive that his first instinct was to bring his opponents up on charges. Only after the split movement hit him on the head did he appeal to the ranks.
Jennings’ and Hall’s bureaucratic split movement is a grave danger to our union and the whole working class. But we should recognize that Toussaint’s misconduct of the Private Lines strike and subsequent bureaucratic trial of Jennings and Curran eased the way for the attempt to split. This will put us in the best position to convince Private Lines workers not to split from Local 100.