The union leadership is taking some steps to defend the members. They are increasing official union presence on job-sites to enforce job safety. They are running a media campaign to publicize the MTA’s grossly unsafe and negligent practices, which put the riders, as well as the work-force at risk. These efforts could and should be part of an explicit campaign to build workers’ mass actions.
Management sometimes backs down from forcing transit workers to work unsafe one day, only to force unsafe work the next day. Massive, sustained refusal to work in immediately life- and/or health-threatening conditions could stop management cold from this kind of intimidation. Collective grievances and mass walk-ins to bosses’ offices can throw management off balance and prepare us for sustained strike action if they are openly and clearly made part of the necessary strike preparation.
Fighting union leaders would build and back such mass action with all the union’s resources, recruiting the best fighters democratically elected by their co-workers, not appointed by the leadership. Workers are justifiably leery of striking, given the Taylor Law and the inevitable injunctions and police measures which Wall Street’s government uses against strike action. But to evade the need to prepare openly for a strike because “the members aren’t ready for it yet,” is condescending, treating the members like children who are afraid of the dark. The sooner the union openly discusses and builds for strike action, the sooner the members will be able to air and deal with their concerns. A union leadership that was serious about fighting would already be explaining how sustained, mass, militant strike action could defend against police attacks and win amnesty from Taylor Law penalties.
The exposure of unsafe natural gas facilities and other dangerous MTA installations could rally the workers who live in the surrounding neighborhoods to support mass actions by TWU members. This kind of mass fight-back would be an example and an inspiration to the rest of the area’s working class and could prepare the way for joint strike action by different unions, as well as by currently non-unionized workers. Rather than allowing the city government and private employers to pick us off one union or one worker at a time, workers need a general strike. Of course, the Democratic and Republican politicians and their flunkies in the labor union bureaucracy would run away screaming from union leaders with enough guts and honesty to openly work toward a general strike. But if leaders of a union with the potential power of the TWU raised the need for a general strike, it would very quickly catch on with hundreds of thousands of workers all over.