In response to the December strike, the Republican mayor and governor screamed threats and abuse at transit workers. But it has been left up to Democratic Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Judge Theodore Jones of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn to join with the MTA in seeking to harshly punish the union and its individual members.
As a reward for his handling of the transit strike case, Judge Jones was appointed an Administrative Judge. He had been elected to office as the joint candidate of the Democratic, Republican, Conservative and Working Families Parties. The latter pretends to be a pro-worker party but is in reality the left arm of the Democrats. Its supporters, among whom are prominent union leaders and “socialists,” can be proud of the new eminence of their candidate in serving the ruling class so devotedly.
Jones recently handed down his decisions on charges initiated against the union and its leaders by Spitzer and the MTA. Most significantly, he hit the local with $2.5 million in fines (half a million less than Spitzer was demanding) under the Taylor Law, and decided in favor of suspending indefinitely the union’s right to automatic dues checkoff. Jones also fined Toussaint $1,000 and sentenced him to ten days in jail.
The union should refuse to pay a cent of these fines and rally the entire New York area union movement in a struggle to defeat them. The right to strike is a basic democratic right that is essential for workers to combat the capitalists’ monopoly of economic power. (Automatic dues checkoff is a method the union bureaucracy uses to collect dues without having to face the ranks and be accountable to them. Revolutionaries prefer that union officials collect dues directly from the members. But we also oppose the state’s attempts to dictate union affairs and to cripple the union’s finances.)
The Toussaint leadership of Local 100 and the rest of the trade union bureaucracy have offered no serious opposition to these judicial attacks. When he called the strike, Toussaint explicitly told workers that they would have to pay Taylor Law penalties. He never demanded amnesty from the state’s anti-strike legislation -- as Local 100’s leader Mike Quill had done in the 1966 strike, and won!
Many of the city’s union leaders have condemned the Taylor Law penalties, but none are calling for abolishing the law. At best they favor reforms that would also punish governments for “bad faith bargaining” with municipal unions. This is because the labor bureaucrats themselves use the Taylor Law as a way of preventing strikes and keeping rank- and-file militancy in check; they just want a little more leverage in negotiations with management. Indeed, Toussaint has accepted the fines in principle and only complained that they are “excessive” and that management wasn’t also fined for provoking the strike. He has also announced that he will not challenge his jail sentence: this is almost certainly because he hopes a little martyrdom will revive his reputation and help him get re-elected.
The city’s Central Labor Council, which scandalously refused to mobilize workers in support of the transit strike when it was happening, called an official labor rally to protest Toussaint’s imprisonment. But their intent was to provide a publicity stunt for Toussaint on the day he goes to jail rather than an act of struggle.
Workers must not forget that it is Democratic politicians and judges who are inflicting punishment on the transit workers for striking. These latest injustices are minor crimes compared to the Democrats’ long history of anti-working class and racist attacks at home and imperialist war-mongering abroad. Like the Republicans, the Democrats are dedicated enemies of the working class. The decades of unions promoting Democrats as “friends of labor” and showering funds on their campaigns must come to an end.