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Transit Workers to Toussaint: We’re with You—to Jail and Beyond |
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Members of the Transport Workers (TWU) are making sure TWU Local 100 President Roger Toussaint knows they support him during his 10-day prison sentence in New York’s Tombs prison—and some plan to remain with him until he’s released.
Following a massive rally on Monday, with thousands of cheering supporters lining the way, local and state union members marched with Toussaint across the Brooklyn Bridge to The Tombs, where he began his sentence for leading his union on a strike in December.
Striking is illegal in New York State if you’re a public employee and Toussaint’s 33,000-member local represents subway and bus workers at the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).
Union members have set up tents outside The Tombs, and plan to stay around the clock, with members of different divisions, such as car equipment or track workers, scheduled to rally outside the Bernard B. Kerik Complex correctional center on White Street.
Speaking to Newsday, union member John Wilson, a subway track worker for the past 21 years, shared why he was willing to pull the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift:
He’s going to jail for us and I think the symbolism is he’s not doing this alone.
Union members aren’t the only ones supporting Toussaint, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, who settled in Brooklyn when he was 18 and was hired by the MTA as a cleaner in 1984. Recent polls found New Yorkers sympathize with Toussaint, according to The Christian Science Monitor.
Support for Toussaint also indicates backing for one of the union’s main goals in the December strike: ensuring affordable health care and retirement. As health care costs have spiraled upward, private-sector employers have increasingly cut benefits and required workers to pay more for them. Firms also are shifting from providing traditional defined pension benefits provided by the companies to 401(k) and other cash programs to which workers contribute.
Speaking last week at a Howard University-DC Economics Club Forum, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney stated his support for the union’s action.
Our movement is also under constant attack from greedy corporations….One of those attacks took place when members of Local 100 of the Transport Workers had to go out on strike in New York, forced there by an employer that had plenty of money to meet their reasonable demands.
As Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center, told The Christian Science Monitor:
This has become an increasingly major issue because it’s difficult to protect these benefits in the private sector and the public sector without increasing contributions and co-pays, and that’s an underlying issue in this fight.
Following last December’s brief walkout, Local 100 and the MTA reached a contract agreement that was defeated by just a seven-vote margin. After the ratification failure, the MTA urged the union to take a revote. But after Gov. George Pataki criticized the agreement for being too generous to the workers, the MTA backed away from a revote and now calls for binding arbitration to settle the dispute.
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