reality-based educator

Having just watched the United Federation of Teachers and it's "preznit" Randi Weingarten sell my union down the river in contract negotiations with the city, I am heartened by the aggressive tactics of the TWU. Here's a fine piece from Ray Sanchez of Newsday on the looming strike:

A quarter century ago, on April Fools' Day, the nation's largest bus and subway system screeched to a halt.

Thousands of subway station entrances were roped off during an illegal strike. Operators finished their runs, discharged stragglers and delivered more than 6,400 littered subway cars back to train yards. Depots throughout the city filled with 4,550 dark, empty buses. As Ed Koch, then mayor, put it, the unthinkable had happened.

...

Over the weekend, thousands of Transport Workers Union Local 100 members voted to authorize union leaders to strike Friday if no agreement is reached on a new contract. The union represents nearly 34,000 bus and subway workers, whose last strike was in 1980.

The expected vote came days after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which blames health and pension costs for a nearly $1 billion deficit projected for 2009, proposed to have new employees wait until age 62 to qualify for a full pension. Current workers get one at 55.

...

The MTA also wants new employees to pay 2 percent of their wages toward health premiums, and for current workers to pay higher co-payments for doctors' visits and prescription drugs.

Larry Hanley, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents about 4,000 MTA workers, said the authority's current demands for new employees could lead to another walkout. Hanley was a newly hired bus driver in 1978, when he said he earned a dollar an hour less than workers hired for the same job under the previous contract.

"If it doesn't create a strike now, it certainly would in the future," said Hanley of the MTA's demands for new hires. "You will have new hires coming on that are just going to hate the union and the company. It could explode."

Another important factor in the current talks is workers' lack of trust in the authority, where disciplinary rules have been described as petty and punitive.

"I used to tell people at the Transit Authority, I remember when this was a bus company," said Hanley, another 1980 strike survivor. "Now it's a paper factory. People weren't getting written up and disciplined the way they are now."

The workforce enjoyed a different relationship with management before and during the last strike.

"There was some level of respect by management for the union and for the workers," Hanley said. "Now it's run like a military state. There is absolutely no compassion."

Joshua Freeman, a labor historian at the City University of New York, said MTA giveback demands plus the union's militant history couple to make a strike a real possibility.

"The very nature of brinkmanship is sometimes you fall off the edge, even if you don't flinch," he said. "But this is not late in the game by standards of these negotiations, which tend to always be resolved at the very last minute."

Basil Patterson, a TWU negotiator in the 2002 contract, said the state's Taylor Law, which bars public employees from striking, would not stop a walkout.

"There's a very ugly mood among the workers," he said. "They're infuriated by the management offer. You can push workers to the point where they say, 'The hell with it' -- that's what you have to worry about."

When bus and subway workers shut down the system for 11 days in 1980, they suffered huge financial penalties. The union was fined $1 million. Each union member had to pay two days' salary for every day on strike, erasing some of the gains they had won in the new contract.

"Workers didn't know the Taylor Law was as bad as it was," McAnanama said. "It hurt when they took out the fines. After the strike, most bosses threw us a little overtime here and there. They didn't want a disgruntled workforce."

With days to the contract deadline, management is dealing with exactly that -- a disgruntled workforce.

As a New York City schoolteacher, I know what it's like to be a member of a disgruntled workforce.

The only difference between the teachers and the subway workers is that teachers are a bunch of sheep who are afraid to stand up for their labor rights or fight for a fair contract. So instead of pushing the mayor, the UFT conceded 50 years of hard-won rights for a bullshit raise that we still actually haven't been paid yet.

I wish my union membership was as tough in negotiations as the TWU has been. I know that the TWU leadership was ready to sell out the membership, but the rank and file made it clear they would not accept a bad contract. So the leadership went back to the table instead of settling for less.

This is what the teachers should have done. We should have told Randi Weingarten and the rest of her UNITY hacks we would not be sold down the river. But instead, like the sheep we are, we allowed our union leadership to be taken to the cleaners by the mayor and we conceded 50 years of hard-won rights for 14%.

Shame on Randi, shame on UNITY, shame on the UFT membership.

And good luck to the TWU.