For More Risk-Taking
An excerpt from Take Back the Power
Take Back the Power: The Fall and Rise and Fall of NYC’s Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975-2009 is available for free download here.
You can help support “Open Access” to this book by making a donation here.
Next week I think it is likely that I will be writing about Zohran Mamdani’s first few days in office. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from my book.
Dilemma: Risk, or Is Another World Possible?
In the early morning hours of December 16, 2002, Roger Toussaint decided not to strike despite a high state of union readiness, a first-year wage freeze that demoralized his most militant members (and mediocre increases in the following years), and a reorganization of the bus departments opposed by his own officers. Toussaint assessed that the costs of a strike were too high for its potential benefits. Health benefits had been preserved. It was thought (erroneously, but not without cause) that progress had been made on excessive discipline, and a host of smaller demands had also been won. The threat of Taylor Law fines loomed; so did, more ominously if ambiguously, Patriot Act penal- ties against any strike, while the hum of 9/11 remained background noise. And perhaps the union membership was not fully and completely prepared for a strike. Explaining disappointing wage numbers to members, Toussaint pointed to 2005, when, he said, political circumstances would be more favorable, the officer corps stronger, and more battles unfolded to give more members the experience of a successful fight. There were good reasons to avoid risk and wait until a more propitious time; there almost always are.
In retrospect, though, the union, fearful of the risks of striking, lost its best opportunity to gain a decisive victory and change the ground rules of TWU-Transit relations. Momentum was lost, workers demobilized. Transit soon returned to the offensive.
Three years later, it was Transit, not the union, that called the strike. Lacking unity and any pivotal demand that might galvanize the membership, Local 100 was undoubtedly less prepared for a walkout than in 2002, and it is unlikely it anticipated one. With Toussaint warning his members that “storybook endings are far and few between,” Transit pressed for a substantial concession on pensions. To Transit’s surprise, the union did strike. It underestimated the visceral experiences of the union’s Executive Board members, the majority of whom had chafed at the lost chance in 2002 and had themselves suffered as the unborn after the pension changes in the 1970s. Personal considerations surely came into play too: how could Toussaint – touted as a fierce militant – be responsible for a groundbreaking concession?
Yet Toussaint managed the strike defensively, minimizing its length and risk – but also potential reward – to the union. To facilitate a later declaration of “victory,” the union never enunciated an offensive demand. The strike’s start date virtually precluded an extended walkout; that meant Toussaint had to accept concessions, then withhold the news about them to ensure approval to end the strike. In the end, those calculations, the determination to avoid the risk of a longer strike with offensive goals, cost the union plenty in the years thereafter – far more than its leadership had anticipated – exacerbating the fall of Local 100, and poisoning a whole new generation of transit workers on their most potent weapon.
Whether or not those particular set of judgments were ill-conceived, union leaders, with few exceptions over the past decades, have opted for the certainty of slowly dwindling power over risk and potential reward. They seek to resolve conflicts rather than win them, and to avoid tests of power. They have trained themselves out of the boldness many of their organizations once possessed. They have embraced a culture of safety, passivity and defensiveness. They prioritize the longevity of their institutions over their accomplishments, and nurture like-minded successors. In so doing, they have foregone not just the possibility of better wages and benefits but the possibilities of empowering workers, encouraging them to take initiative, seize hold of responsibility, try to become agents of their own destiny.
New York’s public employees should be grateful that Local 100 has three times in the last 60 years chosen a riskier path, defying legal constraints. In 1966, it laid the groundwork for half a decade of wage and benefit advances by all municipal workers. In 1980, 23 brave workers, almost by happenstance elected to the union’s Executive Board, stuck together in the face of tremendous pressure, including from their own union leadership, and played a part in ending the severest austerity of the fiscal crisis period. In 2005, the Local fended off a demand for a worse pension plan that likely would have spread statewide.
Yet the nature of the 2005 strike, and the one that did not occur in 2002, also remind us that unions need to be more willing to take risks to win, as well as to avoid loss, if they want to break the curve of decline.
Of course, it is impossible to replay history as though it were a computer game. We cannot see what would happen if the New Directions officers, fresh at the union hall on January 1, 2001, full of exuberance and an awareness of workplace indignities, had gone out into the field and, in a persistent and disciplined manner, created unrest and organized fights, disregarding the Taylor Law and the web of rules, and rejecting the routine accommodations with management. Would it have turned into the sort of magical whirlwind that sometimes happens, calling forth forces seething with anger at Transit, or led to amateurish disasters? Similarly, we can only speculate as to whether 2002 or 2005 might have had a happier ending had the union opted for a more militant, riskier, course.
What we can see, though, is how the implicit hierarchy of New Direction and the explicit one of the union hall, the lack of participatory democracy and voice, the failure to cultivate shop-floor militancy to fight management control of production, and the aversion toward risk-taking and a long-term vision of union-building, all tugged in one direction. The inability to recognize these choices as choices, and assess their import, made the drift into them more certain. Combined, they shattered dreams of transformation of the union, its members, and the workplace.
What we can see, too, if we look, is that where activism and militancy were tried, where the army and the democratic town meeting were synthesized, it often worked. Walter Humphrey’s 207th St. committee running a shop for years on workers’ terms; Arthur Goldberg’s structure maintainers boycotting, and stopping, a bad pick; George McAnanama’s gang refusing to work on the Manhattan Bridge in high winds; Tom Doherty’s shop winning back their coffee break; trackworkers defying management and the police to stop work at Bay 50th; train operators slowing down the whole system; all those buses piled up across the Broadway Bridge outside the Kingsbridge bus depot to “fuck with management.” And countless other fights – where transit workers said, enough! – that just have no chronicler.
Workers can fight and win; not always, but often – often enough to try more, so they, and their unions, can rise more and fall less. Workers and their unions need to plan, and plan far down the road. Workers and their unions need to talk and debate among themselves, to develop theories of what they are trying to do, and trying to win, and why, and promulgate them across job titles and work locations. Workers and their unions need to be unafraid to take measured risks. Workers and their unions need to break down hierarchies and division among workers and between officers and members, and build unity and solidarity. Workers and their unions need to act at the point of production, and do it again and again, learning, getting good at it, teaching management some fear. Workers and their unions need to imagine the other world that is possible.
I’m working on a syllabus for a DSA reading group on Take Back the Power. Here are some “guiding questions” for Chapters 1 & 2:
· What are the three different theories of labor’s decline? What personal contemporaneous experience or knowledge do you have of any of these theories, in practice?
· From this early introduction to New Directions, what seems most interesting, or most relevant to socialists and other labor activists in 2026?
· Why did it matter that TWU Local 100 was an extraordinarily heterogeneous union, as opposed to a homogenous one? Can we make initial assessments of the internal and external benefits and costs of wall-to-wall unions, as opposed to craft ones?
· What was the short and long-term significance of municipalization of the transit system for Local 100?
· How should transit workers, and other municipal workers, think about the causes and effects of the 1966 transit strike?
· What should we make of the legislation that the unions pressed for, and the one they opposed (pp. 63-64)?
Here are two supplementary readings for those two chapters:
Christian Lévesque and Gregor Murray, “Understanding Union Power: Resources and Capabilities for Renewing Union Capacity” develops in more depth different factors leading to union power or decline.
Joshua Freeman, In Transit, Chapter Six, “The Fruits of Victory,” for Local 100 at the height of its power and momentum; Chapter Fourteen, “The New Order” for the union in decline in the 1950s.