12-23-05, 9:09 am

A student of mine from a working class background came and asked me about the media coverage of the Transit strike and Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki’s attacks on labor. Basically he was shocked that they were trying to set the 'poor against the workers' (his words) and thought that they, the politicians and the media, 'must be living on another planet.' Everyone he knows, including his family, thinks that the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) should just settle with the workers and 'pay them their money' regardless of what Bloomberg and the media were saying.

I told him that he shouldn’t be so surprised. First of all, this is a classic tactic, portraying unions as 'selfish,' 'greedy,' and led by 'labor bosses' who are the real enemies of the poor. Of course the salaries, stock options, and other 'compensation' of the corporate executives and the enormous profits that MTA, a regional 'public corporation' which functions as cavalierly as any private enterprise, accrues isn’t really mentioned when strikes take place, except by labor.

The more 'sophisticated' version of this anti-labor view is the so-called wages push theory, which blames unions for pushing up the cost of products and services to consumers, regardless of the facts that workers wages and benefits often stagnate and decline when prices raise and vice versa. When the last great New York transportation strike took place, the media tried to make union leader Mike Quill into a buffoon (he turned that around, using his Irish brogue and deliberate mispronunciation of Mayor Lindsey’s name to very good effect) and proclaimed that the then fifteen cent fare was in danger.

Today, the MTA can’t seriously make such an argument, because transit fares have risen to two dollars a ride (with various 'metro card' discount plans) without workers making any significant gains.

So, Mayor Bloomberg, a very big businessman who is used to buying things, including endorsements from some prominent Democrats and even in the last election a few labor leaders, refers to strikers and their union as 'thugs.' Although Bloomberg has found it useful to purchase an image as a 'moderate liberal' and 'former' Democrat (in New York supporting the Democrats was traditionally good business), his deep class contempt for working people is clear to anyone listening to him. When Bloomberg says, 'this has to end and end now' with the look a drill Sergeant, one should understand where he is coming from. It is hard for a man used to giving orders to people who fawn over him because of his money to accept the inconvenience of a Transit Strike. Also, Bloomberg probably looks at labor questions the way a much richer and more interesting member of his class, Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest men, looks at the class struggle. When asked if the class struggle existed, Buffet said that it was over and 'My class won.'

Although that isn’t of course true, mass media isn’t as honest in expressing its class position as Buffet. In the press and on TV, the transit workers are accused of being 'fat cats' with better benefits than other city workers, which from my readings is factually untrue.

The fact that large numbers of New Yorkers do not have the health care benefits or 'defined benefit' pension program that city employees have is in effect held against them. Instead of saying that every worker should have decent health care and pension benefits, a Mayor with the money to purchase city blocks and politicians who receive generous pensions for serving terms in office are name-calling a union with a long and distinguished tradition in New York. And blaming the TWU for the fact that low income workers are having getting to work for their low incomes instead of working to develop affordable housing and improved social benefits that would enhance the quality of low income workers lives. I told my student that labor law for both public and private employees in the United States, while it is not great in any capitalist country, is especially bad. When I mentioned that leaders of public employee unions are routinely sent to prison for defying anti-strike injunctions, he was really surprised. What about democratic rights? Mayor Bloomberg and the business leaders talk about 'democracy' pretty much the way the Bush administration does, that is, it is something smugly assumed to exist in the United States as a set of fixed but conveniently undefined institutions. Politicians also mention it mostly when dealing with foreign countries in a self-righteous way.

As I am writing this article, the radio has just announced that transit workers will go back to work and work without a contract while negotiations continue. This is not yet a victory for workers, who are fighting in New York a defensive battle to sustain pension rights for future generations of transit workers, not to create a two class system for older and newer workers which employers having been ramming down workers throats since the Reagan years. If Bloomberg can successfully force the TWU, a public employee union with greater strategic strike power than most unions, to retreat on pensions and eventually accept a 'defined contribution' public pension program, he will no doubt seek to impose that on police, firefighters, school teachers, and all clerical and sanitation employees and other public employees in New York City.

This will make him a hero to Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal, and might even encourage Rupert Murdoch to support him for the Republican nomination for president in 2008 over George Pataki. But it will further the deterioration of the quality of life for those New Yorkers who maintain the city’s infrastructure. For that reason, all pressure that activists and the larger labor movement can muster should be put on the MTA, Bloomberg, and Pataki to stop their raid on TWU members’ pension rights during the period in which negotiations continue.

The founder of the TWU, Mike Quill, who led a union built by a leadership cadre of CPUSA members and former Irish Republican Army fighters in the post WWI era, once said, after being called before a red-baiting committee of the New York State legislature, 'I would rather be called a Red by the Rats than a Rat by the Reds.' Today, Roger Toussaint and the TWU members are being called 'thugs' by the Rats (in a metaphorical sense) who hire thugs to break strikes and when they can’t get away with that, use injunctions while a pliant media runs interference for them by weeping for low income bus and subway riders.

New York is still a labor town, regardless of a formerly slick Republican Mayor who used both his own wealth and the division and inertia of the Democrats to buy eight years in City Hall for himself. The TWU can win and must win if we are to turn back the 'race to the bottom' which has seen the real wages and social benefits of both private and public sector workers stagnate and decline at the hands of corporate leaders and their political servants, for whom any union anywhere that is not a company union is composed of 'thugs.'



--Norman Markowitz teaches in New Jersey and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.