The strike is over, though apparently the negotiations aren't. In the coming days and weeks we will see whether TWU President Roger Toussaint's decision to end the strike was based on assurances of any worth. Whether this strike will be remembered as a great victory or another in a long series of betrayals will not be known until a final contract is agreed on.
An excellent (and unabashedly anti-capitalist) article on the strike by Jed Brandt can be found here at the "webzine" run by Monthly Review.
It was just last week, at a party in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, when I railed drunk that the chance of a strike was "zero." I ranted about the sell-out union leaderships and their habits of business unionism. I joked about Transit Workers Union Local 100 leader Roger Toussaint and the sorry path that even earnest militants take after getting digested by the labor bureaucracy. Decades of defeat have created a healthy cynicism about the leadership of a union movement that doesn't move and the dominant model of reducing workers' struggles to only the nickels and dimes of contract bargaining.
more beneath the fold ...
Let me eat my shoe in shame. I was wrong -- there is a line the transit workers won't cross. The workers of Local 100 refused to back down. They are courageously facing New York's draconian Taylor Law that makes any strike by public-sector workers illegal. Fines of $1 million a day are being levied against Local 100; the strike leadership are facing jail; and the membership are threatened with $25,000-a-day fines (yet to be levied). The TWU's international leader Mike O'Brien tried to sabotage the strike. He was duly ignored. Local 100 is standing firm against a two-tier system for pensions and health care that will rob future generations of not just a living wage but the power of class organization. They are striking over the right to strike. This is not just about those nickels and dimes.
Brandt makes the case for the special character of local 100 within the U.S. labor movement.
Local 100 is among the most proletarian of major unions in the country. The majority of workers are from oppressed nationalities, do not tend to have higher education, and have earned a bottom-line standard of living through decades of militant struggle. Local 100 has long demonstrated its ability to shut the world's most powerful city down through strike action. This is why its members are feared and disrespected. 16,000 citations are issued to workers a year for infractions of all kinds. This is harassment. The issue of respect on the job is a huge part of the conflict that few are discussing. Strikes are about seizing dignity.
Support and opposition neatly break down along race and class lines, with the Sex in the City crowd appalled at their inconveniences, the tabloids howling bloody murder, and the working people -- especially working people of color -- of the city overwhelmingly of the sentiment that "this is our strike."
He then cites the race breakdown of the WNBC and Marist polls measuring support/opposition to the strike among New Yorkers. While only 23% of White New Yorkers supported the TWUs decision to go on strike, 61% of Black New Yorkers did. (For those who doubted the racial dimension of this strike I bhelieve thats a bigger opinion divide than we saw over the the OJ verdict.)
While most Kossacks seem to have supported the strike, a vocal minority opposed it (though it should be noted that some opponents to their credit modified their views in the course of the thing). Now that the strike itself is over I think it is worth reflecting on the basis of this division. Brandt's article is a good place to start the discussion.
In the arguments here there were a lot of claims made about who did and who didn't support the strike, with everybody wanting to speak for poor and working class New Yorkers. None of us had more than anecdotal evidence for our beliefs, but the polling data now seems to lend solid support to the claims that this strike enjoyed the support of New York's largely non-white working class.
Of course both support for and opposition to the strike crossed race and class lines, but the sharp racial (and presumably class) divide should cause us to think about what it all means.
There is a lot of lamenting here at Kos over the persistent failure of the Democratic Party leadership to take courageous stands on the issues that matter to most of us. I would suggest the following: that the apparent confusion and incoherence on the part of Dems has its roots in the simple fact that the leadership of the party is in the hands of one class while the rank and file of the party is drawn overewhelmingly from another, the working class (even if many confusedly identify as "middle class"). Of course there are class differences between the leadership and rank and file of the Republican Party as well. But poor and working class Republicans have accepted the whole racist and anti-working class ideological outlook promoted by their leaders. The rank and file of the Democratic Party, by contrast, imagine their party as the representative of the poor, the workers and the oppressed in general, even if in practice it is anything but.
Nothing reveals the inadequacy of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for social justice quite like some honest-to-god class struggle in the form of a strike. Elliot Spitzer, whom many here revere, dutifully fulfilled his obligations to the rich and powerful by initiating legal action against the TWU. And "Bloomberg Democrats" here and elsewhere repeated all the anti-labor talking points on cue, including the worst divide-and-rule crap about how the strike was "hurting the poor most of all" (when it seems that the poor were overwhelmingly in support of the strike).