I write as the principal leader of the December 2005 New York City transit strike. Twenty years ago, Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 conducted a once-in-a-generation battle against the oligarchs of New York City and state by shutting down all mass transportation in NYC. Twenty years later, the legacy of that strike remains contested — not only by predictable opponents but also by some who present themselves as allies of labor and social justice.
In my view, part of the reason for this is a discomfort with leadership that thinks and operates differently from the inherited habits of an old guard on the Left. Habits that just were not measuring up to the challenges at hand.
The stands we took not only worked on their own terms; they helped shape the terrain for later confrontations, from the public sector uprising in Wisconsin, to Occupy Wall Street, to the Black Lives Matter movement, to the Chicago teachers’ strike, and even Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory. So too, navigating the obstacles posed by inherited habits also continues as a serious challenge.
However, Marc Kagan’s recent Jacobin piece argues that the December 2005 NYC transit strike left a “lasting scar” on the labor movement.
A central difficulty in Kagan’s approach is how he assigns responsibility for TWU Local 100’s post-2009 decline. Through a series of interpretive moves, he attributes much of what occurred after my departure in 2009 either to the period following the 2005 strike, or to events predating the strike, including the period after his own dismissal from TWU Local 100 in February 2003. That dismissal followed serious conflicts with the Executive Board and allegations of misconduct — a salient piece of information that does not appear in his account. Whatever one makes of this history, its omission matters, as it bears on the posture of his analysis.
First and foremost, the December 2005 NYC transit strike was a success. We walked out to prevent an…
Auteur: Roger Toussaint
