Twenty years ago today, on the second day of a transit strike that had effectively shut down much of New York City, Roger Toussaint, president of the striking Transport Workers Union Local 100, faced the press in a news conference carried live on all the major local television stations. Earlier that day, the New York Post had put him on its cover behind prison bars, while the Daily News wanted to “throw Roger from the train.” Mayor Michael Bloomberg had denounced transit workers — or at least the union leadership — as thugs.
Yet Toussaint not only seemed unfazed but rose to the occasion. Six years before Occupy Wall Street, and ten years before Bernie Sanders ascended the national stage, Toussaint eloquently, if elliptically, spoke a language of class rarely heard in the mass media. “The notion,” he said,
that it is acceptable to hold cops, teachers, firefighters, DC 37, sanitation, and others without contracts for two to three years is repulsive. Housing costs, the cost of gasoline, the cost of food, doesn’t have the patience that Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg apparently insist that labor unions have. . . . Maybe it is difficult for a billionaire to understand what someone who’s making a few tens of thousands of dollars is going through, and meeting those bills and paying for your children to go to school.
Then he gave a stirring defense of his own members:
We believe that working people in New York can better identify with transit workers and know instinctively that the thugs are not on this side of the podium. We are not thugs, we are not selfish, we are not greedy; we are hardworking New Yorkers, dignified men and women, who have put in decades of service to keep this city moving 24/7. We wake up at 3 and 4 in the morning to move trains and buses in this town, and we will continue to do that.
In the full glare of the spotlight, Toussaint articulated an alternative to neoliberalism and austerity. Yet just a day later, Toussaint urged his…
Auteur: Marc Kagan
