Labor Spotlight
Risk-Taking Award suits Toussaint, TWU
Dec 7, 2006 5:28 PM
Last month, the New York-based Jews for Racial and Economic Justice presented their 10th annual Risk-Taking Award to Roger Toussaint, president of Local 100, Transport Workers Union of America, and his members. The award is named after Marshall T. Meyer, a fierce opponent of the junta in Argentina who later served as the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Jeshrun on the West Side of Manhattan. He died in 1993. The award honors those who have taken extraordinary risks in the pursuit of justice.
When Roger Toussaint was being dragged off to a jail cell earlier this year, he said he was bringing several books with him.
Among them, he said, was a biography of the Edinburgh-born labor leader James Connolly, one of the founders of the Irish Transport Workers Union. He was executed — without benefit of a trial — by a British firing squad for his role in the 1916 Irish rebellion. Connolly’s raison d’etre was spelled out in a sentence from one of the many books he wrote: “As long as I live I will have no rest, only working, educating, organizing and fighting to destroy the forces that produce poverty.” Is there any other reason for labor leaders to exist?
“His people founded my union,” Toussaint said.
Toussaint was talking about the Irish immigrants, led by a man from County Kerry, Ireland, with a brogue as thick as an Irish fog, a mind sharper than those of men twice his age and a will that would never be broken. In the late 1920s, Mike Quill and his Irish comrades, fresh from fighting the mighty British Army to a standstill in Ireland, landed in New York. There wasn’t a subway boss, politician or editorial writer who could intimidate them.
They took enormous risks, knowing full well that other attempts to organize New York transit workers had failed and, in one case, the militia was called out and dozens of workers were shot dead in the streets of Brooklyn.
But, tenacious as he was, Quill had help from another tribe who knew a little about oppression and religious persecution.
They were men and women who also had accents that sounded peculiar to the blue bloods of New York.
Quill always gave credit to the thousands of volunteers who helped build the TWU, “some of whom were older Jewish men and women, their Yiddish accents as thick as our brogues.” The Jews and the Irish made a powerful couple, for each saw in the other’s history their own bitter diasporas.
Quill’s lawyer was amannamed Harry Sacher, born in a shtetl in Hungary. One day in court, someone accused Quill of hitting him with a shillelagh. The judge asked an Irish comrade of Quill’s to explain what a shillelagh was, but he stumbled and couldn’t get it right.
Exasperated, the judge asked Sacher to explain this strange-looking stick. After Sacher completed his soliloquy, the judge was amazed. “Only in New York can a Jewish lawyer for an Irish labor leader explain what a shillelagh is.”
Toussaint the historian knows that when the young freedom fighters who were building a nation called Israel looked toNew York for help, they found Quill and his TWU members, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Paul O’Dwyer — whose brother was mayor of New York —helping to organize a Madison Square Garden rally that raised $60,000, much of which went to supply arms to the Irgun.
When black bus drivers for the Fifth Avenue Coach Lines wanted to break the stranglehold of segregation in the 1930s — yes, in our great liberal city, not Montgomery — they asked Quill and his Transport Workers Union for help.
That tradition was continued when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was seeking allies for the cause of civil rights in 1961 and he turned to the TWU. Quill gave $50,000 in cash in a suitcase to a well-known New York singer and asked him to deliver it to Dr. King with simple instructions: There were to be NO questions asked.
The singer was a bag man for freedom.
UFT members, led by Al Shanker, were in Selma, marching with Dr. King — taking the ultimate risk of possible death.
You can imagine how the diehards in Alabama felt about a bunch ofNew York teachers coming down on buses to interfere with their system of injustice — the same way the Argentinean junta felt about Rabbi Meyer.
And when our union needed allies in 1960, Quill and the TWU were there, providing money and bodies to help us win our first contract from a recalcitrant mayor.
When Quill died in 1966, Al Shanker, then the president of the UFT, said, “Nobody can count how much Mike helped organize teachers over the last 15 years. He was the teachers’ teacher.”
Last December, UFT members stood by Toussaint when he was being pilloried in the press; you remember the headlines, with the racial subtext: “THUG,” a word uttered by Mayor Michael Bloomberg — the same man who admitted in his biography to “violating every fire law, building code and union regulation on the books” when he started his business.
“The leadership of the TWU has thuggishly turned their backs on New York City and disgraced the noble concept of public service,” the mayor said. I told Toussaint at the time to remember Quill’s maxim: “I’ll begin to worry when the papers start saying nice things about me.”
While Toussaint was Public Enemy Number One for violating the law, the governor of New York, George Pataki, was in New Hampshire on some whimsical quest for the holy grail of presidential politics; although his sojourn was technically not a violation of the Taylor Law, it should have been. Pataki walked off his job just as the subway and bus workers did.
We knew how important the subway strike was for the labor movement in this town. It was about respect for workers as much as it was about wages and benefits — more than half of Toussaint’s members had been disciplined, many on flimsy charges, by the MTA bean counters. They led the league in U ratings.
UFT members, who are being micromanaged every day and innundated by paperwork, understood the importance of the TWU’s risk-taking last December and we backed it up a few weeks ago whenthe Delegate Assembly authorized a $50,000 contribution to the TWU.
But Toussaint was taking risks long before he ascended tothe presidency of the TWU. As a teenager in Trinidad, he was arrested for printing graffiti on school-room walls: “Free education means free books.”
What teacher can’t love that slogan?
He, along with thousands of other immigrants with the lilting voices of Jamaica and Guyana and Haiti, came to New York for the same reason the Irish and the Jews and millions of others did: to escape economic deprivation andpersecution. Others from Africa were delivered to our shores in chains and it took them hundreds of years to even gain the right to vote.
The immigrants found jobs in the subways, selling tokens, picking up the detritus of our daily lives, trying to drive a bus through Manhattan traffic without hitting cars or pedestrians. You know the slogan at the general post office?“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”? That slogan rings true because TWU members get the postal workers to their appointed rounds.
Risks? Toussaint was a track worker. For those of us on the day shift, we don’t see them too much. They are deep in the subway system, making sure that our ride to work is safe. They show up every night, just inches from 600 volts of third-rail electricity, which can fry them in a few seconds. They are down there with the dampness they can feel in the marrow of their bones, with trains barreling down on them at 50 miles per hour as their lungs fill up with the dust of steel on steel.
Oh, did I mention the rats?
Toussaint and his members also displayed unyielding mettle last year, knowing full well that the wrath of the media, whose owners have broken their own unions, would be heaped on them. In this, they were following the tradition of Rabbi Meyer, when he stood up to the military masters who were abusing civil rights, trashing civil liberties and torturing political prisoners, journalists and labor leaders.
Rabbi Meyer was a menschin every sense of that word. He had no timefor minor distractions. He was leading his life of Tikkun Alom as he protested the death squads and the “disappearance” of political activists. One of those who could not be bullied by the junta, Jacobo Timmerman, even dedicated his book, “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” to Meyer. Timmerman said the rabbi “brought solace to Jewish, Christian and atheist prisoners.”
Offering an award in the name of Marshall Meyer honors all those who take risks, large and small, to make our city a more livable place for all workers. And granting that award to a militant, honest labor leader and his members pays tribute to all those in the labor movement who are fighting for economic justice in the workplace. Marshall Meyer was the best of us, and the committee members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice recognize his courage every year with the award to the risk takers among us.
Jim Callaghan can be reached at JCallaghan@uft.org.
