Toussaint Pressured on Both Sides

The man who was the driving force behind the last transit strike more than 25 years ago said last week that he believed Transport Workers' Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint had no choice, from a political standpoint, but to have members walk off the job.

The Chief-Leader/Adrienne Haywood-James PASSED THIS WAY BEFORE: Arnold Cherry, a former Transport Workers' Union Local 100 official who played a key role in sparking the 11day transit strike in 1980, said Local 100 President Roger Toussaint had no choice but to call a walkout last week when Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials refused to shelve a demand that future employees receive an inferior pension benefit. Arnold Cherry, the shop steward who led the opposing faction to Local 100 President John E. Lawe at the time of the 1980 strike, said Mr. Toussaint was under additional pressure from both his members and his board because of anger that, shortly after the last union contract was settled in 2002, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials announced a previously undisclosed budget surplus.

No Alternative

"I think he could not have done anything else," Mr. Cherry said during a phone interview Dec. 21, the second day of the strike. "He got his pocket picked in the last negotiation and he came in as a militant."

Mr. Cherry was also critical of International TWU President Michael O'Brien's opposition to the walkout. Mr. O'Brien asked a judge in Brooklyn to exempt the international from Taylor Law penalties because it had no control over Mr. Toussaint, and issued an advisory to Local 100 members shortly after the strike began to return to their jobs and have the union go back to bargaining.

"The International is now actually scabbin' [his] strike, and that weakens the union and Roger's position," Mr. Cherry said.

He also contended that Mr. O'Brien was taking direction from the man who groomed him for the job, Sonny Hall, even though Mr. Hall retired as International TWU president more than a year ago. "Sonny is still involved," Mr. Cherry contended. "He shouldn't be, but there he is."

Mr. Hall declined comment on those assertions, which were supported by another retired union official, Mel Levy, who dealt with Mr. Hall extensively while he was president of the New York City Transit chapter of the Civil Service Technical Guild. In a letter to this newspaper a month ago, Mr. Hall denounced a Local 100 official's claim that he was still meddling in union affairs as "political b.s."

The unusual opposition by an international union to its flagship local's walkout, Mr. Cherry said, had the effect of diminishing the degree to which other unions rallied around Local 100. "Some of that support is going to start backing away," he predicted prior to the agreement the following day under which the strike was ended while the parties resumed talks. "I think other labor leaders like Brian McLaughlin are going to decide [that] if the international is not backing him, how far should we go?"

That analysis, however, was disputed by one prominent labor leader, who spoke on condition that he not be identified.

Unions Feared Precedent

"The public-employee unions wanted to give Roger a lot of support for a variety of reasons," he said, foremost among them being a concern that if Local 100 was forced to accept an inferior pension for future members, both Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg would find it easier to make their unions fall into line.

He said it was well-known that there had long been tension between Local 100 and its international, and that other labor leaders understood both that dynamic and "the need by the international not to be culpable in the way of Taylor Law fines."

Mr. Cherry surmised that Mr. Toussaint had resisted the pre-strike call by the MTA's chief negotiator, Gary J. Dellaverson, to accept binding arbitration because he wanted full control over a process that could determine his future at Local 100's helm.

"If he had gone to arbitration and lost, his career would be over," Mr. Cherry said.

Small Window of Leverage

Local 100, which under a prior administration in which Mr. Cherry served as the vice president for Car Equipment had gotten its contract's duration extended so that it expired on Dec. 15, has used that date to gain leverage in wage talks, since a walkout severely affects businesses that depend on holiday shoppers.

Mr. Cherry argued, however, that the leverage had a double edge: if a strike could not be won quickly, the union and its president risked permanently antagonizing New Yorkers. He actually predicted, a day before the decision to return to bargaining was actually made, that Mr. Toussaint would look to resume talks on Dec. 22.

"I think no one wants to look like Scrooge," Mr. Cherry explained. "If this strike goes through Christmas, I think history will not be good to him."

Anatomy of 1980 Strike

The 1980 strike is generally regarded as a low point for Local 100, which was fined $1 million and lost its right to dues checkoff. The union eventually made a successful appeal to the judge who had ended the automatic deduction of dues from employee paychecks, claiming that collections fell off so sharply when union officials went directly to the members for dues payments that Local 100 was facing bankruptcy. Mr. Cherry contended that dues payments actually fell off by only about 6 percent, and that whatever money individual members lost when 22 days' pay was deducted for their 11 days on strike, they eventually made up for it because the MTA slightly improved its wage package from the pre-strike offering.

During the 1980 talks, the opposing faction of Local 100 took a more militant position than the late Mr. Lawe, and a contract meeting called by the dissidents at a transit hall on Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn attracted 500 members, Mr. Cherry said.

Wanted '10 and 10'

"We were demanding 30 percent," he recalled, "but on the night of the strike we would have settled for 10 and 10." The MTA's offer as the 12:01 a.m. April 1 deadline approached was several points below that, and it wasn't until roughly the same time that the Local 100 board voted to strike that MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch, on the advice of mediator Walter Gellhorn, increased the package an hour after the deadline to include two 8-percent hikes.

The post-strike contract provided wage hikes of 9 and 8 percent, plus a cost-ofliving adjustment - a common feature of wage deals in those years of high inflation - estimated to be about 3.7 percent.

That package was also voted against by Mr. Cherry's faction, resulting in a 22-22 vote by the Local 100 board, but Mr. Lawe essentially declared that a tie was enough to signify ratification.

Today Mr. Cherry maintains of that deal, "Even if you deduct the Taylor Law fines, that was still the best transit contract."

Became an Insider

Over the next couple of decades, he underwent a transformation from opposition firebrand to union insider, although he said Mr. Hall was careful not to allow him to gain too much power within Local 100. During Mr. Hall's last few years as president of Local 100 before moving upstairs to run the International TWU, Mr. Cherry served as his director of grievances and arbitration. He became a union vice president for Car Equipment in 1996, and lost a re-election bid in 2000, the year Mr. Toussaint came to power.

He said the Local 100 leader made the right decision in agreeing to send his members back to work while a second try was made at reaching a deal before escalating fines jeopardized the union's stability and public sentiment turned further against the union.

"It's one thing to stand up and be tough," Mr. Cherry said. "It's another thing when reality hits you in the face."