THE WORLD V. MR. TOUSSAINT

Razzle Dazzle

The World v. Mr. Toussaint

By RICHARD STEIER

"Sobering" was the word Roger Toussaint used Jan. 24 in discussing the vote four days earlier by Transport Workers' Union Local 100 members rejecting the contract he brought back to them after a three-day strike. "Just thinking through the impact of the vote, the perceptions of the membership, where we are in the labor movement."

The weekend that followed must have been a brutal one, even if he hadn't read the Post editorial about him that began "What a jerk," or the pronouncement by Baruch College political analyst Doug Muzzio that Mr. Toussaint had "lost control of his union. This is not a slap on the wrist. It's a punch in the face." Mr. Toussaint is not given to public displays of anguish, however - certainly not in front of reporters. And the humiliation implicit in having members reject - even if by just seven votes - the contract he presented them as the just reward of standing up by walking out did not change him in that regard.

Surrounded by Alligators

"I think as time has elapsed, I'm in a more comfortable place mentally," he said during a 90-minute interview in his office at Local 100. "My Monday was better than my Saturday and Sunday. My Tuesday was better than my Monday."

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow HAND FORCED FROM WITHIN? Transport Workers' Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint said that while his rejected contract wasn't perfect, he lost some of his negotiating leverage when the International TWU and its allies on his executive board urged members to return to work and seek to vote on management's final pre-strike offer. 'Knowing they were scabbing the strike at the international and there was an attempt from within to collapse the strike, I had to get members out of harm's way' by ending the walkout and resuming bargaining, he contended. Even so, to paraphrase the last Local 100 President to lead a strike, the late John Lawe, Mr. Toussaint was still up to his ears in alligators with no clear path to safety. Since the pact's defeat he had sought to deflect responsibility for the rejection in the direction of Governor Pataki, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Labor Relations Director Gary Dellaverson, his media critics and the dissidents within Local 100, all of whom he accused of either bad faith or collaborating in a disinformation campaign that minimized the gains that the terms provided.

He even argued that some of the 11,000 union members who didn't vote on the contract may have believed their nonparticipation would count in favor of the deal, citing a practice he said was employed by Local 100 until the ratification vote following the 1980 strike. (Arnold Cherry, a driving force behind the 1980 walkout, said Mr. Toussaint had bought into an urban legend that many transit workers of that era believed. "It was an impression of the membership but it wasn't actual," he said, explaining that sizable votes in favor of the contracts of that era resulted from Local 100 presidents turning out big margins from their stronghold in the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority.)

The Local 100 leader's rationales obscured one potentially ominous sign for Mr. Toussaint's political future: his members did not have enough confidence in his judgment to ignore the chatter from all sides against the contract and take him on faith when he told them it was a good deal.

"The contract was a successful conclusion of the strike," Mr. Toussaint insisted. "Even with the concession [members having to pay 1.5 percent of their health premiums], there was enough to construct a contract settlement and get our troops out of harm's way."

Noel Acevedo, a former ally who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Toussaint's reelection in 2003, disagreed, saying the health premium contribution would have established "a precedent that we don't want for the current workers. And the fact that we went on strike raised people's expectations" about how good the contract terms should be.

Delay Let Opposition Mobilize

By one account, during the last two weeks of the ratification process, Mr. Toussaint was putting in 16-hour days traveling to work sites to preach the deal's virtues. Even with that schedule, which he adhered to on weekends as well, he couldn't get to every site by himself, or answer questions that cropped up after his visits when union dissidents picked at key provisions of the agreement.

"He had lots of bodies out there against him, and his own staff didn't have enough information to answer some of the questions about the contract," one union official said. That was where Mr. Toussaint's fractious relations with one-time allies wound up costing him: activists who three years earlier could have been counted on to help sell the deal, using both their knowledge of its details and their influence within their shops, too often this time were leading the opposition. And by stretching out the vote so that it was concluded more than three weeks after the deal was reached, he allowed his enemies ample time to mobilize against it.

One example cited by several past and present union officials of a former supporter haunting him was John Samuelsen, an activist in the Track Division who had been the Local 100 acting vice president of Maintenance of Way until a falling-out with Mr. Toussaint last month. Two days after Mr. Samuelsen joined a half-dozen officials in the Track Division in signing a Dec. 8 letter asking Mr. Toussaint to shelve negotiations on the sale of the union's headquarters until the contract was secured, the Local 100 leader fired him.

'Too Many Enemies'

"He made one too many enemies," said Alan Saly, the former managing editor of the union's newspaper, the TWU Express. "Samuelsen turned around and actively campaigned against the contract. In this case it was personal: I think a lot of people just decided that the glass was half-empty rather than half-full. They were probably foolish to turn [the contract] down, but that's how they felt."

Mr. Toussaint said there were signs that many union members had been struck by morning-after remorse. "We're getting some calls for re-votes" on the pact, he said. "The elation [at the deal's rejection] has given way to being stunned and then into fear and, by Monday, anger." He brushed off the suggestion that firing Mr. Samuelsen for his dissent on the building sale was a tactical error in the context of getting the contract approved. He accused Mr. Samuelsen of raising the building sale as a red herring to officially launch a campaign for Local 100's presidency that he had begun contemplating 18 months ago.

Mr. Toussaint said Mr. Samuelsen's duplicity could be seen in the fact that he had sent copies of the letter regarding the building sale to this newspaper and other media outlets before giving him a copy.

Mr. Samuelsen responded that he has made no decision on running for president, although he acknowledged that he intended "to oppose Roger and his slate" in some capacity. He said the stimulus for running for higher office came 12 months ago, not 18, and the source of it was a request from the former vice president of Maintenance of Way, Julio Rivera, whom he called "Roger's right-hand man."

Claims Alliance Sought

According to Mr. Samuelsen, Mr. Rivera approached him, said Mr. Toussaint did not plan to seek a third term, and that if Mr. Samuelsen supported Local 100 Secretary-Treasurer Ed Watt to replace him, Mr. Toussaint would back one of his allies, Patrick Lynch, in an election for the Maintenance of Way vice presidency. Mr. Samuelsen said he made no commitment at the time because "there was a lot of opposition to the notion of an Ed Watt presidency."

Mr. Toussaint scoffed at this explanation, saying he had never told anyone within the union that he wouldn't seek re-election.

Mr. Toussaint cast his clash with Mr. Samuelsen as an act of principle over political expediency, accusing his former ally of "trying to blackmail me" by raising the building sale issue just a week before the original deadline for getting a new contract.

The practical effect, however, according to an official generally aligned with Mr. Toussaint, was to leave the Local 100 president "really isolated in his own union. With John Samuelsen against him, he has opposition broader than anything Sonny Hall or John Lawe ever faced."

Mr. Samuelsen traced Mr. Toussaint's troubles, which he called operational as well as political, back to his 2003 re-election, when five union vice presidents on his slate were defeated. From the outset, he has clashed with their replacements and is a defendant in a lawsuit they filed, and Mr. Samuelsen maintained that Mr. Toussaint "never recovered from that" weakening of his control of the upper echelon of the union's board.

One official who's dealt with Mr. Toussaint during his five years in office calls him "the most paranoid guy I know." To some degree, the Local 100 leader's suspicions are reasonable: remnants of the union's old guard, including Mr. Hall, the ex-Local 100 president and retired head of the International TWU, have actively opposed him and made his life particularly difficult when the last two contract deadlines loomed.

No Dale Carnegie

But Mr. Toussaint has compounded his internal problems by taking harsh action against numerous former allies, with Mr. Samuelsen's firing from the vice president's post merely the latest example. He has justified the personnel moves by accusing those he has forced out of disloyalty or laziness, but the net effect has been to wind up running the union largely on the strength of his own will.

That approach failed him in the contract vote. Mr. Toussaint said the combination of harsh media critiques of the deal and the vocal opposition of union dissidents had a corrosive effect on his rank and file "even though membership knows better. They got to know better."

But the newspaper editorial statements he cited, "Raid on the pension," "Made out like bandits," should have actually made it easier to get the deal approved, since they contended that in securing a refund of past pension payments by about 20,000 members, Mr. Toussaint had bested the MTA in the post-strike bargaining.

"I think Roger likes to think transit workers are easily swayed by people, and that's not the case," Mr. Samuelsen said. The drawbacks to the deal were significant enough, he claimed, that if it hadn't been for "the relentless effort [to sell the deal] on Roger's part, it would have been a landslide against the contract."

He cited the health premiums concession as a large factor, notwithstanding Mr. Toussaint's claim that it was offset by other benefits, including the guarantee of lifetime health coverage for retirees and the awarding of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a paid holiday.

A Source of Envy?

Even the pension refund of up to $14,000 - the source of the howling begun by editorial writers and taken up by Governor Pataki - was a mixed blessing from a political standpoint, Mr. Samuelsen said. Referring to the issue that caused the strike, the MTA's insistence on an inferior pension plan for future employees, he said, "The notion that we would not accept a two-tier pension because it would create division was a good one."

But in obtaining the pension refund as the sweetener that was supposed to make it easier to digest the requirement that transit workers pay a piece of their health premiums, Mr. Samuelsen said, Mr. Toussaint did nothing to satisfy the 10,000-plus union members who were not eligible for the refunds because they had not made additional contributions to the retirement system prior to 2001. "He succeeded in negotiating language that did bring division to the union" between those who would have collected and those who would not, Mr. Samuelsen said.

Although numerous workers cited the health premiums as their prime objection to the deal in interviews with reporters, one person involved in the talks said he believed the real issue for many of them was that the deduction was to be based on total earnings, including overtime.

Revising that provision so that the premium was assessed only against base salary might be all that would be needed to get the deal ratified by a comfortable margin, but the MTA would surely insist on savings somewhere else to make up for the resulting reduction in worker health contributions.

Mr. Toussaint said that when bargaining resumes, he will insist on a substantive change of that sort. He noted that after a 1992 contract deal made by Mr. Hall was rejected by union members, the agreement was subsequently ratified with just a couple of small tweaks: a $1,000 bonus was replaced by a 2-percent raise, and a productivity program was revamped to distribute a portion of the money saved to all employees rather than just those responsible for the savings.

'Won't B.S. My Members'

The Local 100 leader argued that this merely amounted to reshaping the terms rather than improving them, although the revised contract was easily ratified. "I'm doing labor in a different way than it's been done," Mr. Toussaint said. "If you're asking me to b.s. my members by turning a package around but having the same value, that isn't happening."

There is little to suggest, however, that Mr. Toussaint has nearly the leverage he enjoyed prior to the strike. A second walkout would not have as great an impact with the Christmas shopping season passed. It would also be tough to present sympathetically to the public, since at this point Mr. Toussaint's problem stems not from alleged MTA intransigence but rather his own members questioning his judgment about what constituted a fair contract.

The Local 100 leader said the dissidents within the union kept expectations unreasonably high and "it had more impact than I hoped on members' confidence. These guys want to be in a fantasy world where you go into the ring and you come out of the fight looking like Pretty Boy Floyd. But you don't play with strikes. Don't go there unless you have to, because you can't afford to lose a strike. That was the lesson of PATCO," referring to the union that was decertified after President Reagan in 1981 fired the nation's striking Air Traffic Controllers.

'Not Catering to Tribes'

Mr. Toussaint continued, "The labor movement's inability to respond to PATCO led to two decades of concessionary contracts. We could have gotten our heads handed to us; instead we established [the rejected deal] as an issue of perfecting our benefits package."

Members who complained that the health premium charge was financing gains that in the short term benefited only segments of the rank and file, whether it involved a maternity benefit for female workers or the retiree health coverage and pension refund that many younger workers believed had no relevance to them, were missing the bigger picture, Mr. Toussaint said.

"You can [negotiate] as a union or you can do it in tribes," he said. "You decide whether you are a union that takes care of your retirees, or you tie them to a tree in the forest and let the animals get them. You decide whether you're going to take care of your [future members], or you're going to say, 'Eff 'em, we don't represent them yet.'

"The setback here has broader implications. We're going into a period when health benefits are going to be under attack - as well as pensions - and we're deciding the future of the labor movement in the city and the state."

He seemed unnaturally calm about his own future as president of Local 100, considering how important contracts tend to be in deciding union elections. Given the number of prominent union officials who sought to torpedo the contract, it would seem that his best hope would be that several of them challenge his reelection and split the anti-Toussaint vote. While he surmised, "They're going to all want to put their hats in the ring," he added that just as "all of the motley forces have coalesced against this contract," he anticipated that they would seek to unite behind a single opponent this fall.

Sees Hall Calling Shot

"Sonny Hall will put it all together," Mr. Toussaint said, convinced, as are more than a few other past and present TWU officials, that the retired International TWU president is still trying to mastermind a coup. "The ultra-leftists are in bed with the conservative old guard."

The most serious potential challenger is likely to be Barry Roberts, the vice president of the MaBSTOA Division of Local 100, who is also an International TWU Vice President and was among those who during the strike urged members to vote on the MTA's final offer.

Mr. Toussaint is convinced a new contract will be put in place by election time, but others aren't so sure. Under the best of circumstances, government agencies don't look to sweeten the pot in a way that will cost them anything when a contract is voted down, for the simple reason that it would invite unions to always reject the initial contract deal.

And Mr. Toussaint's relationship with top MTA officials is 180 degrees south of the best of circumstances. "They hate Roger," one of his allies said. "Gary Dellaverson would shoot him if it was legal. They won't do anything to help Roger if there's no threat of a strike."

That much became clear when the MTA filed an arbitration petition Jan. 25 in which it indicated that numerous key demands that it took off the table after the strike - including an inferior pension tier for new members that actually can't be considered by arbitrators unless both sides consent - are back in play.

If the contract winds up in arbitration, it's possible the panel will not have rendered a decision by the time voting in the Local 100 officer elections begins in the latter part of November.

Urges Big-Picture View

That would make Mr. Toussaint even more vulnerable, but he insisted that members ought to focus on where the union is going, regardless of the status of the contract. "We have tried to be for true, genuine reform," he said. "And so a big question in the election is, should we give the union back to the old guard, not so much in terms of ethnicity but in terms of the decisions that got us into the position we're in?"

He supplied his own answer and a prediction about his future that defies the signal of the contract rejection. "If you think there's a 50-50 support for me because of the contract [veto], you're wrong," Mr. Toussaint said. "There are those who look at what the alternatives are."

Did he feel any uncertainty about his chances? "No." Then again, Mr. Toussaint predicted his contract would be "strongly ratified."