Razzle Dazzle
Hard to Be Toussaint in City

By RICHARD STEIER

We were walking out of a TV studio early this year, talking about how Roger Toussaint had managed to complicate his re-election chances at Transport Workers' Union Local 100, when one of my colleagues said, "Yeah, Roger's a hair-shirt sometimes, but the labor movement needs guys like him."

He was right on both counts, but a diminishing percentage of Local 100 members deemed Mr. Toussaint indispensable in the recently concluded union election.

On the one hand, they gave him what he needed most: a third three-year term as president. On the other, he actually received less support than the contract he brought out of last year's three-day transit strike that was rejected by a 7-vote margin in January.

Going the Wrong Way

When Mr. Toussaint was first elected in December 2000, he got 61 percent of the vote and his running mates won five of the seven vice president seats. Three years later, he was re-elected with 60 percent but his opponents captured five of the seven VP slots. This time, the Local 100 leader got just 45 percent of the vote, and although his slate won back at least one vice presidency (another will be decided in a runoff election), his One Union slate lost seven seats on the Local 100 executive board.

CHIPS IN THE PEDESTAL: Transport Workers' Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint (left) has been damaged enough by a rejected wage contract and internal feuding, say Joshua Freeman (center) and Bill Henning, that he needs to reach out to his political opponents if he hopes to solidify his power.

This downward trend, even as he has further taken on a Metropolitan Transportation Authority management that his rank and file clearly views as oppressive, is explained by two factors: reservations about the contract he brought back, and Mr. Toussaint's truculence beginning to wear thin as the results at the bargaining table fall short of the fiery rhetoric.

The toll of the past year - from vilification by much of the media for the three-day strike, to his members' initial rejection of the contract because it required them to pay 1.5 percent of their earnings toward their health costs, to the severe financial penalties against Local 100 and his own brief jail sentence for violating the Taylor Law prohibiting public walkouts - may account for why Mr. Toussaint declined to appear before reporters after he learned that he had retained his office but with less than majority support.

Instead, his two top lieutenants, Secretary-Treasurer Ed Watt and Recording Secretary Darlyne Lawson, addressed the media, with Mr. Watt declaring, "We are going to pull this union together."

Just how is an unanswered question. My call to Mr. Toussaint last week was parried by a call from a public relations aide to this newspaper's transit reporter, Ginger Otis, to convey that the Local 100 leader believed I had strayed too far from the Church of Roger in some columns over the past year and given too much space to his opponents' beefs during the election campaign. Mr. Toussaint has made clear by now that he considers constructive criticism to be an oxymoron.

After his election three years ago, he was furious with the camp of opponent Noel Acevedo for allegedly feeding members a steady diet of disinformation, and was unhappy that 40 percent of them had swallowed it. If he has been chastened by the fact that 55 percent of his rank and file voted for one of the other four candidates for president, it is not yet readily apparent.

Some of those who admire Mr. Toussaint despite his warts said that his flagging support does not necessarily mean that he could be deposed in the next election.

'Weathered the Storm'

"I think for the moment he sort of weathered the storm," said Josh Freeman, the City University of New York Graduate School Professor and labor historian who authored a well-received history of Local 100 up through the 1966 transit strike.

With nearly three years before his next election and the chance to negotiate another wage contract in the interim, Mr. Freeman said, "He's got some time to address the issues, including the high level of factionalism within the union and dissatisfaction among the rank and file. But he's got some big challenges ahead, including the financial ones, with the ($2.5 million) fines and the loss of dues checkoff" that were assessed against the union by a Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice.

Bill Henning, the second vice president of Communications Workers of America Local 1180, said notwithstanding Mr. Toussaint's decline in member support, his re-election was "a very important statement that the workers of Local 100 have reaffirmed their struggle and their determination to stand up to the boss."

Expressing a view that's not uncommon among union officials throughout the city, Mr. Henning said, "There's a bureaucracy at the MTA that almost takes glee in screwing the workers," focusing more on catching them in minor infractions and denying Workers' Compensation claims than on addressing working conditions that include safety and health hazards.

"If they spent that much energy on safety," Mr. Henning said of MTA officials, "I think we'd all be better off."

Mr. Toussaint's militancy is not so much a contributing factor to the bitter relations between the union and management, Mr. Henning said, as it is a reflection of rank-and-file anger.

'Right Guy to Lead Them'

"Roger's a son of a bitch," he said, "and that job requires a son of a bitch leading them against management."

The downside of Mr. Toussaint's hard-line attitude is that it has led to clashes with numerous former supporters, and their exile from his inner circle and sometimes from staff positions. His talent for alienating old allies contributed to his contract's rejection 11 months ago, and might have led to his election defeat if two vice presidents with whom he repeatedly butted heads, Barry Roberts and Ainsley Stewart, had run as a team rather than fielding separate candidacies for president.

"I don't think it's simply a matter of Roger's personality," Mr. Freeman said. "There's been a long history of bus workers [Mr. Roberts's political base] having a different perspective than the workers in the subways. And there's a long history of activism and dissent in the union that predates him."

No Free-Speech Fanatic

But he acknowledged, "Toussaint does not tolerate well dissent on his executive board."

Mr. Henning, his tongue firmly in cheek, remarked, "Sometimes it's tough to take counsel from people who aren't as smart as we know we are."

Speaking more seriously, he said that often it was healthier not to have a union dominated by a single group, since that limited the extent to which voices and ideas other than the president's would be heard.

Mr. Acevedo, who was elected Local 100 recording secretary on Mr. Toussaint's ticket six years ago but then, after a falling-out, opposed him for president in 2003, said he doubted Mr. Toussaint would seek to mend the rifts with the opposition on the Local 100 board, notwithstanding Mr. Watt's statement about uniting the union.

"I don't think it's in his character to do that," he said of Mr. Toussaint. "He's not someone who believes in working by consensus. We look forward to another three years of division and persecution, because I don't have any hope that he is going to change."

Larry Hanley, a regional vice president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, argued that this is an unfair caricature. If Mr. Toussaint is sometimes abrasive, he said, it reflects the obstacles he has encountered in trying to make substance and longterm gains more palatable to members.

'He's No Dictator'

"It's easy to say that Roger's a petty dictator, but that's not true," said Mr. Hanley, who formerly headed the ATU local representing Staten Island bus drivers. "He looks at members who just don't get it, and obstructionists - from both the left and the right [wings] of the union - and the approach he's taken a lot of times is just to use the force of his will to move the union forward."

Local 100 leaders for at least two decades before Mr. Toussaint assumed office six years ago pegged contract terms to "how they looked in the next election, not how the contract looked 20 years out," Mr. Hanley said. Mr. Toussaint in negotiating his first contract had to make up a $46 million deficit in the union's health benefits fund that was created by the previous president, Willie James, who sacrificed funding in that area to gain a 5-percent raise in the first year of a three-year pact.

'Ended Key Giveups'

Mr. Hanley said Mr. James and other past Local 100 leaders including Sonny Hall - who became Mr. Toussaint's prime nemesis until he retired as president of the International ATU - had allowed the MTA to make incursions on work rules and disciplinary procedures in return for additional raises from the belief that the union's rank and file focused primarily on salary issues rather than job conditions.

Mr. Toussaint's 2002 contract, besides making up the deficit in the health fund by agreeing to freeze wages in the first year of the three-year pact, "managed to unravel 20 years of concessionary changes," Mr. Hanley said. "But when you took that out into the field, people didn't get it. Getting the Checkers full-time [status under that deal] was a great thing, but if you're driving a bus on Flatbush Ave., you may not appreciate that."

The question remains whether Mr. Toussaint is introspective enough to have learned something from the humiliating contract defeat he suffered. The deal that emerged from the strike was uncharacteristic of a man who prides himself on trade-union principles because it included a giveback - the health-benefits contribution by members - to pay for some of the gains.

Words Haunted Him

In fact, his message to members last Dec. 20 after the strike began included the statement: "This is a fight over whether hard work will be rewarded with a decent retirement and over the erosion or eventual elimination of health benefits for working people." While he succeeded in blunting the MTA's bid for a lesser pension tier for new employees, the health-benefit contribution he agreed to amounted to an erosion of Local 100 members' rights in that area.

Mr. Toussaint has pointed out that in return he got members continued health coverage between age 55 - when they first become eligible for a full pension and are more likely to retire - and 65, when they begin receiving Medicare. He also secured a pension refund for about 22,000 members that will be worth up to $14,000 for some.

He had twice previously sought to get that refund - covering additional contributions members made between 1995 and the beginning of 2001 in return for the right to a full pension at 55 after 25 years' service - via legislation, only to have the bills vetoed by Governor Pataki, who said the refund should be negotiated with the MTA.

Considering that the MTA had agreed to support legislation to provide a refund as part of its 1999 contract deal with Mr. Toussaint's predecessor, Mr. Pataki's position seemed rooted in politics. Mr. Toussaint, after soliciting members for their contract priorities, decided to pursue the refund in last year's bargaining rather than waiting and hoping that a new Governor would be more inclined to grant the refund.

Trouble Down the Road?

Once his members discovered that the health-benefit contribution was the price for it, a slight majority torpedoed the deal. It was resurrected by the arbitration award issued on the same day of Mr. Toussaint's re-election, offering a short-term windfall and a long-term political headache: by the time Mr. Toussaint seeks a fourth term - if he does - the refund money will have been spent but the health-care premium payments almost surely will still be taking bites out of members' checks. (Mr. Toussaint a year ago talked about scaling back the contribution under the next contract, but given the rate at which health costs have been rising, it's hard to see the MTA being amenable.)

While the Local 100 leader has contended that the narrow contract rejection resulted from misrepresentations to union members by his political enemies, Mr. Henning said he believed that was one time when his in-house critics' charge that Mr. Toussaint is a one-man band resonated with the rank and file.

"A deal was reached by Roger and Roger alone in a 'trust-me' mode," Mr. Henning said, referring to the process by which Mr. Toussaint ended the strike and did not inform either his board or his members that paying for a portion of their health coverage was going to be the price extracted by the MTA for union gains in other areas.

'Need Faith in Members'

"The contract was seen as Roger's rather than the union's," Mr. Henning said. Asked whether Mr. Toussaint made his command decision because he believed that to consult his board would have risked prolonging the strike and producing disastrous consequences for the union, Mr. Henning replied, "I think you have to have faith in the members."

Instead, even though transit workers eventually voted strongly for the contract when Mr. Toussaint resubmitted it for consideration in April, Mr. Henning said, "The discontent was palpable in that union, some of it coming from a good place, some of it from a bad place."

The "bad place," he said, emanated from Mr. Roberts's camp, noting that as vice president of the union's division at the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority, he was the lead signer on a petition presented to Mr. Toussaint on the second day of the walkout asking that management's final pre-strike offer be submitted to the executive board for a vote. This amounted, Mr. Henning said, to "repudiating the strike" while it was still going on, making it that much harder for Mr. Toussaint to stand firm against the outside pressures from elected officials and "the louder media."

If Mr. Toussaint proved one thing during the walkout, Mr. Henning said, it was that the stringent penalties under the Taylor Law and the more-conservative political climate since the 1966 transit walkout have not made strikes by public workers an exercise in folly.

"Fifty-seven percent of the public supported these guys, so I think it would be a mistake to say that the strike is an ineffective weapon," Mr. Henning said.

Can't Strike Next Time

It's not one that Local 100 will be able to use in the next round of bargaining, since the return of its dues check-off rights will be conditioned on a no-strike pledge. And the moving of the current contract's expiration date forward by a month, from Dec. 15 to Jan. 15, means that in future bargaining the union won't have nearly the same leverage as when it could hold the Christmas shopping season hostage.

The new Governor, Eliot Spitzer, is unlikely to open the MTA vault to the union, but neither is he likely to use tough-guy posturing against Local 100 to bolster his standing for national office the way Governor Pataki did both before and immediately after the strike.

Mr. Spitzer has spoken about the need to improve the relationship between the MTA and its unions, which Mr. Henning said was an encouraging and refreshing indication.

"They have to create a whole new mind-set," he said regarding the MTA. "Governor Spitzer at the head of this can send a signal, and I hope he does."

Mr. Acevedo shared that view, although he said Mr. Spitzer's call for increased productivity raised questions about whether his concern for employees extends further than getting more out of them.

Mr. Toussaint may benefit from the changes on the executive board even though he no longer can count on even two-thirds of its members for support. Whatever incursions on his power were made, the board no longer includes some of his most-prominent critics, from losing presidential candidates Barry Roberts and Ainsley Stewart to Marty Goodman and John Mooney, who were defeated as part of Mr. Stewart's slate.

Will He Reach Out?

"Will he change his style?" Mr. Hanley mused. "I think he really understands that he has to enter a different stage of leadership" to mend some of the internal rifts.

Mr. Freeman said, "It certainly would be in his interest to work with some people on the executive board who disagree with him on some issues but agree with him on others. Whether he takes that opportunity remains to be seen."

"I have confidence that the majority of people on that executive board will pull together for the benefit of the members," Mr. Henning said. "And Roger's a very strong personality, but I think he fails to adjust at his peril."

All three of them are sizing up the situation from the cool perspective that is afforded by not being part of the internal feuding that has been ingrained in Local 100's DNA for more than a decade. Within the union, even those who do not harbor Mr. Acevedo's sense of betrayal are less optimistic, saying that Mr. Toussaint's opposition will have to reach out to him if there is going to be a smoother working relationship.

One veteran of the backroom bloodletting said, "I don't think he'll function any differently."