Razzle Dazzle
Toussaint: Seize the Moment

By RICHARD STEIER

The title of the lecture Roger Toussaint was supposed to give May 8 was, "A Healthy Workforce in a Healthy Economy in a Healthy Environment in a Healthy City." So of course what he spoke about was politics.

Mr. Toussaint is one of those rare labor leaders who views his job through a wider prism than his next wage contract and his next election. He would probably argue that those who live by pragmatism are fated to just hang on, because focusing primarily on short-term political needs forces them to ignore the outside world and the impact it has on both ideals and reality for trade unions.

"I want to talk about changing the political climate," the leader of Transport Workers' Union Local 100 told the audience of 50 or 60 union activists and environmentalists who had gathered for a two-day conference at the United Federation of Teachers headquarters, and no doubt expected that his Sumner Rosen Memorial Lecture would tie environmental and safety issues to the deaths late last month of two Track Workers he represented.

A Generational Opportunity

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow PIVOTAL TIME FOR LABOR: Transport Workers' Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint asserts that next year's elections offer the union movement a chance to transform government on a long-term basis. 'The last time things shifted for a generation was in 1980 with Ronald Reagan,' he told listeners during a conference at the United Federation of Teachers' headquarters. 'We're still living under that change.'

The current state of the nation, Mr. Toussaint argued, "makes almost any progressive change impossible." But an opportunity to change that dynamic looms in the next year or two, he said, and failure to seize it could lead to another generation of labor being on the defensive and the rights of working people further eroding.

He noted recent sympathetic editorials in the Post and the Daily News lamenting the deaths of the two Track Workers and paying tribute to the dangerous jobs transit workers must perform to keep the system operating smoothly. It was a stunning contrast, he said, from the way the two papers had sought to turn public opinion against those employees less than 18 months earlier, even before he took Local 100 out on strike for three days. Back then, as a run-up to the unsuccessful negotiations that ended in a walkout, the union had run ads focusing on the difficulty and danger of the jobs its members did, Mr. Toussaint said. "If we are hard-nosed negotiators, it is because we have been to too many funerals."

Now the tabloids have shifted from demonizing him and ridiculing his members to echoing the union's sentiments. "We didn't hire a pr firm to get these editorials," Mr. Toussaint said. "We paid a much higher price."

That sympathy will fade as public memories of the dead workers do, though, leaving the union to have to place its own stamp on the future or risk being further stomped upon in the media.

Clearly referring to next year's national elections, Mr. Toussaint said, "Should we be hopeful or fearful? I would say, 'both.'''

He continued, "The last time things shifted for a generation was in 1980 with Ronald Reagan. We're still living under that change. We've had 25 years of denigration that there is something called the public good."

Mr. Reagan, he said, "unleashed the assault" on that concept, in an administration known for deregulating industry, reducing the number of safety inspectors, and unofficially declaring an end to caring about the poor with a joke about "welfare queens" using food stamps to buy vodka. A consistent line ran from that administration to the current one, Mr. Toussaint said, which will "even send our children and co-workers and neighbors into battle without armor, and then defund the VA hospitals."

'Must Change the Culture'

"We need to change the culture that worships the market and rebuild the idea of the public good," he told the audience. "And the common good."

The difficulty of that task became clear when he continued, "Low taxes are an indication of a society going the wrong way."

He was basically arguing that low taxes limit the extent and the quality of the public services that society can offer. As much as he is a man of the left, Mr. Toussaint was not expressing a radical sentiment; his words were consistent with the actions of his sometime-adversary, Mayor Bloomberg, when he pushed through an 18.75-percent property-tax hike four years ago because it was more palatable than the alternative of eviscerating essential city services. But it took close to two years and tens of millions of Mr. Bloomberg's re-election campaign spending to overcome his plummet in popularity over that tax hike.

Citing the Mayor's speech late last month about the changes needed to keep New York strong 25 years from now, Mr. Toussaint said, "He was talking about a big issue, and it's about time. And much of the content [of the speech] makes sense." Congestion pricing, provided it is coupled with a significant increase in mass transit funding and service, the Local 100 leader said, can "make New York City more livable and viable."

But, he continued, "For us, this is not about making lower Manhattan more livable for lawyers and bankers." Congestion pricing as designed by Mr. Bloomberg would have its greatest impact in reducing traffic in lower and midtown Manhattan.

Mr. Toussaint noted, however, that the Mayor had touched on the greater threat to quality of life in an area that would not be affected by the congestion pricing plan when he referred to the 15,000 diesel fuel trucks that passed through the Hunts Point Market each weekday.

'Policies Poisoned Kids'

Citing the high rate of lead poisoning in that area, the Local 100 president charged, "New York City poisoned the children of the South Bronx through conscious policy decisions. We shut down the ports, we shut down the rail lines. And the South Bronx became a trucking route."

Beginning early in the Giuliani administration, he noted, the city's mass-transit subsidy steadily declined, placing an added burden on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for funding maintenance and repair operations. "At the same time," Mr. Toussaint said, "they cut taxes for the rich over and over again.

"We'd better re-establish the legitimacy of the social sphere," he told the audience. "We'd better re-establish the legitimate role of government. Health care and pensions have now been deemed unsustainable entitlements. Interestingly, hedge funds are not considered unsustainable. The war in Iraq is not considered unsustainable. But Medicare is and Social Security is."

He argued that the Bush Administration and its supporters had carried forth "a cultural war" begun under Mr. Reagan.

"Our notion of sustainability is jobs you can raise a family on ... schools and health care that work," Mr. Toussaint said.

'Labor's Under Attack'

He concluded his 22-minute speech, which received a standing ovation, by saying, "Labor is under attack. Labor is a key part for any plan for progress. If you need a strong labor movement, you have to help us more than you do."

It was a reminder that for all the internal bickering within Local 100 and the charges from his critics there that Mr. Toussaint looks to undermine union officers who disagree with him, no one in the city labor movement articulates its needs and a vision for achieving them better than Mr. Toussaint. What he has been unable to do, however, is to make his colleagues see the urgency of acting in unity on a long-term basis to reverse the prevailing priorities in the city and nationally.

Even on a short-term basis, unity has been elusive, with no better example than the December 2005 transit strike. Mr. Toussaint has described it as a job action of necessity - even though binding arbitration offered a peaceful alternative - because the MTA was demanding that the union make unacceptable concessions. He argued that it did so partly because it believed Local 100 lacked the will to strike and the strength to avoid being crushed under the weight of negative public reaction and Taylor Law penalties.

Other labor leaders had their doubts, however - to the extent that sources have said Mr. Toussaint believed some of them were leaking information to reporters about both the walkout and the negotiating that eventually led the union to direct its members to return to work while a contract was reached.

Few Joined the Battle

During a symposium on the strike at the City University Graduate Center last fall, Mr. Toussaint recalled conducting a conference call with 40 labor leaders about stepping up the disruption, "And I told them I was not looking for somebody to hold my coat. I was looking for leaders that would take off their coats and step into the ring too. We didn't see a whole lot of coats coming off."

This shouldn't have been a surprise to Mr. Toussaint, however. Though unions often find common ground, they also frequently are divided by ideological differences, turf battles, and personal and member jealousies, not to mention disagreements about whether a short-term benefit is worth the long-term price it may carry. Or the rivalries that sometimes exist between public- and private-sector labor leaders, and the income differences among union members that can shape everything from their unions' bargaining priorities to the time they can endure without a pay raise in order to get what they consider a fair contract.

For some time, and most recently in a full-page ad in this newspaper last week, Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch has railed against the city's use of pattern bargaining to artificially restrict salaries for his members.

Yet pattern bargaining was something the union delighted in using during the 1980s, when Mayor Ed Koch had a policy of granting uniformed employees slightly better pay raises than those given to civilian workers. In those days, the PBA and other uniformed unions waited for District Council 37 to settle its contract before engaging in serious negotiations, using its terms for a benchmark from which to push percentage raises upward.

Winds Shifted

Twice in the past decade, the PBA has found itself frustrated by the city's successful use of cheap contracts negotiated with DC 37 to limit what cops were able to win in arbitration, even though by the time their deals were decided sizable municipal budget deficits had been transformed into healthy surpluses.

One reason for those turnarounds was that the limiting of labor costs under those deals with DC 37 offered major budget relief to the city.

But pattern bargaining also worked to the PBA's advantage when the timing was different 20 years ago. In the summer of 1987, the Koch administration agreed to give Teamsters Local 237 three five-percent raises, and similar deals with the UFT and DC 37 followed within a couple of months. Less than a week after the DC 37 deal was reached in October of that year, a stock market that had been booming merrily along for the previous four years abruptly crashed.

Because the wage pattern was in place, rather than telling the PBA that the city couldn't afford the kind of raises it had tendered earlier in the decade, Mr. Koch the following May stayed true to form and gave the union a slightly more generous deal, one that is remembered by more than a few veteran cops as the last contract they were happy with.

Layoffs' Psychic Impact

The costs of those deals, combined with an extended Wall Street slump, ensured that when Mr. Koch left office at the end of 1989, he bequeathed a sizable budget deficit to his successor, David Dinkins. And after reaching contract terms with the UFT in October 1990 that critics said were too generous under the circumstances, Mr. Dinkins the following spring was forced to lay off more than 1,000 DC 37 members.

That was still fresh in the mind of the union's executive director at the time, Stanley Hill, when Rudy Giuliani succeeded Mr. Dinkins in 1994 and came to DC 37 a year later threatening massive layoffs unless Mr. Hill agreed to a two-year wage freeze. Publicly, mayoral aides warned that as many as 30,000 jobs could be lost; privately the more-realistic figure of 8,000 or more was put forward.

It was clear that most of the jobs on the chopping block were those held by DC 37 members; Mr. Giuliani wasn't about to lay off cops at a time when he was significantly expanding the NYPD's ranks.

In the labor world envisioned by Mr. Toussaint, the PBA and UFT might have used their collective muscle to counter the impact Mr. Giuliani's layoff threat had on Mr. Hill's bargaining resolve. The tabloids can be reliably counted on to denounce civilian-employee unions that take a hard line in bargaining, but they tend to pull their punches a bit when the aggrieved party is the PBA, and the threat of a job action by the entire citywide work force if there were layoffs would have been enough to quickly determine whether Mr. Giuliani was bluffing or the budget crisis was that severe.

Never Flexed Muscles

No such muscling-up came from the less-vulnerable unions, however. The UFT, worried that Mr. Hill would settle first and create a particularly unfavorable pattern, opted to beat DC 37 to the punch by agreeing to a two-year pay freeze, only to have it voted down by the rank and file. That left DC 37 to make the first double-zero deal that was actually ratified - albeit by what turned out to be a rigged vote. The PBA went into arbitration and found that the arbitrators held it to that same initial pay freeze while granting the union 13 percent in raises for the following three years. The ruling was particularly unfortunate for the PBA because it came in the same week that the Nassau Police Benevolent Association won 24-percent raises for the same five-year period through arbitration.

There's no way of knowing whether the PBA could've forced Mr. Giuliani to back down from his insistence on the two-year freeze for DC 37, but could the union have wound up any worse off if it had gone to the wall in the name of labor solidarity?

The impetus for Mr. Giuliani seeking the two-year pay freeze had been the success of the new Governor, George Pataki, getting state unions to agree to such a freeze in the spring of 1995. That did not put a bull's eye on Mr. Pataki's back among unions when he sought re-election in 1998, however: the municipal labor leaders who endorsed that year generally went with him over his underdog Democratic challenger, Peter Vallone.

Pragmatists for Pataki

When Mr. Pataki sought a third term in 2002, he was able to co-opt the UFT and Local 1199 of the Service Employees' International Union from opposing him by helping both get relatively generous contract deals. Those unions each may have calculated that there was little likelihood that the eventual Democratic nominee, Carl McCall, could upset Mr. Pataki, and so they might as well engage in a quid pro quo and do their members some immediate good. The endorsements of those two generally liberal unions ensured, however, that when Mr. Pataki's objectives had changed and he was looked to burnish his tough-guy credentials in his futile bid for the Republican presidential nomination, he was around to help provoke the transit strike.

There has been no labor leader strong enough to convince the other unions that they must remain unified if they hope to change the tide running against them, and their frequently diverging agendas often create situations that ensure that by the time they see the urgency of coming together, it is too late to matter.

During the question-and-answer period that followed a panel discussion in response to his speech, Mr. Toussaint noted that while environmental contamination in New York City most often affects its poorest residents, "For some time the environmental movement has been associated with the tree-huggers," who tend to be more affluent and white. "We need to make it more of a grass-roots movement." Communications Workers of America Local 1180 Vice President Bill Henning put in, referring to the site of the conference on lower Broadway, "Look at this neighborhood down here. Luxury abounds. Somebody's got money - it just ain't us."

Track Safety Detoured

He noted that during Mr. Pataki's tenure, his Labor Commissioner had opposed the recommendation of the state's Health Hazard Abatement Board that track safety standards similar to those used on Federal railways be adopted by the MTA for all its commuter lines. When a bill was passed by the Legislature to create such standards, Mr. Henning said, Mr. Pataki vetoed it.

Presidents like Mr. Reagan and George W. Bush have done a good job, he continued, of convincing the public that safety regulations amount to "red tape" that hinders efficiency and drives up costs.

Mr. Henning continued, "It's a crime that because - let's face it - the labor movement is weak in this city, 20 workers lost their lives falling off buildings in the city" because of lack of adequate safety regulations. "Government is what stands between us and barbarism," but it won't impose those regulations unless a strong trade-union movement convinces those in public office that there is a political price to be paid if they don't.

"It's time," Mr. Henning said, "that we stood up for our class and built power on the job and [took] back power from those who have abused it."

'No Time for Wish Lists'

"The issue," Mr. Toussaint told the audience, "is to grasp the urgency and seize the opportunity. This is not a time for wish lists and wishful thinking. The right wing has been engaged in strategic thinking" for several decades as it slowly amassed and built on its power in government. "We have to take it to another level if we are to match and better the right wing in this country."

Doing so, however, may hinge on convincing labor leaders who don't share Mr. Toussaint's political views that thinking short-run and strictly in terms of their own rank and files is partly responsible for why they're so often the victims of bad luck and bad timing.

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