Letters to the Editor
Ignoring the Positive in TWU

To the Editor:

Your paper's recent reporting on TWU Local 100 seems a bit skewed to me.

Your reports on shop stewards waiting months to pay their union dues after automatic check-off's suspension, and paying only when their union positions are put at risk, and reports of officers and shop stewards putting out flyers linking members paying their dues with questioning of the local's financial practices, seem off base. In these flyers they seem to be sending mixed messages to the members, on the one hand encouraging members to pay their dues but on the other hand, I believe, giving people who don't want to pay another excuse - ''yeah, something's not kosher with the local" - based on nothing factual.

Your newspaper is seemingly championing these people, putting their pictures in the paper and trying to make readers feel empathy for them. Do you really want to be seen as the voice for non-dues-paying members or very slow-paying members?

Why don't you report on the many positive things happening in Local 100, such as the majority of members paying their dues, thousands of children of members using the various child-care programs every year, loads of members attending upgrade training programs and other educational courses, a new program for Traffic Checkers to move into higher-paying titles? There are also promotional opportunities opening up for many lower job titles which were stopped during the 1990s, a pension refund won through our strike coming to 20,000 members in the next few years, an overtime offset won through our strike, and the ongoing fight around track safety.

When the Taxi Workers Alliance went on strike, it used Local 100's union hall as its coordinating center.

These are hallmarks of a fighting union.

Recently, 300 retirees met at our union hall to discuss their issues and at this meeting presented the local with a check for over $38,000 they had collected. The retirees didn't put any conditions on giving this money.

It seems to me the union solidarity spirit of the retirees should be the spirit highlighted and praised in The Chief-Leader, not folks waiting months to pay their dues and seemingly putting conditions on dues payment.

JOHN McCARTHY, Vice Chair, Track Division, TWU Local 100

Editor's reply: There are several misconceptions and misleading statements in Mr. McCarthy's letter.

Perhaps the most egregious is the statement that we have been focusing coverage on shop stewards and other union officers who have "waited months to pay their union dues" and been penalized for it.

To our knowledge, only one of the shop stewards alluded to was accused by Transport Workers Union Local 100 of not being current on his dues - a charge he has disputed. The other individuals who were stripped of their positions or denied a chance to run in elections for such positions had done nothing worse than signing the letter Mr. McCarthy refers to, which urged members to pay their dues but also questioned Local 100 President Roger Toussaint's handling of the union's finances.

We have highlighted those cases because it is the antithesis of trade-unionism to deny people the right to hold union office based on their criticism of the union's president.

As to Mr. McCarthy's complaint that we are not highlighting the positive aspects of Local 100's operations, perhaps he doesn't realize that Mr. Toussaint has virtually broken off communication with this newspaper for more than four months. The schism came about after he became sufficiently angered about a letter published here from one of his in-house critics to have his outside public-relations firm call up to express his displeasure. The irony of this bit of pique was that the same issue of this newspaper carried an editorial that underscored the importance of Local 100 members paying their dues.

We ran that letter from Mr. Toussaint's critic for the same reason that we are running Mr. McCarthy's letter. The purpose of a letters column is to allow readers to voice their opinions on relevant matters whether we - or anyone else - agrees with them or not. This kind of free speech is not a concept Mr. Toussaint seems willing to embrace, either in his dealings with this newspaper or as it applies to the operations of his union.

Perhaps that's why the "union solidarity" Mr. McCarthy writes of does not extend very deep in Local 100.