Toussaint's Election Maneuver

Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Roger Toussaint last week persuaded his executive board to approve a resolution that would move forward the union's 2009 election by several months. The board also ratified his proposal to create a new position of administrative vice president.

Critics of the new position said Mr. Toussaint had failed to support his claim that it would save the union money. On the other hand, the shambles that has been made of the union's child-care fund offers evidence that someone is needed to clean up the sloppiness that has characterized some of the local's operations, particularly since it lost its automatic dues-deduction rights last June as part of the punishment under the Taylor Law for the December 2005 transit strike.

Mr. Toussaint has sought to turn what should be a hardship into a political opportunity. He has denied union positions to some critics who were elected to them on the grounds that they have not fully paid their dues since the suspension of check-off rights, although in a majority of those cases evidence has been presented that they are current on their payments.

The union has gone nine months without the convenience of payroll deduction because of the three-day walkout. The length of that penalty has approached the shocking stage given that following Local 100's 11-day strike in 1980, check-off was restored four months after it was revoked.

The union has not exactly attached a lot of urgency to restoration this time, although a significant contributor to the delay is the Bloomberg administration, which persuaded a Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice to buy its arguments on the matter in November. A month later, an Appellate Division panel denied the city the right to intervene in the case, which seemed to clear the way for restoration, since the Metropolitan Transportation Authority supports the union's bid. Nearly three months have passed, however, without further court action.

We can imagine Mr. Toussaint chortling that Mayor Bloomberg was an unwitting accomplice in last week's maneuvering to consolidate his control over the union. An even greater irony is that some union members who are most angry with the Local 100 leader are also his accomplices.

Because close to 7,000 Local 100 members have opted not to pay their dues, many in protest of Mr. Toussaint's leadership, they have fallen into bad standing, rendering them currently unable to vote in next year's election. Many of them may have been planning to rectify that situation once check-off was reinstated.

But the resolution permitting the move-up of the election - to an unspecified date that is expected to be sometime before the International TWU convention in the summer of 2009 - changes the calculations dramatically.

As former Local 100 and TWU International President Sonny Hall points out in a letter on the opposite page, members must pay all back dues to the union before they regain "good standing," and must have that status for 12 months before they are eligible to vote. That could leave those who have withheld their dues scrambling to pay the owed monies soon enough to regain eligibility.

There was no valid substantive reason for moving up the election date. While the argument given by the Toussaint forces is that it will strengthen his hand at the International TWU convention, our guess is his prime concern is ensuring himself another term at Local 100 by disenfranchising those who were foolish enough to display their anger by withholding their dues.

As we emphasized at the time that dues check-off was about to be suspended, union members should never stop paying dues as a protest, because it is sure to hurt the union. The appropriate way to express discontent with a union's leadership is at election time, but you can't do that if you've lost the right to vote.