A Long, Strange Trip Down for Toussaint

As surely as the just-begun Transport Workers Union Local 100 election is a referendum on the 8½-year tenure of Roger Toussaint, the prelude to the actual voting is a testament to how drastically the time in office altered his vision for the union.

One of Mr. Toussaint's old allies in the New Directions faction of the union that propelled him to power, Steve Downs, last year published a book about the group's rise and demise entitled "Hell on Wheels." That evoked New Directions' militancy in trying to build a stronger union by getting workers more involved.

To capture the change in tone as Mr. Toussaint has tried to compensate for his slipping hold on his rank and file since the miscalculations that began with the 2005 transit strike, something along the lines of "Hell on Democracy" would be more like it.

Inspiration Turns to Contempt

The need to force management to show respect for Local 100 members galvanized Mr. Toussaint's first successful campaign, and it convinced his rank and file to follow him into battle when he rejected a viable alternative of arbitration of the contract dispute four years ago and led the strike.

NOT THE MAN HE USED TO BE: While he gained office espousing more member participation to rebuild Transport Workers Union Local 100 as a 'great, fighting union,' the setbacks he's suffered beginning with the 2005 transit strike have transformed Roger Toussaint into someone using every political trick at hand to thwart opponents of his hand-picked successor in election balloting that begins this week but won't be tallied until December.

But the conduct of the election process as it affects eligibility both to run for office and to vote—all of it heavily smudged with Mr. Toussaint's fingerprints—has been rife with the kind of contempt for his members that he excoriated New York City Transit officials for displaying for much of the past decade.

What could be more manipulative, and disrespectful of the democratic process, than to have pushed through—with just 8 percent of the local's 39,000 members voting in favor last year—a bylaw change that allowed the election to be moved up to this month but kept the ballot-counting on its old schedule for six months from now?

What could show less confidence in the man he picked to succeed him, Curtis Tate, than to have kept him isolated and insulated from requests for newspaper interviews at a time when Mr. Tate looms as a blank page —those who have dealt with him give him credit for likeability without saying anything about substance—in comparison to his outspoken challenger, John Samuelsen?

John McCain, successfully or not, had the ability to try to distance himself from the controversial President he was seeking to replace last year; keeping Mr. Tate under wraps has denied him the opportunity to show whether he has the ability to run the union rather than being controlled from above by Mr. Toussaint in his position as the International union vice president overseeing Local 100.

It is not that Mr. Samuelsen's public positions over the past three or four years are beyond reproach. His campaign against the contract Mr. Toussaint negotiated to bring an end to the strike had the political value of showing members' discontent with what the walkout produced, but its practical impact merely delayed by 11 months their getting the same terms included in that deal through an arbitration.

Misread Political Realities

And Mr. Samuelsen's criticism of Mr. Toussaint for not being more adversarial in dealing with NYC Transit and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority ignores the political realities of the union's post-strike position. The loss of dues check-off rights forced the Local 100 leader to seek the MTA's support in having automatic payroll deduction restored by a Brooklyn judge. And having no ability to threaten another walkout—both because pledging not to do so was a condition for getting dues rights reinstated and because Mr. Toussaint no longer had broadenough support from union members to credibly gear up for a strike—meant the best possible route to a decent wage deal was to cultivate good will with management. Unfortunately for Local 100 members, a deal that was close at hand last October was scuttled by Mayor Bloomberg.

But if Mr. Samuelsen was unreasonably demanding on both those matters, the circumstances that prevailed were the product of a mess Mr. Toussaint created for himself with far-greater miscalculations.

The Local 100 leader was offered arbitration by the MTA four years ago and rejected it in favor of striking, only to wind up in arbitration anyway, where he got an award no more onerous than the one he had negotiated.

The justification he used for ordering the walkout was that the MTA provoked it by at the last minute insisting that the union agree to an inferior pension plan for future workers.

That claim doesn't hold up under close scrutiny. Mr. Toussaint had previously claimed that his decision to stay at the bargaining table in 2002 after then-MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow failed to make a revised wage proposal by the time the old deal expired showed that he was not "strike-happy" and would not be baited into acting precipitously. If he showed restraint then, why should the late pension demand have been treated any differently, given the reality that it could not have been imposed—either in bargaining or in arbitration—without the union's consent?

Every Sunday during the pro football season there will be at least one instance where a player slugs an opponent after the whistle and draws a 15-yard penalty that costs his team dearly. More often than not, when the TV crews show a replay of what happened, the opponent had done something improper and the penalized player retaliated, with the only difference being that he was the one the referees caught. But it didn't matter that he might have been provoked; it is universally regarded as a dumb penalty.

Caught in His Own Trap

That is what Mr. Toussaint took with the strike. Prior to the walkout, he had spoken of the need to convince management of your willingness to take extreme action as a way of creating leverage in order to meet your goals without having to pull the trigger. But he wound up caught in the middle, taking his members out but then unwilling to risk prolonging the strike and putting a major crimp in the Christmas shopping season because the reaction against the union might have threatened its continued existence.

And so in mediated bargaining that began while his members were still on the picket lines, he reached a deal that provided decent wage increases and some important fringe-benefit gains, but also forced members for the first time to pay part of the cost of their basic health care. That demand by management was one of those that created rank-and-file support for a strike; for many members, it was a bigger issue than the one Mr. Toussaint staunchly opposed: an inferior pension plan for new employees. So for more than a few of them, the health-care payments—and because they were pegged to total earnings, those working significant overtime got hit hardest—represented a double indignity: the tentative contract whacked them in that area, and they also faced the loss of as much as six days' pay for the three days on strike under the Taylor Law.

'Members Just Care About Pay'

Mr. Toussaint's 2003 re-election had been a mixed blessing for him, because his strength on the Local 100 executive board was diluted when five political opponents won union vice presidencies. One of them, John Mooney, said at the time, "Toussaint just learned it's not about Toussaint. The membership doesn't care about personal politics. They just care about their jobs and their pay."

Mr. Mooney was alluding to the 2002 wage agreement, which included a $1,000 bonus in the first year rather than a permanent pay raise. This was a necessary step for Mr. Toussaint because a shortfall of more than $40 million in the union's health fund that he inherited from his predecessor required a major infusion of money that otherwise could have funded a pay hike. But it became an easy target for his opponents, who seemed to grow exponentially from the time he took office.

More than a few of them had once been his allies. After Mr. Toussaint's New Directions slate took power in the 2000 elections, his treasurer, Ed Watt, said it planned to invite all factions of the union to come together— ''anyone who wants to can come in to talk to us."

But after Mr. Toussaint took office, his open-door policy seemed designed primarily to usher out supporters who made the mistake of disagreeing with him. They accused him of being dictatorial and unwilling to tolerate dissenting views; he fired back by calling them lazy or inept bureaucrats looking to coast on the hard work of others.

The cumulative effect of the defections was to fuel the thought that maybe Mr. Toussaint's more-truculent side was the real problem, and perhaps its defining moment occurred in the argument that left him and Mr. Samuelsen estranged.

Building Sale's Fateful Fallout

Shortly before the 2005 contract deadline, Mr. Toussaint reached a deal to sell the union's West End Ave. building for $60 million. When he brought the proposal to Local 100's board, Mr. Samuelsen argued that no action should be taken until the contract was completed.

It was not an unreasonable request. Three years earlier, Mr. Toussaint grew infuriated by an uprising among private bus lines union leaders just as the city transit talks were reaching a crucial stage, denouncing it as a distraction engineered by officials loyal to his bitter foe, then-International union President Sonny Hall.

But the building sale was his distraction, and he responded to Mr. Samuelsen's intemperance by banishing him from the board. Having burned that bridge for him, he made it easy for his former ally to lead the charge against the post-strike contract—what did he have to lose after being exiled from the union's power structure?

When the contract was rejected by just seven votes out of more than 22,000 cast in January 2006, Mr. Toussaint expressed no regrets about the extent to which his actions against Mr. Samuelsen might have been responsible, claiming that his former supporter had been seeking to undermine him for months before that. He also insisted that his support among the rank and file was much greater than the 50 percent minus seven that the contract vote implied.

Overestimated His Support

It seemed possible; Mr. Toussaint got as far as he did through a mix of smarts, strength of will and an ability to tap into his members' frustration with management. But when he sought a third term at the end of that year and got just 45 percent of the vote, winning only because his four opponents divided the anti-Roger ballots, it was clear that he was politically vulnerable because of the contract fallout.

Rather than reaching out to those who had lost faith in him, Mr. Toussaint kept on lashing out at his vocal critics. After dues check-off rights were suspended, Mr. Samuelsen said that declining to voluntarily pay dues as an expression of displeasure with Mr. Toussaint was "not the right thing to do." But when he added that members had a right to know how their dues money was being spent, Mr. Toussaint used it as an excuse to bar him from holding an elected position, claiming he was discouraging the rank and file from paying dues.

That was the start of a trend over the past two years, using the lost dues rights as a club to disenfranchise those who criticized Mr. Toussaint's leadership or fell even slightly behind in their payments. Some union activists offered proof that they had stayed current on their payments but been erroneously deemed to be delinquent.

It took nearly 18 months from the time that check-off rights were suspended in June 2007 until they were restored late last November—a shockingly long penalty for a threeday walkout given that after the 1980 transit strike Local 100 got its automatic collection privileges reinstated after four months for a job action that lasted 11 days. Initially it seemed to have been bad judgment on Mr. Toussaint's part when he declined to seek restoration due to financial hardship, instead appealing a Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice's ruling against the union on First Amendment grounds.

A Curious Bylaw Change

But then last summer he proposed a series of union bylaw changes, which only those who were up to date on their dues payments could vote on. That immediately rendered more than half the union's 39,000 members ineligible, and a low return from those who were eligible meant that slightly more than 4,600 valid ballots were tallied. As a result, the bylaw changes passed, most important among them a proposal to move up the union's officers election by six months, with about 3,100 votes in favor—8 percent of Local 100's membership.

Under the change, the balloting would take place this month, but the tally would be put off until December —the normal time for vote-counting. The method to this screwball comedy began to become apparent during the past couple of months, when several members of Mr. Samuelsen's slate were told they were ineligible to run because they had not remained members in good standing for the 12 months prior to the election.

Had the voting stayed on its normal December schedule, more than a year would have passed from the time that automatic dues collection was restored to the point when ballots were mailed out, meaning that any candidates who had taken care of their previous arrears would have remained eligible. The change in election schedules was adopted in mid-July of last year, however, meaning those who were behind in dues payments at that point could not possibly have been in good standing for the required 12- month period prior to this week's start of voting.

It seemed as if Mr. Toussaint, who came of age in Brooklyn at a time when Meade Esposito was the corrupt baron of the borough's Democratic Party, had taken an election law page right out of that old scoundrel's book, using technicalities to get opponents thrown off the ballot. Compounding the bad appearance was the fact that several members running on the United Invincible slate backed by Mr. Toussaint had dues problems of their own yet were permitted to stay on the ballot.

Only Half of Members Can Vote

There was also the remarkable fact that the dues problems have led to half the membership being disenfranchised— just 20,600 ballots were scheduled to be sent out. A large part of the blame for that rests with individual members who for whatever reason didn't keep up with their dues payments, but it's also a commentary on how far Mr. Toussaint has fallen short of his pledge to bring union members together to strengthen Local 100.

At the time of his election nearly nine years ago, he lamented that the union had come to rely too much on its vice presidents and headquarters staff, saying, "They've allowed the most important part of the union to be deactivated, which is the shop floor."

That comment rings especially ironic because a program set up by Mr. Toussaint to develop activist shop stewards has been neglected for the past two years, a casualty of the organizational problems that resulted from the loss of dues check-off. It is one more indication of the damage done by his decision to strike, a move made particularly questionable because the union was taking a stand against officials—then-MTA Chairman Peter Kalikow and then-Governor George Pataki—who everyone knew would be gone slightly more than a year later.

Union Still Stuck in Mud

They moved on, a more unionfriendly pair of Governors and MTA leaders succeeded them, and Local 100 is still spinning its wheels in the mud, unable to regain its traction after the strike penalties. Mr. Toussaint and his aides were largely absent from the battle to produce an Albany bailout package to avert layoffs and minimize a transit fare hike.

When he was first elected, he said, "The riding public just got a good friend. This union will be far more a public advocate than it's ever been." Those words seemed especially hollow in recent months, however, with Mr. Watt, the union's representative at the MTA board, largely mute during debates over the draconian cuts in staff and service that were later averted.

Mr. Toussaint upon taking office was seen by many in the municipal labor movement as an eloquent but militant voice for workers' rights, someone tough enough to stand up to aggressive management tactics based on his own battles with NYC Transit over the years. He was also a labor leader less likely to put aside his beliefs for the sake of success at the bargaining table or in Albany, and an early and prescient opponent of the Bush Administration's plans to invade Iraq.

Undercut By Combativeness

But his combativeness has undercut his effectiveness. It's driven away intelligent allies who all too often were replaced in top positions by those more loyal than talented, carried him into an unnecessary, ill-advised strike, and corrupted his concept of a "great, fighting union" into one riven by divisions in which he has had to resort to lame maneuvers and technicalities to try to retain power.

Mr. Samuelsen sounded physically and emotionally weary last week as he spoke about taking a "beating over eligibility" as his slate scrambled to keep candidates on the ballot and replace those who were knocked off. "They fabricate one technicality and when we overcome that, they fabricate another," he said.

Mr. Tate went through the campaign without ever taking the role of union spokesman from the man he aims to replace, without debating, without saying anything more memorable than his comment at a meeting of his slate and its supporters in late March: "If you try to stop us from moving Local 100 forward, we will run you over." It sounded like maybe the United, Invincible slate should be renamed "United? Impossible!"

Yet the manner in which he and Mr. Toussaint have used incumbency as a cudgel against the Samuelsen slate has created a real possibility that Mr. Tate could win office, despite the failures of his sponsor's presidency over the past 3½ years. Mr. Samuelsen acknowledged that prospect, but said he was encouraged by the way in which he'd been received by members as he campaigned over the final week before the ballots went out.

"They're doing whatever they can to prevent us from appearing on ballots as a slate," he said of Mr. Toussaint and Mr. Tate. "It's a sign of desperation. They wouldn't be doing all these things if they weren't worried."

Or, for that matter, if Mr. Toussaint still believed the ideals he espoused less than a decade ago.

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