With Contract Expired, Potentially Powerful TWU Local 100 Remains an Enigma

It’s not unusual to hear a president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents nearly all subway and bus workers, and whose contract has been expired since May 15, say his union is at war with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Indeed, in one form or another, Local 100 presidents have been saying something similar since the days of Mike Quill.

Nor is that without cause.

Unlike most public employers, the MTA’s quasi-militarist management structure of harsh discipline led the transit system’s leading historian, Joshua Freeman, to write that, “an autocratic style of management seems built into the DNA” of Transit.

The MTA routinely demands concessions, and sometimes secures them. Most recently, it forced all Local 100 retirees into a Medicare Advantage plan, even as MTA workers represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union and the two supervisory unions retained traditional Medicare.

Previous concessions included an increase in the number of years to top pay. Transit workers are the only city-based public workers who pay part of their salary for basic healthcare benefits. It was the MTA’s demand for a worse pension plan for new hires that precipitated the 2005 transit strike.

Now, 2005’s MTA negotiator, Gary Dellaverson, is back leading the MTA’s bargaining team, this time as a paid consultant. Yes, that’s the same Gary Dellaverson whose refusal to negotiate reasonable contract terms led to the Long Island Railroad strike just two months ago.

This time, he and his bosses, MTA Chair Janno Lieber and New York Transit president Demetrius Crichlow, have a new bag of demands, including hiking out-of-pocket health benefit costs still further, limiting prescription coverage, making it harder to call out sick and stripping job pick rights from workers who have been hurt on the job.

In the meantime, they’ve been stepping up disciplinary harassment. A normal person might think it’s a good thing that a bus operator whose day extends over 12 or 13 hours, driving during morning and evening rush hours, takes a nap at the bus depot when they’re not actually driving their bus. More alert when they get back behind the wheel, right? Instead, in recent days, Transit has been raiding depots and suspending them!

These “pre-disciplinary suspensions,” are only supposed to apply when it’s too dangerous to allow the worker to stay on the job while their disciplinary hearings proceed. But the MTA has never felt that contractual rules applied to it.

One reply to Chiarello’s video urged the union, “to step in and get the beakies (Transit investigators) off our backs as we are losing a lot of members to extreme disciplinary actions.” But it’s not yet clear that new Local 100 president John Chiarello and his officer team have a plan to wrest a good contract from the MTA. (Chiarello never responded to my request to talk about the union’s bargaining demands.)

And, in the absence of a plan, what is apparent to Dellaverson and Lieber, because it is apparent to anyone paying attention, is that Local 100 is internally troubled, while it’s failed to cultivate potential allies.

Chiarello is the latest Local 100 president to ascend to his post by internal maneuvering and appointment by the union’s executive board rather than election by the members. Virtually his first act in office was to approve an almost quarter-million-dollar payoff to his predecessor, as The Chief detailed just last month.

That was followed soon after by the purge of the one Local vice president to object to this unprecedented bribe. Now, a second vice president is also up on charges and removal from his post.

Contract negotiations should be a time to mobilize members, to get them more engaged with the union, to encourage them to collective action. If this really is war, the real question is whether, and how, Local 100 is prepared to fight it – and with what goals.

But Chiarello’s three-minute video last week, which he admitted was “a long-awaited update,” only told members what the MTA wanted back – not what the union is fighting for. Then he warned members, “don’t give them an opportunity to discipline you. You can’t be too careful… Protect yourself and look out for each other.”

Is the union lowering expectations, so that fighting off some of the MTA demands will be framed as a victory?

Meanwhile, the Local’s political tactics leave me scratching my head. I can understand not endorsing Mayor Zohran Mamdani in last year’s Democratic primary; most unions missed that boat.

But why, oh why, didn’t it get on the victory train and endorse Mamdani – whose free bus proposal would lead to more bus operator jobs and protect them from disputes with riders – in the general election? Then, it compounded the error by not inviting Mamdani to its annual membership meeting, while welcoming the mayor’s political rivals, City Council Speaker Julie Menin and Comptroller Mark Levine.

When the Central Labor Council endorsed a May Day march, why did Local 100 not only spurn participation, but schedule its own rally for the same day? It would have been so easy to join forces and end the May Day march at the MTA’s 2 Broadway headquarters (instead of Federal Plaza), publicly demonstrating that the whole labor movement stood behind TWU.

Instead of looking out over a sea of tens of thousands of angry workers, the MTA saw the smallest Local 100 contract rally in years.

The flirtation with Republican Gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, and New York Daily News ads attacking Kathy Hochul, who controls the MTA Board, are also puzzling. Does the union expect Blakeman to win? And if he did, why would he be more generous than Hochul?

Traditionally, the Local’s done best either when it has cultivated a friendly relationship with the Governor – Roger Toussaint briefly with Elliot Spitzer; John Samuelsen for a longer period with Andrew Cuomo – or when it has been able to put its strike gun on the table for all to see. Neither seems true right now.

It gives me no joy to see my old union struggling.

We need a strong labor movement, and precisely because Local 100 has put its strike gun on the table in the past and its strikes are so impactful, it has sometimes been capable of leading municipal labor. The municipal unions need Local 100 to at least match the LIRR 4.5 percent, with no strings attached.

They need it to secure similar or greater raises in the following years, as inflation once again mounts. Public workers took a salary hit during the Covid inflation years; they can’t afford another.

So, please Local 100, put that gun on the table. Put some fear into the MTA. Demonstrate the power of your membership in the streets, and especially in the workplace.

All of labor will thank you for it.