Transport Workers Solidarity Committee

What Killed Roger Rebel? A Self-Inflicted Wound of NYC TWU 100 President

http://www.thechief-leader.com/news/2009-12-18/Editor's_"Razzle_Dazzle"_Column/What_Killed_Roger_Rebel_A_SelfInflicted_Wound.html

What Killed Roger Rebel? A Self-Inflicted Wound

By RICHARD STEIER
In the 1974 movie “The Gambler,” the title character, Axel Freed, is asked by a bookmaker how he, a Harvard-educated college professor, could have gotten himself $44,000 in debt with his betting.

Axel, played by James Caan, replies, “I maneuvered.”

That is essentially how Roger Toussaint squandered a career as a labor leader that once glowed with promise and became so radioactive among his own members that his hand-picked successor was handily defeated by John Samuelsen Dec. 7 in the Transport Workers Union Local 100 election.

It didn’t matter that Mr. Toussaint and his cohorts did everything they could to stack the deck to protect their power, including a try at some chicanery on the morning of the actual vote-count. They managed to get so many of the union’s 37,000 members either declared ineligible to vote or too alienated to bother that only a shade over 10,000 took the trouble to mail in ballots. Nine years earlier, Mr. Toussaint by himself got 12,465 votes, justifying his claim that he had been given a mandate by his rank and file.

FROM SAVIOR TO SCHEMER: Roger Toussaint came to power as president of Transport Workers Union Local 100 pledging to empower members and revitalize a ‘great fighting union,’ but as his support dwindled following the failed 2005 transit strike he increasingly resorted to machinations aimed at preserving power by disenfranchising his political opponents.
An Accelerating Descent

In the time since then, however, he went through all that good will like a gambler on a spree, losing it, as a Hemingway character once said, “gradually and then suddenly.”

By the end of his first term, one of his closest allies was running against him as the most-visible example of a mounting list of union officials who earned Mr. Toussaint’s wrath by expressing a point of view different from his own.

It might have been glossed over as an inevitable product of the friction that can develop when a union leader, knowing he’s the one who shoulders the burden of making crucial decisions and takes the flak if they are wrong, bristles when one of his loyalists suggests he isn’t sharing power enough.

But Mr. Toussaint’s quarrels even at that relatively early point had spread beyond his erstwhile supporters, as he made clear that he wasn’t sure his members were smart enough to be worthy of a leader like him. Two years into his tenure, negotiating his first contract with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, he hinted at a strike but refrained from pulling the trigger when the contract deadline came, and later that morning got an offer reasonable enough to make a deal.

It wasn’t a breakthrough by any means: to fix a major shortfall in the union’s health fund that he had inherited from his predecessor, he was forced to forgo a first-year wage increase under the three-year agreement. It was solid enough to warrant ratification, not celebration, and it gained the approval of 60 percent of the union members who voted.

Rather than characterizing this as a good debut, Mr. Toussaint at some length lamented that too many of his members had allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by his political opposition, and vowed to better educate them for the future.

At the end of 2003, he gained re-election by the same margin that the contract was approved, but lost several key positions on the Local 100 executive board. Given his acrimonious relations with then-TWU International President Sonny Hall, some would have taken that result as a sign that he should mend a few fences if he wanted to consolidate his hold on the union, but not Mr. Toussaint. He continued to exact a price from those who disagreed with him.

A Fateful Building Sale

During the 2002 contract talks, he had been infuriated by a rebellion in the private bus line ranks led by a union official who was close to Mr. Hall, blasting it as a hurtful distraction at a time when everyone’s energy should be focused on improving wages and benefits. Yet shortly before the 2005 negotiations grew urgent, Mr. Toussaint created a distraction of his own by agreeing to sell Local 100’s West End Ave. headquarters for $60 million.

Speculation abounded as to his motives. Was he planning to lead a strike and figuring the money from the sale could tide the union over for an extended period when it lost dues check-off rights? Was he liquidating a key asset to ensure that it couldn’t be seized to satisfy a strike-related judgment against the union?

Mr. Samuelsen, a Track Inspector whose skills at bringing grievance cases had endeared him to Mr. Toussaint, questioned whether this was the right time to be making a major decision on the building sale, and asked at a union meeting that the issue be tabled until after a wage contract was reached.

This was too much for Mr. Toussaint; it constituted doubt, which to his mind bordered on disloyalty. Mr. Samuelsen was not only challenging his judgment but doing it in a room full of other union officials. That was outrageous, and might prove contagious as well unless dealt with severely. Mr. Samuelsen was banished from his inner circle, an object lesson to all others that Mr. Toussaint would not tolerate being asked to explain or justify his decisions. (A couple of years later, the building was sold again for $30 million more than Mr. Toussaint got for it. The union continues to occupy space there but has no permanent home.)

And that same lack of debate figured into how the strike happened not long after. Mr. Toussaint had the guts to lead his members out but enough caution to realize it was not something to be done casually: about a month before the walkout he said in an interview that the trick was to convince management you were willing and able to go, giving the MTA incentive to offer you a viable alternative. But while there was discussion among the select few to whom he listened when it suited him about the MTA’s proposal and its bargaining posture, one that seemed to be daring him to strike, he ultimately reached the conclusion that it was time to toss the grenade on his own and presented it to them as a fait accompli.

Wrong Time for a War

Prudence would have seemed to lay in taking the MTA up on its offer of binding arbitration. Governor Pataki was about to begin his final year in office, and it was already expected that Eliot Spitzer would be elected to replace him, meaning a change in MTA management that figured to thaw out the relationship with Local 100. Arbitration presented a forum where the union didn’t figure to get hurt in the interim.

But from the time he ran for office, Mr. Toussaint had talked about making Local 100 into the “great fighting union” it had been under Michael J. Quill, who became an immortal labor leader for the 1966 transit strike that welcomed in the mayoralty of John Lindsay and died shortly afterward. That spared Mr. Quill from any legacy re-evaluations that might have occurred if his cantankerous nature at some later date had brought him into conflict with his subordinates.

Conditions were significantly different than what Mr. Quill had faced nearly 40 years earlier. For one thing, the Taylor Law was a much more effective tool of punishment for publicemployee strikes than the harsher Condon-Wadlin Law had been. Perhaps as importantly, the TWU contract that spurred the 1966 strike ended on Jan. 1; this time Local 100 would be striking at the heart of the holiday shopping season, meaning a much greater inconvenience to the general public.

A Dare He Couldn’t Refuse

However much Mr. Toussaint weighed these factors, they didn’t balance his conviction that management was challenging his manhood, basically daring him to strike. And so he led the charge, taking his members out before dawn on Dec. 20, right into the cannon fire of negative media coverage and mayoral condemnation.

He ended the strike 60 hours later, on the afternoon of the 22nd, later saying that the time had come to “get out of Dodge” before the strike blasted Christmas to smithereens and led Mayor Bloomberg and the business community to seek the same fate for the union. Working with mediators, he was able to craft a tentative contract settlement that provided some significant gains for his members beyond the wage increases.

But it also required that Local 100 members for the first time pay a portion of their health premiums, with the amount to be set based on their earnings, including overtime. Mr. Toussaint had called that a potential strike issue, along with the MTA’s alternative demand that he accept an inferior pension plan for future members. He argued that it was fairer to extract a little bit of pain from the entire membership than to require the “unborn” to shoulder the entire load, but the rank and file didn’t necessarily share that view. Most of them believed they were striking to avoid the health-benefit hit, and so his acceptance of the giveback, no matter what gains he’d made in other areas, stamped the strike as a failure, one that would also cost them six days’ pay under the 2-for-1 employee strike penalty required under the Taylor Law.

An Exile Comes Home to Roost

Yet it also seemed clear that rejecting the contract would not lead to better terms. And so the deal might have been ratified due to a general sense of resignation, except that Mr. Toussaint’s knee-jerk reaction to Mr. Samuelsen’s questioning the building sale became the first excommunication that visibly came back to bite him on the posterior.

Already cast out of the flock, Mr. Samuelsen had little to lose in vigorously opposing ratification. The proposed pact was rejected by just seven votes out of more than 22,000 cast; there seems little question that he swung far more votes than that margin against the deal.

Mr. Toussaint was bloodied but unrepentant, and insisted that the vote did not mean that only half his members still supported him. He stuck to that belief even after winning a third term in late 2006 with just 45 percent of the vote, saved by the fact that he had four challengers who split the anti-Roger ballots.

The bad choices continued to mount. After dues check-off rights were suspended in June 2007, even the discovery that many of his members were angry enough over the outcome of the strike that they wouldn’t voluntarily make payments to the union didn’t humble Mr. Toussaint. Rather than seek relief in Brooklyn Supreme Court based on financial hardship, which would have had to be accompanied by a pledge not to strike again, he based his case for check-off restoration on the First Amendment. And so, where the 1980 strike lasted 11 days but dues rights were reinstated after a penalty of just over four months, the three-day walkout resulted in a check-off loss that lasted 17 months. And in the end, he also made the no-strike pledge.

A Way to Disenfranchise

Somewhere along the way, Mr. Toussaint seemed to decide that this devastating financial blow to the union could be converted into a political opportunity. Since a majority of those who balked at keeping current on their dues were likely to vote against him, it was to his advantage for them to fall so far behind that they couldn’t catch up even if they wanted to in order to regain eligibility to vote in the next Local 100 election.

And when Mr. Samuelsen urged members to pay their dues no matter their feelings about Local 100’s leadership but also noted that they had a right to expect that leadership to be accountable, Mr. Toussaint argued that he was really telling them not to pay dues and used it as an excuse to fire him as a shop steward. There would be other cases in which potential opposing candidates were ruled ineligible to run because of supposed dues arrears, even when they produced evidence that they were up to date.

And in the summer of 2008, Mr. Toussaint pushed through a bylaw change—approved by less than 10 percent of his rank and file—allowing the election to be conducted this June, but with ballots not to be counted until December.

From Revolutionary to Wheedler

There were several theories as to why he sought what appeared to be a screwball process, and all of them pivoted on some political advantage for Mr. Toussaint. And so the man who had come to power as a kind of revolutionary trade-unionist vowing to mobilize his members to better take on management was now resorting to the sort of Byzantine election-law antics generally associated with the Brooklyn Democratic Party. It now was obvious that Mr. Toussaint was less intent on leading a movement than on creating a cult of personality.

By then, it was the only way he could have maintained power: his long-ago promise to develop and then empower a large shop-steward cadre had initially sputtered and, in the wake of the union financial cuts required when dues check-off was lost, fizzled out. A man who spoke often about taking the long view and had tried to implement that belief in his contract bargaining had been thwarted by his short-sighted, short-fused decision to strike.

But the scheming and wheedling on the staggered election process continued right up through the vote count last week. On the morning when the ballots were to be opened, Mr. Toussaint’s United Invincible slate sought to have disqualified roughly 400 votes from those who had been union members when they cast ballots in June but subsequently left the bargaining unit, either because they were promoted out of it or departed the transit system altogether.

Couldn’t Have It Both Ways

Given that the revised election rules barred those members who weren’t current on dues when the June vote was held from becoming eligible to vote if they were paid up in full by the time that ballots were being given to new employees, this was an astounding attempt to tilt the process once more. It was rejected, and it turned out Mr. Samuelsen had enough votes to win even if all the ballots at issue had been tossed and all came from his supporters.

One reason he won was that Mr. Toussaint’s Maximum Leader governing style had ensured that he chose a potential successor who was no threat to his ultimate authority. Curtis Tate, who led the UI slate, never established himself as independent of Mr. Toussaint, in part because he rarely spoke to reporters, raising questions as to whether he could be the public face of the union in any context more complex than a speech at a rally where the primary requirement was to sound militant.

He had a reputation for affability, but anyone expecting that he might be a kinder, gentler president than his patron found scant evidence in the local’s operations after he became Acting President when Mr. Toussaint took a position with the TWU of America a year ago. When Darlyne Lawson, the recording secretary who came to power on Mr. Toussaint’s slate nine years ago, had her car taken away earlier this month, she said she was told it was on Mr. Toussaint’s order. When she reminded Mr. Tate that he was supposed to be running Local 100’s day-to-day affairs, she said he responded that she wasn’t going to put him in the middle of her dispute with Roger.

Still Settling Scores

Despite the local’s claim that this was just a routine recycling of officer vehicles, it seemed clear that this was Mr. Toussaint, settling scores to the end, punishing a long-time loyalist who had incurred his wrath three years earlier when she balked at giving up her position to run for a vice presidency he thought could not be won by any other supporter.

That’s an old, ordinary kind of political dispute, with the boss expecting his subordinate to defer to his judgment about what’s good for the organization. She was rewarded for her defiance by being pushed as far from his orbit as one of the union’s top officers could be, but toward the end Mr. Toussaint decided that wasn’t penalty enough, and had her notified the week of Thanksgiving that she was losing the union car that took her between the local’s headquarters and her home in Rockland County.

It was an example of the basic character flaw that prevented Mr. Toussaint from becoming what a man of his intelligence and drive might have been for Local 100 and the labor movement at large.

He was so intent on fighting internal battles that he neglected to build a lasting organizational structure that empowered union shop stewards. Lacking that ability to transmit his message down the line to his rank and file, he left himself vulnerable to attacks from his critics, most notably in reaction to the post-strike contract, the rejection of which produced no tangible gains for Local 100 members and delayed by nearly a year their receiving the first-year raise under the deal.

Lack of Dialogue Hurt Him

And his attempts to stifle disagreements, which extended even to boycotting this newspaper because it printed letters from Local 100 dissidents, made it harder to consolidate his support in the union. Had he been more tolerant of those who spoke up against his policies, he might have convinced his members that they were wrong; he might even have won over some of those critics had he engaged in a meaningful dialogue in which they believed that at least they were given a fair shot to be heard.

Nine years ago, in the flush of their victory, Steve Downs, one of the prime movers behind the insurgent New Directions slate headed by Mr. Toussaint, spoke of reaching out to the incumbent union officers who had won re-election.

“We have to make clear that as long as they’re doing a good job, they’ll have the backing of the union,” he said. “We have to, in many ways, build a new union in the shell of the old.”

Last week, Mr. Downs was re-elected as head of the Train Operators Division, running on a slate with Mr. Samuelsen, who in the first euphoria of his victory offered a variation on those remarks.

Asked what it said about Mr. Toussaint’s tenure that the same statement could be applied when he left as when he took power, Mr. Downs said, “I certainly wouldn’t say that Roger didn’t have any accomplishments, because he did. But nine years after he took office, I would say that the union is in worse shape than it was when we got here.”

‘Didn’t Honor Members’ Will’

He continued, “One of the reasons is that he didn’t make good on that promise to honor the will of the members and the people they selected as their representatives. The fruit of that is a weaker union. I think John and those who were elected with him— many of whom were victims [of Mr. Toussaint’s high-handedness]—have learned a lesson from that and know the union paid a price for it. We’ll make some mistakes, I’m sure [in the new administration]. I’m hoping that we avoid that one.”

Mr. Samuelsen, still digesting that evening’s victory, said, “It’s surreal. It’s been such a long fight.”

In a larger context than he could provide on election night, it was the final half of Mr. Toussaint’s tenure that was surreal. Mr. Samuelsen’s victory offered the hope that there really was a light at the end of the tunnel.