NYC TWU Dissident Alleges Special Treatment Claim TWU Tilts Election

http://www.thechief-leader.com/news/2008/0523/news/007.html

Dissident Alleges Special Treatment
Claim TWU Tilts Election

By ARI PAUL

A candidate in a division election at Transport Workers Union Local 100 has claimed that the union's leadership is unfairly playing favorites by putting his opponent on release time and giving him lists of members in good standing with voting rights.

JOHN CHIARELLO: Local 100 playing favorites.
Line Equipment and Signal Division Recording Secretary John Chiarello is running against New York City Transit Signal Maintainer Shawn Welcome for one of the division's three executive board positions. The board position has been vacant since April 2007, when Richard Conte left the bargaining unit for a management position. Division rep Pete Foley, who is aligned with Mr. Chiarello, is running against Eli Harris, another division rep, for the vice chair position.

More Time to Campaign

But Mr. Chiarello, who was elected on the dissident Rail and Bus slate in December 2006, said that his opponent was put on release time, freeing him from his NYC Transit duties and giving him more time to campaign.

"Immediately after announcing his candidacy for the e-board position, Signal Maintainer Welcome was put on union release April 30," Mr. Chiarello said in a letter to Local 100 Recording Secretary Darlyne Lawson. "I feel this is a deliberate attempt to undermine the election. Prior to announcing his candidacy I had never seen Signal Maintainer Welcome at a single union meeting."

The candidates have until May 23 to submit petitions with the signatures of 225 members in good standing in their division in order to be on the ballot. Mr. Chiarello also claimed that union staffers involved in the dues-collection campaign were aiding Mr. Welcome in his run for executive board member.

"There's an unlevel playing field," he said in a phone interview last week. "Every other person who's working with this guy has the ability to look at who's paying their dues. To me, it's a very big violation of the election."

Welcome: 'I'm a Fighter'

Spokesmen for the union did not comment on Mr. Chiarello's allegations. Mr. Welcome described himself as a veteran Local 100 activist.

"Shawn Welcome has been fighting management on the job every day for 10 years," his campaign literature stated. "Eli Harris is a veteran of workers' struggles with the Guyana Mine Workers union."

While their campaign focused on loyalty to Local 100's leadership, a flyer for Signal Maintainers Foley and Chiarello took the opposite tack, promising to "hold the union accountable" and calling for financial transparency, especially in regard to the sale of the union's Upper West Side headquarters and management of the child-care fund.

Mr. Chiarello is a vocal critic of Local 100 President Roger Toussaint and raised the ire of the union's leadership after he made public criticisms in February related to the union's depletion of the child-care fund. Later that month, the union blasted the division recording secretary for allegedly circumventing Local 100 protocol in a campaign to gather sick-leave and vacation donations for a member with cancer, insinuating that he wanted to claim all the credit and blame the union for inaction.

In his letter to Ms. Lawson, Mr. Chiarello called into question whether Mr. Welcome had fully paid his dues and was therefore eligible to hold an elected office.

"I am also petitioning to see Signal Maintainer Welcome's record of dues payment," he said. "You can furnish him with mine if that is a problem."