United Front Organized to Fight MTA Bosses

Dear Workers Vanguard,

As readers of your paper, some of us in the Transit Workers for a Fighting Union (TWFU) caucus of Transport Workers Union Local 100 want to give your readership an update on our efforts to prepare our union brothers and sisters for the upcoming contract fight against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Forty thousand subway and bus workers covered under this contract toil every day with low pay, long hours, dangerous working conditions and brutal company discipline. The contract expires on May 16, so these next few months are critical for building rank-and-file power to secure real improvements. To that end, TWFU has joined other like-minded groups and individuals to forge a united front called Transit Workers for a Just Contract (TWJC).

As proud socialist militants, TWFU understands that the contract fight can’t be left solely in the hands of Local 100’s top officials, whose main aim seems to be lowering workers’ expectations and whose only strategy is to politely lobby Democrats and Republicans in Albany for a few more crumbs. At the local’s January 24 “Mass Membership Meeting,” the TWU brass prominently featured the opening speeches of two-faced Democratic Party politicians while completely muzzling the voices of the TWU membership. In fact, the event began with the union’s top lawyer threatening discipline against any worker disturbing the “peace and harmony” of the meeting.

TWJC is comprised of TWFU, the Loca1 100 Fightback Coalition, Transport Tribune, the Stronger Together caucus and the retiree group TWU 100 R. These groups united behind four central demands: (1) For three annual $5/hour wage hikes; (2) No givebacks and one year to top pay; (3) Stop the MTA’s abusive management and rehire victimized train operator Andy Valentine [see WV No. 1186, August 2025] and conductor Tramell Thompson; (4) Restore the Traditional Medicare option for retirees, which was a huge giveback by the union bureaucracy in the last contract. These demands are based on workers’ needs, not management’s bottom line.

“3x$5” Just to Stay Alive

TWJC is gaining traction with transit workers around the city, galvanized by united-front flyers emphasizing Local 100’s traditional motto “We Move New York” while adding “But We Can’t Afford to Live Here.” It continues:

We distributed thousands of these leaflets at the mass meeting and throughout the industry, while also passing out green-and-yellow “3x$5” buttons to popularize our wage demand. This dollar figure wage hike (unlike the bosses’ favored percentage figure) would grant the same purchasing power wage increase to every transit worker, from cleaner to technician, moving the whole union forward together. “3x$5” would also achieve pay parity for subway crews with workers at the commuter railroads. It makes up for decades of inflation and giveback contracts. It eases the burden for transit workers to actually live and work in this insanely expensive city.

Not surprisingly, we soon found out that the TWU leadership hates this demand because “3x$5” pushes hard against the MTA’s phony cries of poverty. TWFU members have heard from coworkers that Local 100’s unelected president John Chiarello told a recent train conductors division meeting that “3x$5” is “Impossible!” The division vice president representing subway crews and tower operators, Tramell Thompson (yes, the same person who we call for the MTA to rehire), dedicated two of his recent online videos to praising his boss Chiarello and heaping criticism on the TWJC demands, especially its popular wage demand.

Lobby Day Doesn’t Cut It

Every genuine union fight to improve workers’ jobs and livelihoods is a bullheaded struggle against the interests of the employers and the ruling class. Comfortable in their posts and fearful of both the state’s anti-strike Taylor Law and the Supreme Court’s union-busting Janus decision, the TWU bureaucracy has long followed the same dead-end script of lobbying the bosses’ supposedly “friendly politicians” every year and every contract. They work together with management to present giveback, “cost neutral” and sub-inflationary contract deals that they sell to an atomized and demoralized membership. Instead of organizing the angry rank and file to fight for desperately needed improvements, the pro-capitalist officials offer this year’s “Lobby Day” in Albany on March 25, going door to door begging politicians of both parties for mild reforms (many of them admittedly supportable).

It is not enough to decry bad working conditions in social media videos and make moral appeals to the powers that be. The MTA bosses believe that the system is running just fine, except for its allegedly troublesome and greedy wage slaves.

What we fight for is new union leadership that would unleash the collective power of TWU Local 100. We should now be organizing real mass meetings where transit workers can hammer out contract demands, elect rank-and-file committees, insist on open negotiations, discuss plans to authorize and implement well-prepared strike action, plan workplace and mass union demonstrations, etc.

TWFU aims to bring the union’s concerned, activist and militant workers together in the TWJC in order to fight for a better contract and rebuild our union from the ground up.