MTA chairman Jay Walder and Transport Workers Union Local 100 president John Samuelsen, both new to their jobs, got together for their first meeting in mid- January.
On the agenda: the broad disagreements about the MTA’s budget policies over the next year and what that will mean for the union’s workforce.
The day after the meeting Walder said he felt he would be able to work with the new leader of the city’s subway and bus workers, given all his stridently anti-MTA public rhetoric.
“He has pledged to do so, and I have pledged to do so,” said Walder, projecting optimism. “But we’re both new to our jobs, so we’re finding our way.”
Samuelsen offered a darker assessment.
“We have diametrically opposite positions on a whole array of issues,” Samuelsen said. “It’s not going to be personally hostile. But we’re not going to just roll over, either.”
The new head of the 37,000-member union, who got his start as a track inspector, won election after a heated campaign that accused the previous administration of being too close to the MTA management— an assertion that might come as a surprise to New Yorkers who lived through the 2005 transit strike led by his predecessor, Roger Toussaint.
At the same time, Samuelsen comes into the job at a time when the MTA is reeling from a $400 million budget gap and is threatening layoffs.
Samuelsen said that in recent years the union’s anti-democratic leadership structure made it so the union actually was often fighting itself rather than fighting the MTA.
“Once we started doing that, we had no strength to compel management,” Samuelsen said, in an interview at the office he recently took over from Toussaint. “So the only alternative was to try and develop a relationship with the company and curry favor.”
That line of argument helped Samuelsen handily defeat Toussaint’s hand-picked successor, Curtis Tate, in early December. He has since appointed Tate to the union’s political action committee, in a gesture toward this newly democratic spirit.
Samuelson also enters office on the heels of an arbitrator’s ruling that Local 100 members should receive 11-percent raises over the next three years, despite the MTA’s financial woes.
In the MTA budget released in December, 700 layoffs of unionized workers were proposed. But instead of laying off union members, Samuelsen believes money should instead be diverted from the MTA’s capital budget in order to cover an operational deficit. Walder, however, is adamantly opposed to the idea and has spent much of his time looking for inefficiencies in the workforce.
Samuelsen was readying for a fight against management and he said that his experience so far with Walder has only reinforced a reputation that preceded him.
“Walder’s reputation from his experience in London is that he will come into town and try to balance his budget on the backs of organized labor,” Samuelsen said.
As the relationship between Walder and Samuelsen develops, others note that Toussaint also came into office with a strongly anti-MTA message, only to develop a relationship with MTA leadership in later years. Bill Henderson, executive director at the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, suggested the same dynamic could occur eventually between Samuelsen and Walder.
“Roger Toussaint came into office with a reputation as a firebrand kind of guy too,” Henderson said. “Eventually, the relationship changed.”
As the MTA goes through a period of fiscal crisis, Samuelsen said, his main task is now to empower the union rank and file politically in order to fight expected layoffs.
Samuelsen says he has personal experience with the anti-democratic nature of the union under Toussaint. During the early years of Toussaint’s tenure, Samuelsen worked his way into the president’s inner circle. But they had a falling out just weeks before the disastrous 2005 strike over Toussaint’s decision to try selling TWU Local 100’s longtime headquarters on West End Avenue, even as negotiations with the city were growing intense.
At a meeting of the union’s leadership, Samuelsen said the sale was a distraction from the real work at hand, and should be tabled until after the contract situation was resolved. For his disloyalty, Toussaint stripped Samuelsen of his well-paying administrative position and sent Samuelsen back to his old job as a track inspector.
“And that’s how we got here today,” said Samuelsen.
During the campaign for Toussaint’s replacement, the two
were openly hostile towards one another. Toussaint at one point referred to Samuelsen as “mentally ill.”
Samuelsen filed a defamation lawsuit.
With the campaign over, Toussaint, who has taken a position with the national Transit Workers Union, declined to comment about his old nemesis.
“I have no need to speak over Mr. Samuelsen, and I wish them all well,” Toussaint said.
Since taking office, Samuelsen has taken steps he believes will make the union more democratic and encourage a healthy level of dissent. He also said that going forward, the union also would spend less money on expensive lobbyists and instead encourage the rank and file to meet with lawmakers and to run for office themselves.
All of this, he said, would help the union more aggressively confront Walder and the MTA.
“I’m a hardened trade union democrat, and I believe in it wholeheartedly,” Samuelsen said. “There’s no pure power in a system where members are kept in the dark and only a few officials are entitled to make decisions for a 40,000member union.”
