Hal Friedman over at The Daily Gotham [1] explained to me how the Taylor Laws wa passed to make government unions legal. What did they have to relinquish for the right to unionize? You got it, the right to strike. The strike was illegal, but we have had strikes and slowdowns by city government workers before. This time around demographics changed everything and I don't think that it's a coincidence that the Transit Workers Union was one of the few labor unions to endorse Fernando Ferrer.

Fernando Ferrer represents the dream of "Middle Class America" to a lot of Latinos in New York City. The Transit Workers Union has become the anchor of minorities in the city's labor movement. The TWU represents in many ways the dream of getting up from some of the most menial and thankless jobs in New York City and through the doors of the working middle class ranks; just like white minorities have done since the 1930s when Italian, Polish, Irish and countless European Jews did in the last century.

Still showing signs of good journalism, The New York Times just published today an excellent article that explores the racist overtones of the media and government attacks against the union:

[via Race Bubbles to the Surface in Standoff - New York Times [2]]:

But for all the accusations and counter-accusations, clues of a simmering racial tension have hovered over the contract negotiations between the union and the transit authority all along.

Mr. Toussaint, for instance, continued yesterday to cast the strike as part of a broader movement for social justice and invoked the civil rights movement, as he often does in his calls to respect the dignity of his workers. "Had Rosa Parks answered the call of the law instead of the higher call of justice, many of us who are driving buses today would instead be at the back of the bus," he said.

Mr. Toussaint added that he was the one who pointed out that the authority did not honor the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The authority, in its offer on Monday night, agreed to create such a holiday, an action estimated to cost $9 million a year. Indeed, the politics of the strike are in some ways embedded in the broader demographic changes in the city. Mr. Toussaint, who is originally from Trinidad, leads a union, now dominated by blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans, whose members were once mostly of European descent.

"Clearly race is a subtext of much of what has happened in city politics, in the ethnic succession within unions and city agencies," said Douglas A. Muzzio, a professor at the Baruch School of Public Affairs, who said he saw nothing inherently racial in the use of the term thuggish.

Among members of the Transport Workers Union, however, there is a real and bitter sense that city leaders speak of them differently from members of other unions, like those of police officers and firefighters, whose memberships are whiter.

New York Daily News, of all newspapers, has been incredibly dissapointing in the tone and the level of outright prejudice thrown the way of Roger Toussaint, head of the Transit Workers Union. They called for his head, to put him behind bars for being arrogant and not wanting to back-down :

[via New York Daily News - Home - Editorials: Stop the strike dead in its tracks [3]]:

Pataki and Bloomberg must ask a judge to:

# Jail Toussaint and his bull-headed lieutenants.

# Impose fines on the TWU that double daily and are large enough to bankrupt the union within days.

# Hit every transit worker who walks with a penalty of two days' pay for every day out, as the law allows.

Now, mind you, this paper is the home of writers like Juan Gonzalez, ER Shipp and Stanley Crouch. This is not a "whites only" newspaper at all. Actually, I find their mix of opinion writers one of the best in the nation. But still, I am appalled at how vitriolic that paper turned against Toussaint. [4] | [5] | [6] | [7] | [8] | [9]