Transport Workers Union of America - Origins of The Union

Origins of The Union

When the union began organizing subway workers in New York in the early 1930s, two of the three subway systems were privately owned and operated. Earlier efforts to organize unions in the industry, generally along craft lines, had been beaten in 1905, 1910, 1916, 1919 and 1926. Most workers on the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) and the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) were represented by company unions, while the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Brotherhood of Railway Signalmen represented small pockets of skilled workers employed by the BMT.

When The Great Depression hit, public and private management took advantage of high unemployment rates by offering jobs to and keeping on only those individuals willing to accept excessively low wages, brutal management practices, poor working conditions, and other severe aspects. With the national unemployment rate reaching 25 percent, there were nearly 20,000 applicants for every one job in the transit industry.

Pay cuts of ten percent by both the IRT and the BMT, along with the layoff of thousands of employees and a speed up of work for those who remained, spurred new organizing efforts in 1932. Seven subway workers who belonged to Clan na Gael, a longstanding Irish nationalist organization that had received an influx of veterans of the Irish Republican Army in the 1920s, and who were inspired by the socialism and trade union work of James Connolly, met to discuss formation of a trade union. Used to the secrecy of Clan na Gael, they proceeded cautiously, first seeking help from Irish organizations, such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.

When those groups declined to involve themselves in something this controversial, the organizers approached the Communist Party. The Communist Party had, in fact, been making organizing efforts of its own among transit workers, beginning in 1933. John Santo and Austin Hogan, Trade Union Unity League organizers, met with the Clan na Gael's members in a cafeteria at Columbus Circle on April 12, 1934. The name that they chose for the new union was a tribute to the Irish Transport and General Workers Union led by Jim Larkin and Connolly twenty years earlier.

The new organization, founded during the CPUSA's ultrarevolutionary phase as part of the Third Period, focused both on organizing workers into the union and recruiting members for the Party through mimeographed shop papers with titles such as "Red Shuttle" or "Red Dynamo". The new union appointed Thomas H. O'Shea — who would later become a witness against it before the Dies Committee — as its first president.

The TWU declared its aim to represent all public transit workers in the City, regardless of craft, and campaigned to reverse the ten percent wage cut, increase wages to meet increases in the cost of living, limit the workweek to forty hours and hire more workers to eliminate the speedup and to establish safe and sanitary working conditions. The union proceeded clandestinely, forming small groups of trusted friends in order to keep informers at bay, meeting in isolated locations and in subway tunnels. Even so the IRT managed to infiltrate spies into the organization, as the union discovered when it obtained some of the company's files from sympathetic sources.

One of the workers who had been in attendance at that meeting, Michael J. Quill, quickly attained leadership in this fledgling organization. One of the few who was willing to accept identification as a union activist, he also spread the word about the new union by handing out flyers and delivering soapbox speeches in front of company facilities. His abilities in public speaking, and 'playing to the media' boosted his effectiveness and the overall draw of the union. Another prominent figure in early union history was Douglas McMahon, who led a group of lieutenants assisting Quill.

After a year of organizing, the union formed a Delegates Council, made up of representatives from sections of the system. The new union nearly foundered, however, when Santo and Hogan, delivering the news of a change in party line as the Third Period gave way to the Popular Front era, directed O'Shea and Quill to abandon efforts to form a new union and to run instead for office in the IRT company union, the Interborough Brotherhood. Quill denounced the plan vociferously, to the point that he was nearly expelled from the union. Quill came around, however, by the next party meeting and began attending Brotherhood meetings — while still recruiting workers there to joint the TWU.

TWU members succeeded, in fact, in turning Brotherhood meetings into a platform for the new union. The Brotherhood had agreed to a new pension program to replace the one that the IRT had created during the 1916 strike. The new plan, which went into effect in 1934, shifted most of the cost to workers. TWU activists attacked the plan and the pay cut from two years before at Brotherhood meetings that hundreds of IRT employees attended, taking over the platform at some meetings and holding large rallies outside the meeting hall in other cases.

The first significant strike by the newly formed union was in 1935. Previous strike attempts in 1905, 1910, 1916 and 1919 were crushed by the transit companies' use of beakies, hired goons who intimidated and violently attacked any who opposed the transit companies.

On July 9, 1935, however, the Squeegee Strike demonstrated the power of the union. Management at the Jerome Avenue barn in the Bronx attempted to make the cleaning crews work faster by forcing the use of a 14-inch squeegee instead of the customary 10-inch tool. When six Car Cleaners were fired for insubordination, a two-day walkout inspired by the TWU caused the mangament to acquiesce and reinstate the workers.

A second incident that helped establish the union's reputation among transit workers was initiated the next month by the IRT, when Quill and a number of colleagues were jumped by beakies at Grand Central Station. Strangely, this led to Quill and four other union activists, including Herbert C. Holmstrom, Thomas H. O'Shea, Patrick McHugh and Serafino Machado, being arrested for inciting a riot. The charges were later quickly dismissed by a court. Nonetheless, the incident was retold in the media and at various work locations, where it epitomized and typified the cumulative history of abuses suffered by transit workers throughout the city.

Organizing among the more dispersed transit workers outside the powerhouses, machine shops and car barns proved to more challenging. The union relied to some extent on the network of Clan na Gael members scattered throughout the IRT; those workers could appeal, using the prestige of their past association with the Irish Republican Army, to the thousands of Irish workers around them. The clandestine style of the IRA both aided in organizing fearful workers and attracted them by imbuing the organization with the mystique of secrecy and intrigue.

At the same time Santo and Hogan recruited transit workers into the Communist Party, which organized along similar lines. The party began taking a far less visible role, however, as the organizing drive picked up steam and as the party entered the Popular Front era. The Communist Party stopped publishing its shop papers after some workers complained that they were hurting the union's organizing drive. While Communisty Party members still provided much of the leadership for the union, they refrained from identifying themselves as such.

Later the party directed the union to seek affiliation within the American Federation of Labor, which it finally did in 1936, after unsuccessful negotiations with the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees, by becoming Lodge 1547 of the International Association of Machinists. The union did so, but did not relinquish any significant amount of its autonomy during what proved to be a short-lived relationship.