Transport Workers Union of America - Public Ownership

Public Ownership

The union soon faced a serious challenge to its newly-won status as representative of the employees of the IRT and BMT when the City bought those lines in 1938. The union had already discovered that the City Board of Transportation, which ran the smaller Independent Subway System (IND), was as dismissive of unions as the private lines, even though two of the three members had union backgrounds before they entered politics.

Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who had represented the Amalgamated Clothing Workers as a lawyer in private practice twenty years earlier, and who had received labor's support in running for Mayor of New York, was likewise hostile to any union of city employees that could not be bent to his will and contemptuous of those that could. Even though the TWU, in coalition with the Amalgamated Association, swept the election to determine which union should represent the IND's employees, the Board refused to bargain with it. La Guardia invited the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen to represent the motormen, but had to retreat when Roy Wilkins of the NAACP pointed out that this brotherhood did not allow African-American workers to join, while the TWU did. The union's organizing drive on the IND, however, stalled in the face of official opposition.

The City's plan to buy the IRT and BMT threatened even greater problems, however, since the City, as prospective employer, not only threatened to refuse to recognize the TWU, but argued that collective bargaining was inappropriate for civil service employees. In addition, public ownership would make both the closed shop and the right to strike unlawful.

The union, faced with a challenge to its very existence, threatened to strike if the Mayor went through with this plan. With the support of the national CIO, the union was able to maintain its collective bargaining agreements and the right to represent the IRT and BMT employees after the City took over those systems in 1940. The union soon found itself struggling with the special problems of creating a civil service system for thousands of employees, while providing representation for thousands of workers who faced problems with meeting the City's new naturalization and medical requirements. But the union lost ground among its members, both in terms of actual numbers after it lost the closed shop and in terms of actual support, since many workers who may have remained members saw the union as less important now that they had the seeming job security that civil service status promised and the union had lost the right to strike.

The union did not, however, concede the last point. After winning a contentious strike against the privately owned bus companies in early 1941, during which La Guardia had announced plans to have the police guard strikebreakers in the event that the companies attempted to operate, the union made public preparations for a strike against the City if it challenged the union's right to represent these employees or to roll back their contract rights. La Guardia responded by directing the Police Department to develop plans to run the subways in the event of a strike and supporting legislation that made it a crime for workers to leave transit equipment unattended. La Guardia went further and announced that while workers could choose organizations to represent them, the City had no obligation to recognize those organizations as the exclusive representative of those workers or to engage in collective bargaining with them.

In the end the adversaries resolved their differences, but in a very ambiguous way, through intermediaries, without actually settling the key issues. With the intervention of the Roosevelt administration and the national leadership of the CIO, the City agreed, in a series of telegrams exchanged in June, 1941 between LaGuardia and Philip Murray of the CIO, to maintain the status quo under the collective bargaining agreements with the TWU that the City had assumed, while agreeing to disagree as to whether they would bargain in the future. The parties also differed on practical details: the City took the position that promotions would be made according to Civil Service requirements, the CIO took the position that seniority provisions would still govern. The union not only survived, but regained much of the ground it had lost among transit workers during the next four years.