Dedicated to building a United Opposition to the current TWU Local 100 leadership based on principles of Democratic Accountability, Workers' Solidarity and Social Justice. But our current officials treat the union as a machine through which they can rise to enjoy management-like positions, with management-like paychecks, at the members’ expense! Today, our union’s officials make many times more than the highest paid workers do for a 40-hour work week. The fact that they are paid salaries that are not tied to members’ wages and conditions means they can accept lousy wage deals and other givebacks without feeling the effects themselves. With a union bureaucracy organized like this, it’s no wonder our current leaders so readily embrace the bosses’ divide and conquer logic and accept our continued sacrifice to save the NY ruling and political class and the MTA Bosses’ bottom line. Four infamous examples of this are how these traitorous "leaders":
● Stuck new-hires with the Tier 6 poverty pension rip-off,
● Entrenched management’s discrimination against cleaners by accepting their being singled out to start work at a lower percentage of their top-rate pay than all other transit workers,
● Outrageously collaborated with Governor Cuomo and the MTA bosses during the COVID-19 crisis by refusing to even fight for us to have proper PPE provided by our employer and abandoned any real fight for workplace safety enforcement, a betrayal which which directly to the deaths of over 173 transit workers!!!,
● And most recently, how they helped the MTA Bosses attack the Healthcare insurance benefits and coverage of NYC Transit Retirees to pay for the below-inflation crumbs they "negotiated" in our 2023 contract. We can’t afford a union leadership that uses the union to get ahead at the members’ expense. As we have learned through our recent tragic experiences, this kind of union leadership is literally killing us! We need a leadership that is committed to democratic decision-making at every level of the union, always encouraging debate and opposing censorship, and most importantly VIOLENCE and INTIMIDATION. That means recognizing that in the struggle to defend and improve the conditions of all members, a priority must be made to raise the conditions of transit workers who have been stuck with “second class” and “third class” wages and benefits. And it means championing the interests of members who face systematic discrimination, especially people of color, LGBTQIA+ and women workers. A Union leadership that doesn't understand that one of it's most important tasks is to organize a collective class-wide fight back against every attempt to divide workers and set them against each other in a war of all against all, cannot defend the class interests of any worker and is in fact paving the path of it's own destruction. We desperately need a leadership that is committed to uniting the members against the politicians’ and the MTA bosses’ attacks to fight for our real needs right now! A leadership that refuses to accept any more working class sacrifice to save the Bankers and Wall Street criminals who own over $47 billion in MTA bond debt---the real cause of all the MTA's never ending budget crises! That's why Local 100 Fightback was formed as a rank and file Transit worker led Coalition in September of 2018 in a United front attempt to do just that. In our earliest days as a Coalition we called for the necessity to build a United Opposition to the current Local 100 leadership based on the principles of Democratic Accountability, Workers' Solidarity and Social Justice. We issued "An Open Call to Discuss a United, Democratic Opposition to Utano & Co." (Available online at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VW658c0GM-a20hfRkPZ-zkw6QbU3mzb1/view?fbclid=IwAR23veARUKQjAHrMuf3sE82DP9tyUy-OpiUoPN8fN3kqndjk-UZRazho0AE) calling on all serious opponents of the Samuelsen/Utano/and now Davis union leadership to participate in meetings to discuss and decide on how we could build a united opposition based on worker's militancy, defiance and principles of Working Class Solidarity. We proposed an Opposition that represented a movement of the members from below and not just an election slate, and for that reason we called for meetings that would be open to all members committed to working to build such an alternative to Utano & Co., and not just potential candidates. The meetings we proposed would have discussed and voted on a program of basic principles that all candidates would be sworn to uphold, and then would have voted on what candidates should run for what positions. This would have for the first time put the rank and file members in control of what this Opposition represented and fought for before any of these officers were elected. It would have been a first step to build the basis for a union in which the membership actually democratically controlled their own union. Unfortunately, to this day, our attempt to build such a Democratically controlled and Accountable United Opposition slate has not been yet been achieved or even seriously considered by those who claim to represent an "Opposition" to the current Union leadership. But the Local 100 Fightback Coalition stands even more committed to this essential task of reforming and rebuilding the Opposition of this Union into an Independent, Truthful and Accountable leadership based on principles of Democratic Accountability, Workers' Solidarity and Social Justice. As we all have seen with the election of "Opposition" candidates like Eric Loegel and Canella Gomez in RTO and Lynwood Whichard in the Station's Departments, it is much harder to hold these officers accountable after they are elected than to demand accountability before they are elected. The whole union has suffered the consequences of the betrayals of these union officers made once elected precisely because they won election as members of unprincipled and undemocratic slates that made no effort to be held accountable to the membership before they were elected to office. The fight to learn from these mistakes and certainly not repeat them is one we remain committed to this day and forms the basis of the tradition we represent in the union movement in general. Throughout our history and work within the union as Shop Stewards and activists, we have also been at the forefront of leading fights for workplace safety and shutting down unsafe work, enforcing our current contractual and legal rights and educating our co-workers about those rights. At the same time we have also tried to show by our example the power we have as workers to collectively fight back, publicize our bosses unsafe working conditions and exploitation, build political and media pressure upon them and force them to make concessions by building united fights of transit workers with other workers and the riding public. This is because we know that the only way for any group of workers to really be successful in defending themselves required a fight for this kind of leadership for the working class and oppressed communities as a whole. A big part of living these principles and values is being able to show what Working Class Solidarity and Unity really looks like in action. Our Coalition has always made every effort to build the political and organizational connections between our fight for respect and fairness on the job as Transit workers with the struggles of all working people and oppressed communities. This means that when there are protests against Racist injustice and Police Brutality, Our Coalition Members are there in Solidarity, because the working class will never win any of our fights for justice if we are silent about racist injustice and don't show that we understand that this is our fight. It means when Amazon and other warehouse workers are fighting back against unsafe working conditions related to COVID-19 that endanger their lives, our Coalition members are there to support their fightback. It means when NYSNA Nurses and other Hospital workers are organizing rallies exposing the lack of PPE and Staffing levels that are literally killing them, Local 100 Fightback Coalition members are there to support them because we want all workers to know they are not alone and that transit workers support them and have their backs. This is also why we have repeatedly united with Progressive Action, another rank and file led activist group in our Union to help build and support their yearly Transit Worker Assault Rallies to bring attention and demand action in response to the rising and unacceptable unsafe working conditions we face as NYC Transit workers. When our boss-loving Union "leadership" refused for months in 2019 to lead any Contract Struggle at all, we also organized with Progressive Action to lead the first Contract Rally at MTA Headquarters at 2 Broadway on September 25, 2019. Whenever there has been any attempt to build unity among the different Opposition groups within Local 100 we have been ready and willing to build the widest possible unity and we have never let our political differences become an obstacle to building that unity. We have never demanded any Union officer positions as a condition for unity or demanded any perks or privileges as a condition for building unity. In fact, we have always fought for rank and file union members to democratically decide who should run for what office and what leaders they trusted to lead our Union forward. In an era of Trump and MAGA Fascism and rising authoritarian governments around the world, the working class faces historic attacks on our most basic democratic and union rights and the rights of immigrants and other oppressed communities. In part because of these existential threats, we have come to understand that we can never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This means that even when we cannot convince other members of the Opposition in our Union to agree to fully honoring democratic principles and even when we have big political differences with them that have huge consequences, we have committed ourselves to never put any unnecessary obstacles in the way of building the widest Unity possible RIGHT NOW to defend ourselves and our class. So if that means that we can unite around trade union issues like the refusal to agree to concessions or givebacks to fund corporate welfare, the defense of union members' democratic or political rights, to defend union members from violence or intimidation by their own union leaders, then we will do everything possible to build such unity. This is because we believe in our class and it's ability to learn from it's own collective experiences of united struggles. And we also understand that workers consciousness is not fixed and can be changed and shaped by concrete lessons they learn through their own experiences about what strategies and tactics work to create real and lasting change. There can be no more convincing argument about why democratic principles and accountability are essential for our class to win, than by going through experiences of working class struggles side by side with our co-workers.
