Labor

Transport Workers Take Fight to Bloomberg

Lindsay Beyerstein October 5, 2009

A TWU member pickets in December 2005 in the Bronx borough of New York. The city's transit workers continued their strike despite a court order fining their union $1 million per day during the stoppage.

Transport Workers Union Local 100 is making an unusual foray into electoral politics with its bare-knuckle campaign against incumbent New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

Historically, Local 100 hasn’t invested heavily in this kind of electoral activism. The threat of a subway strike in New York confers ample leverage. During the 2005 subway strike, Bloomberg disparaged Local 100 as a bunch of thugs. That remark still rankles, perhaps because the mayor’s choice of epithet struck Local 100 as racially loaded.

The rift between Local 100 and Bloomberg deepened this year after the mayor informally signed off on wage hikes for subway workers, but later slammed the union in public for making excessive demands. Many TWU members suspect that Bloomberg encouraged the MTA to fight the verdict of a state arbitration panel that awarded raises to TWU workers.

TWU created the iconic “Bloomzilla” image, depicting Mayor Mike rampaging through the city like the movie monster. The caption reads: “I don’t need NYC. NYC needs ME!”

Local 100 is backing Bloomberg’s challenger, William C. Thompson, Jr., a Democrat.

The New York City mayoral race is expected to be something of a snoozer. In 2005, Bloomberg trounced Democrat Freddie Ferrer by 19 percentage points.

Bloomberg is seen as a competent, technocratic manager. Being a self-financing billionaire media mogul doesn’t hurt his electoral prospects either. If history is any guide, Bloomberg will outspend his opponent by eight to one.

However, Bloomberg’s high-handed disregard for term limits left a bad taste in the mouths of many New Yorkers and may create an electoral vulnerability for him. TWU is proving to be an effective surrogate for the Thompson campaign, amplifying Thompson’s charges that the mayor is a power-mad bully who seeks to make himself mayor for life.

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Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist and In These Times staff writer who writes the blog Duly Noted. Her stories have appeared in Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. Her photographs have been published in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times’ City Room. She also blogs at The Hillman Blog (http://www.hillmanfoundation.org/hillmanblog), a publication of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, a non-profit that honors journalism in the public interest.