Remembrances Of Transit Strikes Past
by Thomas Cogan

Michael J. Quill at left and Matthew Guinan at right, past presidents of the TWU.

It’s likely that a transit strike has either begun or is still a threat as this week’s Gazette is published. If it has begun it will probably last several days. I could be too optimistic. Could it, once begun, last indefinitely?

I’m old enough to have been through two previous transit strikes—three, actually; there was, I dimly recall, a walkout in December 1958 that lasted a day or two. In those days, the Transport Workers’ Union contract came up every other year, just before the end of the year, so that short strike in 1958 was a warning of what might happen if New Year’s Day arrived and the union and the city had not come to an agreement. Also in those days, the Transport Workers’ Union was led by Michael J. Quill. I repeat the union’s name in full, rather than resorting to the TWU abbreviation, because it’s so easy to remember Quill’s voice as he declaimed the noble cause of “the Trahnsport Worrrkers’ Yooonyun” in a brogue he reputedly reinvigorated with annual trips to Ireland. It was also alleged that each biennial crisis was a dramatization, and that the mayor of New York and Quill would make a settlement behind the scenes each time and announce it to an anxious public that could then proceed to its New Year’s Eve celebrations.

The mayor during that time was Robert F. Wagner Jr., a man as exciting as bread pudding but generally sympathetic to the TWU and other unions. He didn’t run for reelection in 1965, a year in which the contract was due for renewal. John V. Lindsay ran and won. He, unlike Wagner, was tall and handsome, with a strong speaking voice, and was the first candidate in several decades to run for mayor as a Republican and win. It was instant hatred as far as Quill was concerned, and Lindsay, though not yet mayor, was intolerant of a back-room deal anyway, so the crisis was at last real. A strike was declared at midnight on December 31, hours before Lindsay’s inaugural ceremony. New Year’s Day 1966 was a Saturday, so on January 3 millions headed for work any way they could, deprived of buses and subways. I came in from the suburbs on the Long Island Rail Road and settled for the duration in an apartment my brother was sharing on Second Avenue, across from St. Mark’s in the Bouwerie. (Months later, I took up my share of it.) From that base, I walked each morning to my first job, at Sixth Avenue and Spring Street.

I believe the strike lasted 12 days. Mike Quill had been a prominent labor figure since taking leadership of the TWU in the 1930s, but all his longstanding preeminence combined couldn’t compare to the exposure he got during the strike, in what proved to be the last month of his life. Denouncing “Lindsley”, calling his adversaries “cockroaches” and telling the judge who ordered his arrest (the strike was illegal under the Condon-Wadlin Act) that he could “drop dead in his black robes,” he commanded attention that became national, even to the point where his glowering visage appeared on the cover of Ramparts , the radical San Francisco magazine, which hailed him (if posthumously) as a symbol of the masses, who weren’t going to take it from The Man any more. In jail, he suffered a heart attack, and was in the hospital when the strike was settled, much in the TWU’s favor; two weeks later, he was dead. The price of a subway ride, 15 cents since 1953, went to 20 cents when the fiscal year expired at the end of June.

But while the 1966 strike and its origins remain vivid to me—mere nostalgia, no doubt—I find the reasons for the 1980 strike about as memorable as Quill’s successors at the TWU, Matthew Guinan and John Law. There was a critical difference between the 1966 and the 1980 strikes: by 1980, negotiations between the city and the TWU were a thing of the distant past. The negotiator by then was the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state body. I was surprised to be reminded recently that the 1980 strike lasted as long as the earlier one. Am I right in remembering that it began on April Fool’s Day? I had just moved to Sunnyside by then, and while the strike was on I got to work at Fifth Avenue and 45th Street by walking, getting car rides, whatever. Hiking home one night, my mood thoroughly foul, I got to the Manhattan side of the Queensboro Bridge and looked up to see that I was invading television territory. Staring at me some 50 feet away, microphone in hand and looking quite shocked, was John Stossel, who was apparently doing interviews with harried commuters, in his capacity as a local reporter for CBS. Was he about to tell me not to blunder into his sacred space? I was about to tell him and his metropolitan audience a few quite profane things—but I guess my face gave my disposition away, and John turned aside while I strode by, heading for the outer roadway on the north side of the bridge. When the strike was over, the fare went up again, perhaps to 60 or 75 cents. That seems cheap now, but we groused about it then.

It’s interesting to realize, though it may have no relevance or significance, that we’ve had three big blackouts and two big transit strikes in the past 40 years (the 1965 blackout, the first big one, and the 1966 transit strike, ditto, were only seven weeks apart). Is it untoward to say that a third transit strike is overdue to occur? Probably, but it’s tempting to do just that.