Tough Stance, Tougher Fines: Union Leader Is in a Corner

Oh, dear. Looks like Roger Toussaint, leader of the rogue Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York City, is starting to realize just how badly he has miscalculated...

...Mr. Toussaint has quickly discovered that engaging in an illegal walkout can leave a union with a weak hand. His union faces a $1 million fine for each day on strike, a state judge is threatening to throw him in jail and thousands of individual strikers stand to lose two days' pay for each day out.

Not only that, but the mayor, the governor and editorial writers are denouncing the union as greedy and showing contempt for the law. The front page of The New York Post screamed, "You Rats." And the transit workers' parent union has come out in opposition to the strike.

"They have painted themselves into a corner," said Barry L. Feinstein, the former president of New York City's largest Teamsters local and now a member of the transportation authority's board.

This news analysis appears today in that notoriously unreliable, arch-conservative, anti-union, anti-worker running-dog rag, The New York Times: Tough Stance, Tougher Fines: Union Leader Is in a Corner - New York Times.

Here's a strategy hint for the union boys: When you finally realize that you're stepped on your johnson and are continuing to grind it into the dirt, your first move should be to LIFT YOUR FOOT.

(Mr. Toussaint and his colleagues shouldn't give up hope entirely, though; a few people are still buying into their class-warfare rhetoric. In particular, the World Socialist website, published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (sic), is still 100% behind them. So they're apparently assured the continued backing of at least a few losers in rent-controlled cold-water flats... just what you need to win the hearts and minds of average New Yorkers.)