It's clear Bloomberg just didn't get it
By Errol Louis, New York Daily News columnist
Mayor Bloomberg yesterday confirmed that he stood by every word of his televised outburst against the Transport Workers Union's leadership at the height of this week's strike. He called them "thuggish," "selfish," "frauds" and the like. A host of critics, such as state Sen. Kevin Parker of Brooklyn, now accuse the mayor of being racially divisive.
"We only need to look back to the day and time when MTA workers first gained the kind of pension and benefits which are now being called 'cushy.' The complexion of the union was sure of a different hue at that time," says Parker, the son of a transit worker.
"Now that the Transit Authority workforce is majority black and Hispanic, they are suddenly 'spoiled,' 'selfish' and 'overpaid,'" Parker says. "Are these colors of the race card too obscure to see? Not from my view."
Parker has a point. In August of 2004, when aggrieved members of the 91% white Fire Department of New York were protesting every public appearance by Bloomberg and threatening an illegal strike during the Republican National Convention, Bloomberg's spokesman, Ed Skyler, called the protesting firefighters "thugs." But Bloomberg himself took pains to not to repeat the slur, telling the New York Sun, "I wasn't brought up that way." And yet, when it came to the city's transit workers, the mayor's home training eluded him.
Bloomberg's rant was not only divisive, it betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of our city and its history. As the Wall Street Journal Online wrote in a revealing story earlier this year, the MTA "has been a haven for African-Americans seeking upward mobility since the 1940s, when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. joined other Harlem activists in pressing city-owned and private transit lines to hire more blacks."
The article described the career of Valerie Beatty, a Harlem native who at
25 years old was a black single mother on food stamps - until she snagged a job as a subway cleaner at $18,000 a year. Beatty ended up in her early 40s as a motor inspector earning $50,000 a year, with a house on Long Island and her sons in college.
Food stamps in the ghetto versus self-sufficiency, health care, a house in the suburbs and kids in college: For native New Yorkers, especially black New Yorkers, that's all this week's strike was ever about. It's why TWU chief Roger Toussaint risked fines and imprisonment and kept repeating the word "dignity" that so baffled and enraged Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki.
Toussaint probably deserves a ticker-tape parade but will have to receive his glory on the installment plan: standing ovations in churches, union halls and almost any place he shows his face in black neighborhoods.
The Trinidadian and Tobagonian-born former train cleaner gave Bloomberg a lesson in real courage, dignity and determination. Toussaint brought the city to a halt with five words to his members - "shut it down, then talk" - a power that even the billionaire mayor will never possess.
And after ensuring that a path to the middle class will remain open to his members, Toussaint ended the strike yesterday with an equally terse order:
"Hold your head high when you report to work."
It brought to mind that word again. Dignity.
Originally published on December 23, 2005