The TWU Local 100 Experience

Bill Breihan

Take Back the Power:
The Fall and Rise and Fall of NYC’s Transport Workers Union
Local 100, 1975-2009
By Marc Kagan
Brill, 2026, 452 pages, $157 hardcover
(Haymarket paperback edition in 2027).

JANUARY 3, 1984 was author Marc Kagan’s first day on the job as a New York City Transit worker. He begins his story there at the training center, filling out paperwork, signing a union card, meeting future co-workers, getting assigned to a subway repair shop.

Four years earlier he had “joined the working class,” he explains. Now at 27, “an enthusiastic communist,” he had at last landed a job in “one of the ‘strategic industries’ that the leftist organizations which had emerged during the late 1960s saw as the key to class struggle and revolution.”

His union, Transport Workers Union Local 100, representing nearly 40,000 city bus and subway workers. His organization: “the Marxist-Leninist Party, a small left organization with a presence in a handful of cities.” With him came others from his group. One who stayed, Trinidadian emigrant Roger Toussaint, would one day lead the local as president.

Take Back the Power is a thorough, 452-page case study in class struggle and transformational union politics. Kagan chronicles the decades-long fight by New York transit workers and their union to win respect, economic justice, and power on the job. That story involves both victory and defeat: “The Fall and the Rise and the Fall” in the subtitle.

More than narrative history, this is a work of scholarship. The first chapter frames an understanding of the challenges facing Local 100 in an era of “neoliberal austerity.” For this, Kagan draws on the work of Lynn, Aronowitz, Glaberman, Zeitlin, Metzgar, Lichtenstein, Parker, Brenner, Gilpin, Blanc, and on his dozens of interviews with transit union activists, as well as archival sources.

But more than a work of historical or scholarly interest, it is in some respects memoir. Marc Kagan lived many of the struggles he writes about, for nearly 20 years, as a mechanic, rank-and-file activist, reformer, faction fighter and local union leader.

The title of the first chapter underscores the central theme, the purpose, of the book: understanding “The Fall of the House of Labor and the New Directions Project.” The half-century decline in union membership and power is recounted, the theories explaining it, its impact on Local 100 and its members.

Enter New Directions. This vibrant oppositional caucus, formed in the mid-1980s, becomes in time the lifeline for union revitalization, the vehicle for taking back the power.

TWU: Origins and Early Battles

First to the history: Kagan takes us back to the founding of the union during the tumultuous 1930s. The TWU was one of the militant CIO unions with a major Communist Party presence, led by “Red Mike” Quill, an Irish-American unionist, and a close CP ally.

Quill was to lead the union for the next 30 years, past a break with the CP during the McCarthy witch hunt, to an illegal but hugely successful 1966 strike for which he was jailed, died days later of a heart attack, and gained martyrdom.

Kagan explains the power of the union in those days, how grievances were settled on the job by direct action, how workers exercised a degree of control over production, how the employer was so often on the defensive.

Then came the fall — the inevitable bosses’ counteroffensive and austerity drive, culminating in a looming municipal bankruptcy amidst the 1975 New York financial crisis. Then another illegal strike in 1980, forced on a recalcitrant union leadership, who managed somehow to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The 1980 strike, the work both of a determined membership seeking to reverse losses and an alliance of opposition currents in the leadership, was illegal under New York’s Taylor Law, enacted in 1967 following the 1966 transit strike, the previous law having proven so unsuccessful in preventing strikes.

The Taylor Law provided for fines against the union, individual strikers, and the loss of dues checkoff. All these penalties were imposed in the wake of the 1980 strike. The resulting demoralization, and with it, deactivation, provides the backdrop for the advent of New Directions.

Four years after the 1980 setback, several leftist activists launched the Local 100 newsletter Hell on Wheels. Around that publication gathered the activists who would initiate the New Directions caucus.

As Kagan explains, there were a number of left organizations active in Local 100 during this period. Some aligned with New Directions. Others, like his group, did not. His organization maintained an independent status, issuing periodic leaflets, several of which he includes in an appendix.

When the group dissolved in 1993, Kagan and Toussaint eventually moved into New Directions, which had by then grown substantially in strength and numbers.

The standard bearer for New Directions was 30-something, second generation, African-American transit worker, Tim Schermerhorn (1955-2022), an activist in the new socialist organization Solidarity, a product of the merger of several socialist groups.

Schermerhorn was elected to represent train operators and would run several times for local union president. Always a contender, in one election he fell only a few votes short. Schermerhorn had a close ally, train operator Steve Downs. Also from Solidarity, Downs was, writes Kagan, “the intellectual founding father” of New Directions. And there were others from Solidarity.

In Chapter 1, Kagan presents a series of dilemmas that have historically confronted unions and unionists. Among these was “the tension between leadership and participatory democracy.” Early American socialist leader AJ Muste compared the “two extremely divergent types of social structure” within a union “that of an army and that of a democratic town meeting.”

The union, as army, is a combat organization: steeled leadership, imaginative tactics and strategy, a top-down command structure set to mobilize the ranks and lead them in battle.

As democratic town hall, the union is bottom-up, grounded in member activism and willingness to fight: “democracy is power.” When unions jettison the town meeting, the army command structure often gives way to bureaucratic sclerosis, business unionism. That’s what New Directions and other Local 100 reformers were up against.

Kagan is clear from the outset: the reform movement in Local 100, the effort to set the union back on track, was in the end a failure.

“Despite the radical origins of New Directions, traditional methods — running for union office, alliance politics, risk-aversion, and the top-down army methods — won out, redefining success and undercutting the possibility of a transformational effort.” And the failure of New Directions set the stage for the most recent fall of Local 100 — the fall following fall and rise in the subtitle.

Kagan asserts that while some in New Directions continued an orientation of “fighting the boss,” the organization’s work nevertheless became increasingly focused on “fighting the union to fight the boss,” the need to build electoral alliances geared to winning — the idea that opposition union reformers must “first, win.”

Then once in power, the thinking was that the new militant leadership could facilitate “bottom up change from the top.”

Growth of New Directions

During its first decade, New Directions grew from a small grouping geared to education and agitation, based in only a couple divisions, to a union-wide powerhouse capable of mobilizing thousands in contract protest rallies and other forms of direct action and in local union election campaigns.

By the late 1990s, the caucus had grown to several hundred dues-paying members, few with previous involvement with left organizations. It was then that differences began to emerge in the caucus.

By 1996, Roger Toussaint and a number of his supporters, including Kagan, had joined New Directions, by then “the ‘only game in town’ for those who wanted to change the Local.” Pushing for some changes in caucus orientation, Toussaint was welcomed into leadership, running on its slate for the “Top Three” officer positions, headed by Schermerhorn for President, in the 1997 Local 100 elections.

In the 1997 election, New Directions ran Tim Schermerhorn (right) for president, Roger Toussaint (left) for recording secretary and Naomi Allen (middle) for secretary-teasurer. Schermerhorn lost in a close vote.

In Kagan’s view, New Directions’ key strategist, train operator Steve Downs, “believed that Toussaint’s shop floor work would be a valuable counterweight to the ‘change from above’ ideas circulating in ND.”

After Schermerhorn’s loss in a close vote, Toussaint and others in New Directions came to believe that a new candidate to head the slate would be needed for the next election. A Toussaint faction began to emerge in the caucus.

Kagan argues that not only was Toussaint eventually seen as a stronger potential candidate, one with more convincing leadership skills than long-term caucus leader Schermerhorn, but that the orientation Toussaint championed, a turn away from New Directions’ “pre-existing oppositional culture of fight the union to fight the boss” to “greater focus on management outrages and less on ‘fighting the union’” — a straight out ‘fight the boss’ approach — would be more popular with the union ranks.

Following the election, Toussaint was fired by a repressive Transit management. Toussaint’s and ND’s fight for his reinstatement would go on for months. He gained hero status among the members during this time.

But before the next union election in 2000, the caucus faced another big fight. With the old guard still in charge, New Directions, now just shy of a majority on the Executive Board, was determined to win the upcoming 1999 contract battle with an arrogant Transit management egged on by Republican Mayor Guliani and Republican Governor Pataki.

Bringing pressure to bear on a business unionist leadership, ND won a vote at the Local Executive Board to hold mass shift membership meetings “at the Manhattan Center — home to many Mike Quill rallies — on the eve of contract expiration.”

At a day meeting of 5000, with New Directions leading strike chants, the local leadership was “mandated to read an injunction secured by Mayor Rudolph Guliani hours earlier,” which “enjoined both union and every member from even advocating a strike, and threatened staggeringly escalating fines, even against individual workers, for violating the order.”

With top local officers absenting themselves from the evening meeting, New Directions seized the initiative. “Downs opened the meeting,” Kagan recalls, “by announcing he held the injunction in his upraised hand. Then, he dramatically tore it in two, mimicking Mike Quill’s famous 1966 ripping up of an anti-strike injunction. At both meetings, ND led strike authorization votes in further defiance of Guliani.”

Itching for Change, A Turning Point

In the end there was no strike. Not this time. The contract was approved. But Kagan quotes one union activist as saying, “People were itching for change; they were really fed up with the old guard by this time…This mass membership meeting was a turning point for the members.”

Following the contract fight, New Directions prepared for the upcoming local union election. Toussaint announced his intent to seek ND’s nomination, to head the ND slate as alternative to Schermerhorn.

In Kagan’s view, Toussaint was “charismatic, spoke with great self-assurance, and seemed to possess a strategic vision for New Directions and the local, encapsulating the best of both Downs and Schermerhorn…To increasing numbers of ND members, Toussaint, with me as his right-hand man, replicated the strengths of Schermerhorn and Downs.”

Here was a “visionary with an impressive record of action against Transit” with “a potent package of assets…Leftist supporters of Toussaint believed that he resolved the militancy (bottom up) versus electability (top-down) dilemma by providing both.”

But Toussaint had his critics in New Directions. Downs, for one, believed Toussaint “would be a good candidate but not a good president, because he would not respect ‘union democracy,’ or would be too authoritarian.”

Kagan, one of his most ardent supporters, noted Toussaint’s self-promotional, “fitness for office” persona. “In comparison,” he notes, “Downs’s work on the Local’s Executive Board seemed to reflect on the whole organization, not the man, although he was, as usual, the organizational mastermind of unity among ND’s 21 sometimes fractious individuals” on the board.

In the end, Toussaint won the New Directions nomination handily and the local election by 60% against a divided old guard. ND also won an overwhelming majority on the Executive Board.

But trouble was brewing. As Kagan notes, “Since Toussaint was never one to bury the hatchet, New Directions’ days as a united organization were already numbered even as it prepared to take office.” During his first months in office, Toussaint was to experience pushback from both the union’s old guard and from his critics in New Directions.

Contradictions of Power

At the end of Chapter 6, “The Rise of New Directions,” Kagan returns to one of the central themes of the book: “dilemmas that radical trade unionists face.” In a concluding section “Blemishes on the Golden Apple,” he observes how “ND’s path to victory…came with costs.”

After reviewing several of these, most related to the dilemma Muste posed of union as army or town meeting, he returns to his earlier observation: “Faced with pressures from within and without, ND increasingly, and with little interrogation, adopted an electoralist perspective — running to win: fighting the union to fight the boss.” He appears to apply this criticism to both wings of New Directions.

Chapters 7 and 8 deal with the first two years of “New Directions in Power,” then, with the Toussaint regime. When Toussaint was first elected, the question of accountability was raised. Would the New Directions caucus, now that it had won, have input into the policies and direction of the local?

The answer was, no. Toussaint would not take direction from nor consider input from New Directions. He would be accountable, he said, to the members only.

During these first years Kagan, now on union staff, served as Assistant to the President. He was Toussaint’s trustworthy operative, a key player in the leadership.

All that changed when Kagan told some co-workers from his shop that he would be voting “no” on the 2002 proposed contract. Although Kagan continued to produce the Local’s pro-ratification literature, once the contract was approved, Toussaint fired his erstwhile comrade.

From ND to the Toussaint Unity Team

Kagan describes Toussaint’s leadership style as “democratically disinclined…a sort of enlightened despotism,” and though he “was not wholly responsible when the union hall became a hostile workplace…he fanned the flames rather than fight them.” He “would not gladly suffer dissent or disagreement, and would use the extensive tools at his disposal to suppress it.”

Kagan contrasts this with life in New Directions, where “free-wheeling meetings fostered a culture of participation, debate, listening, voluntary collaboration, and a tendency toward consensus.” In New Directions “members felt free to speak their mind in an organization they knew they were building through their own efforts.”

With Toussaint supporters in solid control of New Directions and Toussaint taking the union farther and farther from the course originally charted by ND, its days were numbered. The caucus stopped meeting after January 2002. The 2002 contract fight sealed its end.

Many in the union felt that this was the year the union could win a strike, with the ranks mobilized, ready for a showdown. But President Toussaint, ignoring all the prescribed mandates for leadership participation in the bargaining process, got a deal almost on his own, which the membership in the end accepted.

In the first part of the book, Kagan provides the introductory framework and story of the union up until its first fall in the era of the 1970s New York financial crisis. Part 2 details that fall.

Part 3 is about the union’s rise, in particular the story of New Directions and its eventual triumph. The fourth part deals with a second fall: the demise of New Directions and the eventual return to the traditions of business unionism.

By 2003, New Directions had given way to the Toussaint Unity Team. Toussaint was reelected. Chapters 7 and 8 detail the accomplishments as well as the failings of the Toussaint leadership.

The first two years were all about building power: a thousand new shop stewards trained, militant protest actions organized — pickets, press conferences, petition drives, rallies, “often reaching over 10,000 TWU t-shirted workers” — all “startling top-down mobilizations of the army.”

But New Directions had “shattered and fratricide began; the fallout became an additional factor in shelving any expansive notion of ‘union democracy.’” It soon became apparent that “the army and town meeting were both necessary to radically transform labor relations with the employer: the army, alone, was insufficient.”

The Strike and its Aftermath

As 2005 contract negotiations loomed, the sides geared for battle. Transit management assumed a particularly aggressive stance, backed by the administration of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Kagan devotes Chapter 10 entirely to the three-day strike that resulted: every twist and turn in the bargaining process, all the legal and political factors and ramifications.

In the end, Kagan concludes, it was Transit management that caused the strike. They were convinced Local 100 would not go out. They were wrong. The Executive Board voted by a wide margin to strike.

The mayor denounced the workers and their union as “thugs.” But soon Toussaint had an agreement in hand, though he was later criticized for withholding critical details. The Board voted to approve, but the membership, in a close vote, did not.

No second strike followed, an agreement was finally signed, but Toussaint was off to jail for ten days as penalty for the strike. This “eventually made Toussaint more of a hero to the labor-left and labor academia than to his own members.”

Chapter 11, “Back to Normalcy,” is devoted to the aftermath. Local 100 lost dues checkoff for 18 months. Nearly half the membership fell into arrears, unable to vote and effectively participate in the union. The experiments in mass mobilization of the union army came to an end.

Toussaint served another term, but then “exhausted and embittered, and with a feeling he has nothing left to accomplish, or was capable of accomplishing, with a fractured and demoralized membership” took a position with the international union.

Posing Dilemmas

In the final chapter, “The Dilemmas of Union Revitalization,” Kagan returns to themes from the introduction. The chapter is divided into eight sections, each addressing a dilemma: Fight the Boss or Fight the Union to Fight the Boss; Educational Campaigns or First Win; Leadership or Participatory Democracy; the Army or the Democratic Town Meeting; and so on, ending with Risk or Is Another World Possible?

One frustration in my initial walk through the book was a feeling of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” No matter what you’d do as a union reformer, what you tried, you’d be up against insuperable obstacles.

Then I’d have to remind myself: dilemmas, the author is posing dilemmas. As he states toward the end, “My purpose is not to run speculative counter-histories, but to look forward, to provide today’s and tomorrow’s activists with the better tools and insights necessary to build more worker dignity, agency and power.”

Then in the last sentence: “After all, my main purpose is to assess the meaning of dilemmas of the New Directions project, so that labor activists who come after us can utilize this analysis and apply it fruitfully to their work and efforts. Those activists, workers, and the reader, are participants in that task.”

No definitive answers here — just dilemmas to understand, challenges to address, road blocks to overcome.

With a lifetime active in the United Steelworkers, and as a socialist, local union president, I am painfully aware of the dilemmas Kagan poses. He’s done a real service identifying and analyzing the challenges facing those who seek to remake the trade union movement.

His rendering of the New York transit story fleshes out the concepts. There are lessons here. This book should be read and studied. It’s certainly a tale worth telling.

NOTE: The book can be downloaded from the Brill website for free. Steve Downs wrote a pamphlet, Hell on Wheels in 2008 and a working paper, Socialist Strategies in Unions: Twenty Years in Transport Workers Union Local 100 in 2022. The working paper can be downloaded; both can be ordered through the Solidarity website for $5.

September-October 2026, ATC 244