I was at union headquarters the night the subway strike was called. The room was crammed with cameras, microphones and TV anchors sending snippets of news to a city holding its breath. The mood was sour. We’d been told Transit Worker Union president Roger Touissant would announce the strike, we stood, cameras focused, pads opened, laptops glowed then it was postponed. NBC anchor Melissa Russo whispered loudly into her cell phone, “Who do these workers think they are, throwing a whole city into chaos if their demands aren’t met.” I knew two things, the strike was on and the media was going to make it ugly.
The subway strike of 2005 can be summed up by a phrase, “black workers are Evil Doers.” When the Transit Workers Union 100, a majority Caribbean-Latino-Asian-African American local walked off the job, the media immediately fused images of criminals and terrorists to the picketing workers.
It began when Mayor Bloomberg said the TWU had “thuggishly turned their backs on New York." TWU President Roger Toussaint and Rev. Al Sharpton quickly criticized him for it but more blatant racism appeared on the TWU website. The mostly black union was called monkeys and Toussaint Osama Bin Laden’s sweet-heart.
On Wednesday’s cover of the New York Post a photo of strikers playing chess under the word “Rats!” The next day “Jail ‘Em” was stamped over a photo of Toussaint behind bars. Columnist Andrea Peyser wrote of the strikers, “The terrorists made it their mission to kill the economy. This brand of homegrown enemy pretends to have the city’s interest at heart while it takes aim at the most vulnerable workers.”
In a city where people walked bridges to get home after 9/11 to label a strike “hostage” taking and workers “terrorists” re-directs lingering fear and rage of that day at workers. None of this is new; equating organized workers with terrorists is a tradition of the Right. In 2004, Education Secretary Rod Paige called the largest teachers union the National Education Association, “a terrorist organization.” In 2002, in a stand-off between West Coast Longshoreman’s Union and their employees, Tom Ridge the director of Homeland Security called union head Jim Spinosa and warned him against striking, saying it would threaten national security.
Yet if workers are also citizens how do they threaten their own nation’s security? It only makes sense if national security is defined by the profit margin of the corporate class, a class that is not the nation but a small powerful sector within it. During the subway strike our class divisions opened but the corporate media stitched them with racially coded coverage. In the case of the TWU, a non-white union, the difference between legal citizenship and cultural citizenship was implicitly invoked by the media equating them with foreign Al Queda terrorists.
The corporate class was faced with an internal enemy, the workers whose interest in pay and benefits clashes with their interest in profit. Yet the Right wing media depicted it as a struggle between workers rather than of and by them.
“It’s not the way I want to get to work,” said a one legged man lurching across the Brooklyn Bridge. The New York Post showed him bundled in yellow coat, gripping his crutches. He doubled as a symbol of a city crippled by the TWU strike and an alibi for the Right.
The non-union working class has been hobbling for years with 9/11, rising rents and falling wages, the city is too expensive to live in. But during the subway strike they finally got love as the New York Post, Daily News, the New York Times and the major news channels placed a halo of victimization on stranded workers. TV anchors welding microphones amplified the stories of ruined Christmas, tired feet and children with no gifts to get.
The appearance of working class New York in the media was possible only as innocent victims of a selfish and greedy strike by union workers. Yet, in a reversal that approaches absurdity, vulnerability to real poverty by missing a few days of work does not add to an argument against unions but shows the very real need for them.
The final image of the strike was of spoiled children pouting for undeserved gifts. It is an odd image since they strike was about pensions, the ability to live decently in one’s old age. Yet if the value of human life is determined by the labor it can sell, if we aren’t working to make a surplus profit for others we are uselessly rotting, like fruit on a tree. The image of spoiled workers is in silent dialogue with Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit”, a ballad about lynching blacks who whites could not totally control, a violence it took our media only three days of a strike to begin justifying.