Mike's Strike

All week long, New York lay under an eerie siege. From Manhattan's sky scrapers to the rows of neat little homes in Queens, from Harlem's tenements to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn, the bustle and excitement that symbolize the world's greatest city became a slow-motion mockery of itself. For the first time in history, the huge city was with out any mass public transportation, which had been shut down by a strike of its 36,000-member Transport Workers Union. The 134 miles of subway tubes, normally jammed daily with 4.6 million passengers, stretched silent and empty beneath the city; the 2,200 buses that daily haul one and a half million people over 554 miles of New York streets sat in bumper-to-bumper immobility in vast parking lots around town.

People walked. Thousands of New Yorkers took to their feet, trudging in refugee-like lines over rainswept streets and across the great bridges that span the East River between Manhattan and the other boroughs. Secretaries hiked 50 blocks to work; men felt the twinge of leg muscles long unused. People took to motor scooters, bicycles and, in at least one case, a horse. Many drove their cars into the city--too many. Though most of them generously picked up neighbors or strangers along the way, they often wound up stalled together for hours in massive traffic jams that surpassed anything that even car-glutted New York had ever seen.

The city displayed an astonishing reserve of cool in crisis, never succumbing to panic or total paralysis. But the damage, like almost all statistics about New York, was impressive. Everywhere, there were shuttered shops, empty offices, unanswered telephones, vacant theater seats, unused barber chairs, empty streets where there should have been crowds. An extraordinary number of people somehow managed to get to work, but day after day went by without pay for thousands of far-distant clerks, secretaries and laborers who could scarcely afford the loss. Merchants complained that they were losing millions every day. There was no doubt that the strike was damaging to business, but no one would really know exactly how great a financial loss the crisis had caused until monthly sales figures came out.

WASP Product. New York's great blackout in November had been caused by a mechanical failure; the transit strike was caused by a failure of communication, of understanding and of reason. It was basically the product of a bitter, and partially symbolic, conflict between two men.

One was Michael J. Quill, 60, an intransigent, fork-tongued man with a shanty Irish brogue who is founder and president of the Transport Workers Union and a raving Anglophobe who fought in the Irish Revolutionary Army. He had a meager childhood on a County Kerry farm, immigrated to the U.S. in 1926, sold religious pictures in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town, later became a ditchdigger and a change maker in the New York subway system. Quill was a loyal Communist-liner when he founded the T.W.U. in 1934, once said, "I'd rather be called a Red by a rat than a rat by a Red!"

The other protagonist was articulate, patrician John V. Lindsay, 44, a WASP product of the Ivy League and the winner of four terms as Congressman from Manhattan's 17th ("Silk Stocking") District, who took over as the city's first Republican mayor in 20 years the week the strike began. Quill's unconcealed enmity toward Lindsay was partially a product of their sharply different backgrounds, but it stemmed largely from the new mayor's unmistakable determination to bring a semblance of order and responsibility into the city's labor relations--a determination that Quill saw as a clear-cut threat to his power. Indeed, Quill wound up in jail at midweek for defying a restricting injunction.

Mike Quill has brought New York City to the brink of a transit strike dozens of times--and backed down, each time at the last minute. Quill and the city's Democratic mayors usually have worked out a cozy deal in advance, compromising between what Quill felt he needed and what the city felt it could afford. Nonetheless, Quill was always allowed to run through his biennial charade, dramatically announcing at the last moment a settlement that had actually been agreed on days earlier. Naturally, no one took too seriously Quill's blustering about a transit strike: people had heard that threat too often.

This time, though, there were some important differences. Outgoing Mayor Robert Wagner, who had worked hand-in-glove with Quill during three mayoral terms, was weary and obviously bored as his last days as mayor approached. He made only a feint here and there toward seriously talking with Quill, finally left town for Acapulco 20 hours before the strike deadline of 5 a.m. on Jan. 1. Moreover, Quill, a sick man who had had several heart attacks and slept with an oxygen tank by his bedside, was under heavy pressure from his union to win bigger wage hikes than he had been settling for. He realized that this might be his Last Hurrah.

New York City's Transit Authority, which must depend on the city's help to meet legal requirements that it be selfsupporting, tried to head off a strike, got a court order on Dec. 30 asking the T.W.U. to show cause why it should not be enjoined from striking. Mike Quill ripped the court papers to pieces before the TV cameras. Cried he: "I predict that we are in for a terrible strike." Lindsay had no legal rights to enter the conflict until his inauguration, but once the transit workers walked off the job on New Year's morning, the strike became his problem; his administration would ultimately have to bankroll the Transit Authority in whatever contract it drew up.

By the Book. In a tough and cynical city like New York, deals are the rule rather than the exception. In ways that some thought naive and others admirable, John Lindsay quickly made it clear that he intended to go by the book, like the good trial lawyer he was before entering Congress. He refused to inject himself as a private manipulator between Quill and the Transit Authority, insisted that the three-man team of mediators be the only go-between. He made it clear that labor would no longer be able to make any sub rosa deals with the mayor.

Few men in public life have ever endured more concentrated public abuse than Lindsay took, with remarkable restraint, from Mike Quill. At one time or another, Quill branded Lindsay "a common, ordinary coward," a "pip-squeak," "a boy in short pants" and "an ass." He accused the mayor of reaching the "heights of stupidity," purposely and consistently mispronounced his name as Lindsley.

Quill's original demands on the Transit Authority were so outlandish that few people took them seriously. In a 76-point package, which he blandly labeled "very modest requests," Quill demanded that the Authority increase the T.W.U.'s contract for 1966-67 by nearly 2,000% over the old one--including an increase of more than $2 per hour, a 32-hour week, and six weeks of vacation after one year on the job (present vacation: five weeks after 25 years). The Transit Authority figured that the package would cost $680 million, or one-fifth of the entire New York City budget. It did not make its first counteroffer to Quill's demand until a bare seven hours before the strike. It then offered a $25 million package, a 3.2% increase that hit exactly the wage-hike guidelines laid down by President Johnson. As a result, Johnson, who had criticized a steel-price increase early last week, was criticized for refusing to step into the New York situation even though Quill's outlandish demands went miles beyond his guidelines. Quill's reaction to the Transit Authority offer: "Peanut package!" He walked out of the negotiations.

Both Lindsay and the Transit Authority agreed that New York's subway and bus workers needed a raise to bring them more nearly into line with city workers of equivalent talent and status, but nothing on the order of what Mike Quill asked for. Top wage for T.W.U. members working for the Transit Authority is $3.57 an hour, for work that includes everything from driving the underground trains (a job that requires 280 hours of schooling) to repairing buses. Even though New York's T.W.U. men lead their union in nationwide pay, they lag behind many municipal workers in New York. City laborers, for example, get $4.28 an hour, garbage men $3.59, city truck drivers $5.26.

Be Brave. As the holiday passed and the first full impact of the strike hit the city, Lindsay went on television again and again to urge "nonessential people" to stay at home. "Every man when he looks at himself in the mirror when he's shaving in the morning likes to think of himself as essential," said the mayor. "But remember, there are degrees of essentiality." He gave daily bulletins about the strike and tried to encourage his constituents. "We must sweat it out," he said. "So I ask you to be very tough about it and very brave about it."

When negotiations had gone four days without any progress, the Transit Authority got a ruling from the New York Supreme Court that the strike was illegal, and that Mike Quill and eight other T.W.U. officials should be jailed. Said Quill: "The judge can drop dead in his black robes and we would not call off the strike. Personally, I don't care if I rot in jail."

Deputy sheriffs took him away to prison right from the bargaining table at Manhattan's Americana Hotel. Two hours later, as he sat in the warden's office of civil prison, his head suddenly flopped forward. A doctor quickly summoned an ambulance, and Quill was taken to the emergency ward of Bellevue Hospital, where his collapse, possibly from a heart attack, was described as serious. A second team of union negotiators took over, led by T.W.U. Vice President Douglas MacMahon, 59, who shortly announced that the strike would go on "until hell freezes over."

The Transit Authority made another offer, upping the ante to a $40 million package, and the union, having come down to $180 million, cut its demands even more. But the two could not seem to come any closer, and the bargaining mood worsened after the Transit Authority turned down union bids to have Quill and his eight colleagues released from custody. President Johnson sent Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz to New York to discuss the impasse with negotiators, and Wirtz returned to Washington to report gloomily: "The situation still remains uncertain and serious." In response to an appeal from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Johnson announced that the Federal Government would grant low-interest loans and other aids to small businesses and individuals financially injured by the strike.

The Transit Board upped the pressure on the union at week's end by asking the courts for a $322,000-a-day retroactive fine against the T.W.U., whose total treasury is so modest (less than $1,000,000) that it does not even pay its union members strike benefits. That only made the T.W.U. madder and brought charges that the Authority was trying to bust the union. "As a result," said Douglas MacMahon, "negotiations are now at a standstill." No one was quite sure just how long New Yorkers would have to walk, but everyone suddenly recalled that Mike Quill had predicted a long strike, perhaps as long as 28 or 29 days.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.