The entrenched sellout bureaucrats atop TWU Local 100 called their slate “Members First,” but thousands of us transit workers tagged them “Members Last” and for good reasons. Barely a month after the union election concluded, TWU officials announced that just-elected president Richard Davis had resigned for “health reasons.” That was soon followed by news that Davis resigned under pressure from top union officials for “credible allegations” of sexual harassment and physical threats against a Local 100 employee. Then as a few gory details emerged, transit workers found out that Davis will be getting 100 weeks of severance pay and medical benefits (reportedly worth over $400k) paid for by our union dues. And the final straw: For the third time in less than a decade, our 44,000-strong membership will not be allowed to elect their own union president. After the long appointments of Utano in 2017 and Davis in 2022, the “Members Last” dominated Executive Board plans to appoint another flunky as TWU Local 100’s top dog.
In response to this fiasco, we in the Transit Workers for a Fighting Union demand:
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Transit workers must decide who their new union president and leadership should be!
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The whole election was a sham. There must be a new election to re-run candidates for all top posts, including division vice presidents and E-Board members!
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We need a real Mass Meeting where members are allowed to discuss issues, set a date for new elections, elect a new Elections Committee, and vote motions on how to move forward!
While we cannot pretend to know whether Davis is guilty or innocent of specific charges, we are sure of one thing: the TWU top officers who ousted him were totally aware of those “credible allegations” against Davis months, if not years, prior to the recent election. Members be damned, TWU International president John Samuelsen and his cronies just cynically promoted Davis as head of their slate and the best option-on-hand for perpetuating their own power and privileges. The law firm’s investigation into Davis’s purported wrongdoings was carefully timed to wrap up after the membership was dragged through a sham election. And if Davis’s huge severance package isn’t hush money, it sure as hell looks like hush money! Dumpster fires like these show vividly why the TWU Local 100 membership is so demoralized and why a mere 20-25 percent of union members even bothered to vote in the recent election.
A petition from the “Coalition of the Concerned Members of TWU Local 100” is circulating around the industry. It calls for a “full membership vote to elect a new President for Local 100, ensuring the leadership reflects the will of the union members and not an appointment by the Executive Board.” It also opposes the incumbent regime’s calculated use of union bylaws to muzzle the membership and deny its democratic rights. We agree with these demands, along with ideas like electronic voting. But we won’t be signing the petition because we strongly disagree with its dangerous demand that a new election be “overseen by the Department of Labor.” That not only goes against our struggle for transit workers to control our own union and union elections, but also the Labor Department is an agency of the bosses’ government whose fundamental purpose is to hogtie and bust unions. Don’t invite a fox into your henhouse—Labor must clean its own house!
Despite the treacherous policies and actions of our current misleaders, our union is still indispensable for defending and improving our jobs and livelihoods. We transit workers can best defend ourselves by rebuilding TWU Local 100 with a completely new leadership, one whose program is based on unleashing the energy and power of our thousands-strong, multiracial, unionized workforce. With tough times ahead, we can’t delay.