TWU Stands for Us All!!!

American heroes

Power to the people!!!


White Corporate Slave Masters use their media to assassinate the character of the workers


Union leader Roger Touissant challenges NYC and America to do what's right


I’ve just watched the pig of a mayor, Michael Bloomberg, call the Transport Worker’s Union “cowards”. Then I saw the other rich bastard, Ed Koch, compare the Transport Worker’s Union with the terrorists of September 11th.
Two billionaire club members taking to task the rank and file of a union headed by a black man with a large membership of ethnic minorities is like the slave master taking out the bullwhip when his bidding isn’t done as he likes.
Ed Koch complained to the perennial sellout Geraldo Riveria the transit workers got to retire at age 58. Ed Koch has the arrogance to question what hard-working men and women do after endless hours of deadening work year after year. Bloomberg who is only mayor because he bought the election with his family money has the arrogance to call these people cowards when they stand up to the most powerful of cities and say, “enough of you abusing us!”
There certainly are cowards involved in this strike. It’s the corrupt men and women who rule the streets of New York and America. It’s the corporate “masters” of America who have stolen pensions and jobs from the poor year after year with impunity.
Not only have they stolen the goods from the workers, they’ve stolen their dignity and rights to have collective bargaining. They’ve enslaved other workers around the world by proxy and without guilt. They’ve allowed the jobs of the American worker to be the jobs of the child slaves of Haiti, the slaves of China and the slaves of all the other third world countries.
Then they go to their trade organization meetings with the rest of the world and continue to steal the natural resources of the smaller nations all the while acting as if they’ve been victimized.
If ever an action of people in this country epitomized courage it is the TWU. If ever the peace and justice movement needed to stand beside their brothers and sisters it is the TWU.
New Yorkers being inconvenienced at Christmas time is bound to drive a stake in the heart of TWU much as the air traffic controllers were gutted by dear, old, loveable, Ronnie. Too much money stands to be lost in the next few days by the consumer driven economy to allow a bunch of “commoners” to upset things.
Much of America will support the rich barons of greed as they smash down hard on this union. Many will point at this as the reason there’s no real need for unions in America.
They’ll do so as they worry about paying mortgages on a two income salary, while their kids are sent off to other people until odd hours of the night and while they often have huge debt they’ll never be able to repay in their lifetime.
They’ll pay for all that “stuff” they just had to have ten or twenty times over after they pay off the interest. These will be the people who will take out their anger against a transit union that had the courage to stand up from the enslavement of the corporate ruling class.
They will be people like you and me who constantly scoff at unionization. They’ll be those who complain about paying their dues because it takes money out of their pockets and yet will settle for less money without any recourse when big companies make record profits and lay off record numbers.
We’ll all say good things about the courage of TWU but it’s obvious we’ll not do much when it comes time to put up. We just can’t afford it. Jobs are getting tight and management might decide to look at what we’re saying and doing.
And one day when we look back we’ll wonder what happened to the American dream. We’ll wonder why the unions were willing to stand up to be killed and persecuted when all the rest of us never found that courage.
We’ll wonder as we see less and less of the pie coming our way and more and more of it going to the fat, greedy bastards like Bloomberg, Koch and Bush.

Terry Leichner
Ex Union Pipefitter
Former unionized nurse
Vietnam Veterans Against the War