Another war, another New York City transit strike, another Christmas. This time around it concerned my younger brother, Patricia Leahy.
Last week Seán lined up beside his fellow workers of all nationalities and creeds to protest at the low pay and clawing back of pension and medical entitlements. In essence, they demanded the wage increases needed to make up for the rise in the cost of living, generated by the Iraqi conflict inflation.
Last week when the transit workers first walked out, a New York State Justice levelled sanctions against the Transit Workers' Union (TWU) for violating a state law that bars public employees from going on strike. A heavy penalty threatened which could have forced the union off the picket lines and back on the job. Under the law, the union's 33,000 members would have lost two days' pay for every day they were on strike. Eventually they went back to work following negotiations.
For my brother personally, coming up to 30 years' service in the Manhattan and Bronx Service Transit Operating Authority (MABSTOA), it was about his pension and how the company is trying to rid itself of long-term employees. The tabloid press showed little sympathy for the strikers. "Four days before holidays and we're all Mad As Hell" was the front page of the Daily News. The New York Post had this message for the workers: "You Rats", as millions of New Yorkers had to walk to their jobs. They claimed the strikers were holding the city to ransom.
Forty years ago, another transit strike threatened to cripple New York. This time it concerned my father, Terry. Although brewing for a while, negotiations started in November, 1965 and went up to and beyond the Christmas. Every day, my father donned his "Dangerous Dan McGrew" coat and tucked his feet into his "Ploughman's Bloody Big Boots" going out in the snow to work in the bus garage. I heard the name "Mike Quill" like a mantra chanted across the kitchen table between my father and mother. The threat of a strike saw my father's shifts and long working hours cut back without pay or explanation. Down to the bone already, my family lived on rice and evaporated milk with raisins.
Mike Quill from Gortloughera, Kilgarvan, Co Kerry, was having none of the "bullshit" thrown at him and his men from the authorities and the press. The founder, builder and tireless campaigner for the TWU since 1934 had heard it all before. At the top of the Transit Workers' Union's list were wage increases to make up for the rise in the cost of living generated by the Vietnam War inflation. The city dug in its heels and said no. During these fraught times, boxes of food arrived into our apartment from the United Jewish Appeal.
One of the nights before Christmas, my parents walked in to find us kids taping up the Christmas decorations on to the wall to compensate for not having a tree. In a temper, my father grabbed a saw from the closet and ran out of the apartment, kids at his heels.
We saw him climb the hill of Manhattan College across the street. He went in the snow to the exclusive college's flagpole at the top of the hill, around which stood a circle of evergreen trees. That circle was broken in the Christmas of 1965.
The TWU stopped the threats and started making strike preparations. Newly elected mayor John Lindsay dismissed the short, bald, man with the cane and funny accent as a talkative nuisance.
Out of step with what the times called for, John Lindsay was an upper class Anglo-Protestant lawyer trying to govern a working class and ethnic city. Mike Quill's mocking press conferences made the mayor with the movie star looks appear inept.
Despite a series of heart attacks, the frail Mike Quill on the morning of January 1st, 1966, called for his TWU members to finish their last runs and by 8am the last trains and buses rolled into their terminals.
No buses or subways would run for 10 days. News editorials and political pronouncements called him an "irresponsible demagogue" and a "lawless hooligan".
On that first day, a judge issued an injunction against the strike.
Mike Quill tore up the injunction in front of the television cameras.
The judge promptly issued an arrest order. Mike Quill walked into the Americana Hotel ballroom soon afterwards to meet the press, mediators and TWU negotiators and announced "The judge can drop dead in his black robes. I don't care if I rot in jail. I will not call off the strike." Quill went to jail and was later transferred to a hospital.
It was in a hospital he heard the news that the city agreed to a package which included wage increases, pensions benefits and other gains.
Late in that January of 1966, not too long after our Christmas tree was taken down, Mike Quill died. My family along with hundreds of other families took the subway down to Fifth Avenue to see his Tricolour-draped coffin emerge through the doors of St Patrick's Cathedral.
In that 40 years the protagonists have changed little. Whereas conditions have improved, so have profits. The hard-fought benefits gained by those who went before can be slowly erased unless workers remain vigilant. Reflecting back on those years, Mike Quill once recalled, "We were no experts in the field of labour organisation, but we had something in common with our fellow workers - we were all poor. We were all overworked." The fight continues.