At a Foley Square rally early that fall, Samuelsen declared his “thanks” to the Occupy movement for “sparking the labor movement, and showing us that the way to do it is not to have conversations with politicians…it’s to take it to the streets.” And that December, he led his fellow TWU workers in a mic check at Zuccotti Park.Ī year and a half later, Samuelsen’s union has thrown its support behind the most Wall Street-friendly candidate in the 2013 mayor’s race, Bill Thompson. It was thus not surprising that in the fall of 2011 the TWU (Local 100) was one of the first unions to come out in support of Occupy Wall Street, at one point even protesting the use of MTA buses to transport hundreds of anti-capitalist arrestees from the Brooklyn Bridge. Once in power Samuelsen began to point his anger at the financial system, vilifying the agency’s bond holders as the main source of instability at the MTA.
Samuelsen, a track maintenance inspector, ran in 2009 and defeated Toussaint’s hand-picked successor, arguing that Toussaint had become too soft in his stance toward MTA management after the strike. Then came John Samuelsen, Toussaint’s former ally turned nemesis, who takes pride in his friendship with British transit union leader Bob Crow, a communist who’s never shy about talking about the global war against capitalism. In 2005, that same union, under the leadership of Roger Toussaint, who had come to power on a reformist slate called New Directions, brought the union out on strike at Christmas time, without regard to how much the public and the establishment painted him as the Grinch. In 1966, when a judge enjoined New York City transit workers from striking, the union’s fiery leader Mike Quill, the outspoken socialist and IRA supporter, ripped up the order before the news cameras.
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