Union chief known for militant stance

Toussaint's no-nonsense attitude could be effective or disastrous for the strike.
NEW YORK (AP) -- When New York's transit workers chose Roger Toussaint as their president five years ago, they knew exactly who they were getting: Toussaint had been a leader of a highly militant faction within the union.
The New Directions Caucus ultimately wrested control of the Transport Workers Union from its old guard leadership. And now, Toussaint has taken his 33,700 subway and bus workers into the New York streets despite bitter weather, a lack of support from the parent union, and court-ordered fines of $1 million a day for violating a state law that bars public employees from striking.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ripped the union boss two days running, and a tabloid editorial Wednesday urged, "Throw Roger Under the Train!"
The transit strike is the city's first since an 11-day walkout in 1980. To older New Yorkers, Toussaint's pugnacious manner evokes comparison with Mike Quill, the bombastic Irish immigrant who founded the TWU in the 1930s, led a 12-day strike in 1966, and became famous for insulting the city's patrician mayor, John Lindsay.
Sharp tongue
The outspoken Toussaint may have stunned some New Yorkers when he told Bloomberg in 2002 to "shut up" after the mayor said the union should be fined heavily for a threatened illegal strike.
But blunt language has been the 49-year-old Toussaint's style since his boyhood in Trinidad, where he was born into a poor family of nine children. He spoke out as a youth against local politicians who had replaced the long-time British colonial government in 1962.
By Toussaint's own account, that subjected him to "harassment and intimidation" and eventually prompted him to emigrate to the United States, where his mother worked as a nurse's aide in Brooklyn.
At Brooklyn College, he joined groups supporting minority programs and other social causes. After finding a job with the MTA in 1984 as a track maintenance worker, he almost immediately turned his activism to union affairs, publishing a newsletter on complaints about working conditions.
When the union's New Directions faction arose in the 1990s out of rank-and-file dissatisfaction, its leaders included Toussaint, whom labor expert Joshua B. Freeman called "very charismatic, with a very sharp tongue."
Toussaint was fired in 1998, allegedly for doing union business on company time, but sued to get his job back -- and won.The strike over wages and pension contributions could determine Toussaint's labor legacy.