Most U. S. citizens know that there are Communists in labor's ranks, frequently in key positions. But few citizens pay much attention. Last week they had good reason to look, and look again. In New York City 3,500 busmen struck, leaving 1,300 busses stalled, inconveniencing almost a million New Yorkers. The strike was engineered by Michael J. Quill, head of the Transport Workers Union.
Said the Daily News: "One orthodox Red tactic is to hit at a large community's key points — transportation, power plants, water works and the like — in the hope of paralyzing the place and creating chaos, so that a well-organized knot of Reds can then step in and take over. . . .
"Whether Mr. Quill has it in back of his head to give it a tryout here — whether this bus strike is a sort of rehearsal for a general bus, subway, El and taxi strike to come — we don't know.
"We do know, though, that Mayor LaGuardia always has been a friend of organized labor; bona fide organized labor.
. . . Yet the Mayor calls this strike 'a tragic mistake' and denounces its leaders as bullheadedly and stupidly refusing to arbitrate."
Mike Quill, who carries a briar stick and limps around with a bullet in his hip, which he got in the Irish Republican Army, has been fighting since he was a Boy Scout. He started his labor career in the U. S. as moneychanger in a subway booth, got interested in union politics and helped start T. W. U. In 1937 he got a closed-shop contract for his new, pugnacious union. In 1939, as candidate for re-election to the New York City Council, he took the Communist line, refused to go along with the American Labor Party's denunciation of the Hitler-Stalin pact, was read out of the party, lost the election.
Last year he was called before the Dies Committee. Other witnesses had already pinned the Communistic label on Mike Quill and on two other top-ranking officers in T. W. U. : Austin Hogan and John Santo. Mike blusteringly denied the charges.
Mike Quill's demands included an increase in wages (present wages for drivers are 75¢ an hour to start, 81¢ after four years); a six-day week, eight-hour day (instead of the present 54-hour week); three weeks vacation with pay; other improvements and benefits. Mike based his demands (later reduced) on the company's earnings, which he claimed were plentiful.
Mike Quill had something else at stake.
When all city subway lines were put under city management last year, subway employes were taken into the Civil Service.
Since then many a subway worker has wondered why he needed to pay dues to a union, now that he had Civil Service protection.