Complete Odds

The Times’ Sewell Chan moves forward reports that the local and its parent organization are at “complete odds” with each other:

The transit workers’ union, despite taking the extraordinary step of calling its first strike in 25 years, has revealed itself over the last 48 hours to be an organization wrestling with considerable discord — a local union, in fact, that is at complete odds with its larger parent organization.

The union’s vote to strike, made at 1:15 a.m. yesterday in a closed-door session of the executive board, was opposed by three of seven vice presidents of the union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union. A fourth abstained.

And yesterday, merely hours into the paralyzing job action, Michael T. O’Brien, the international president of the parent union, the Transport Workers Union of America, urged the city’s transit workers to abandon the strike and return to work immediately. He said the parent union would provide no money or other assistance to Local 100.

Those two facts — a lack of unanimity among its own leaders and an absence of help from fellow transit workers across the country – could complicate the union’s ability to hold up under the mounting public criticism, enormous fines and escalating attacks by the city and state’s top political leaders.

Makes you think that the Village Voice’s Tom Robbins is simply shilling for Toussaint (“[U]nion sources said an agreement was reached in which the international agreed to state its disagreement – a move aimed at insulating it from heavy fines – while allowing the local to pursue the job action.”)

Update: Or not . . . a different day, a different Robbins take — now it’s “The Transit Union’s Family Spat” . . . so which is it?