Cherry's Legacy: Transit Walk-Out, Later Sell-Out

When Arthur Goldberg, a long-time Transport Workers Union Local 100 officer, called to tell me that Arnold Cherry had died, the first thing I thought about was his decisive role in the powerful dissident movement that shook the TWU in the late 1970s, and in the transit strike that rocked New York City in 1980. That was Arnold's finest hour and a piece of work good enough for a lifetime.

Then I thought about how 20 years later, in 1999, he bargained away my seniority rights for a measly $1 an hour. In Arnold's life is captured the enigma of a whole era of New York public-employee union history: from a powerful force greatly improving the lives of working people to a far-meeker version, making concessions to, and collaborating with, management.