When friends of mine from New York City visit me in London, they often refer to our city-wide underground rail system as “the subway”. I explain to them that here in England, we have subways — but the word has a completely different meaning. (A subway here is an underground passageway.) Here, we call our underground rail system — “the underground” or, more usually, “the tube”.
The difference between New York’s subway and London’s tube was highlighted over the Christmas break when short strikes broke out in both cities.

The transit strike in New York lasted three days, ending just before the likely arrest and jailing of the leaders of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100. On the very morning that union president Roger Toussaint was due to appear before a judge, the union reached a tentative settlement and ended the walkout.
Only days later, Britain’s National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) shut down the London Underground on New Year’s Eve, and held a second walkout a week later.
What struck me was the difference between how the two societies reacted to the strike.
In New York, the strikers were breaking the “Taylor Law” which forbids public sector workers in New York state from striking. Toussaint had to invoke the spirit of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott to remind the public that sometimes, breaking the law is the right thing to do.
In London, the question of arresting Bob Crow, the leader of the RMT, never came up. The strike may have been unpleasant for commuters, it may have angered London’s mayor, but no one for a moment said it was illegal.
The right to strike is a fundamental human right. Almost all countries ban members of the security services — the police and military — from striking. But very few would consider bus and subway staff to be in the same category.
Frightened by the “Taylor Law,” the national leaders of the TWU did not support Local 100 — a fact that city and state officials made much of. But the London strike was organized and led by the national union.
New York’s bus and subway workers were denounced by the mainstream media as overpaid, underworked and greedy. In London, people tended to remember the heroism shown by bus and tube workers at the time of the July 7th and 21st terrorist bombings. (Tube workers were on the front lines, evacuating the dead and injured from deep underground, surrounded by smoke and flames.)
New York and London are both cosmopolitan, liberal cities. They have much in common.
But the two strikes made me wonder about why one was nearly broken by state repression and ruled illegal, while the other — while unpleasant for many — was accepted as part of the normal course of life.
One fundamental difference is that workers in New York, unlike workers in London, do not have and have never had a real political party of their own.
I know that there exists today a Working Families Party which tries to throw the weight of the trade union movement behind this or that Democratic candidate. And in the past, New York’s unions were instrumental in setting up the American Labor Party and the Liberal Party. But the idea of trade unions organizing an independent political party to elect working-class candidates to office never really took off.
Britain has had a Labour Party for a century now. Ask trade unionists today if that party still serves the interest of working-class people and you might get laughed at. Tony Blair’s “New Labour” bears little resemblance to the party formed by industrial workers and coal miners a century ago.
Just how far today’s Labour Party has moved away from its origins is illustrated by the fact that the RMT union, representing London’s tube workers, got itself thrown out of the party — which it helped found, and to which it had been affiliated for decades — two years ago. The reason: the union had allowed some of its members in Scotland to affiliate to another party, the left-wing Scottish Socialist Party.
Nevertheless, even with a Labour Party more remote from unions than ever before, a Labour Party that bears little resemblance to the party founded a century ago — even with a Labour Party like that, something like the “Taylor Law” would be unimaginable in Britain.
At their very worst, when Labour Party politicians are pushing for privatization, pursuing policies that would once have been considered “Thatcherite” and betraying the legacy of Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee, even then no one in the party would dare talk about banning all public sector strikes.
Does that mean that all New York’s workers need to do is form a labor party (or turn the Working Families Party into one) to solve their problems? Yes and no.
Even with a hundred years of independent labor political action here in Britain, with a Labour Party in power nationally and “socialist” Ken Livingstone the mayor of London, workers here face the threat of privatization, downsizing and attacks on unions. This is hardly a workers’ paradise.
Political action is at best just one weapon in labor’s arsenal and is no substitute for other weapons, such as organizing, the picket line and the strike.
And yet, as I watched the TWU end its struggle faced with million dollar a day fines and possible imprisonment of its leaders, I had to wonder if Roger Toussaint didn’t feel a little bit jealous of his British counterparts, who were able to conduct their struggle without fear, and with the law on their side.