It’s the 40th Anniversary of TWU’s 1980 City-Wide Strike

It was April Fools Day 1980, but the TWU Local 100 membership was not joking.

Thousands of New York City transit workers hit the picket lines on Tuesday morning, April 1, 1980, in the first City-wide transit strike in 15 years. The strike would last 11 tumultuous days.

New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who did more harm than good during the strike, lamented to the press: “The unthinkable has happened and now we have to figure out how to live with the unthinkable and we will.”

The man at the center of this watershed moment in TWU’s history was John Edward Lawe, a rugged Irish immigrant who had labored in a road repair crew and in Ireland’s peat bogs before arriving in America in 1949 at the age of 30.

Lawe, one of ten children to Luke and Kate Lawe from Strokestown, County Roscommon, Ireland, worked as an elevator operator in a Manhattan high-rise for one year before finding work as a Bus Cleaner for the old Fifth Avenue Coach Co. at the 132nd Street depot.

He became active in the union as a Shop Steward.  During the 29-day bus strike in 1953, he served as a picket captain for maintenance.  Later that year, Lawe switched to transportation and quickly rose up the union ladder.  He was elected Transportation Section Chair in 1955 and then Chair for all of Fifth Ave. Coach Transportation.  After the historic 1962 bus strike that led to the creation of MABSTOA, Lawe was elected Division 1 Recording Secretary immediately, and then Division 1 Chair in 1964.

Lawe served on the negotiating committee during the union’s first citywide transit strike in 1966.  In 1968, he was elected Division 1 Vice President.  Then in 1977, Lawe succeeded Ellis Van Riper as President of Local 100.

The decade of the 70’s was a turbulent financial period for New York City, which in 1975 teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.  Who from that generation can forget the famous October 30, 1975 front page of the New York Daily News that blared “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”  President Ford, the day before, had vowed to veto any Congressional bailout for the City.