Three little-known rabble-rousers - a radical token booth clerk, a son of a veteran striker and an immigrant once fired by union boss Roger Toussaint - played big roles in the defeat of the tentative transit workers contract.
After leading bus and subway workers out in an illegal strike last month, Toussaint signed a new work agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that he believed would be ratified. The deal called for 10.5% raises over 37 months but required workers - for the first time - to contribute 1.5% of their wages toward their health insurance.
Marty Goodman, John Mooney and Ainsley Stewart said no way.
They blasted Toussaint, the Transport Workers Union Local 100 president, and his pact to anyone who would listen or would read their flyers.
Team Toussaint has variously called the dissenters loose cannons with little regard for the truth, career inciters or political opportunists. Supporters say the three men are true union activists who are fighting for workers' rights, including the right to dissent.
Either way, they have colorful backgrounds of confrontation and agitation.
Marty Goodman, 55, has been a token booth clerk and TWU activist in the city for nearly two decades. He is known for berating MTA board members for the alleged mistreatment of workers, the closing of token booths and fare hikes.
"2005 is payback time," he thundered at the December board meeting, when he demanded annual raises of 10%. "No justice. No train. No bus. No us."
His leftist beliefs, however, have led to more dangerous locations than the subways and MTA meetings.
Goodman said he was in Haiti as a reporter for the left-wing New York Guardian in 1986 when brutal dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was overthrown. He returned to the troubled island as an election observer in 1990, when former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was voted in as president, he said.
Three years ago, Goodman, who is Jewish, traveled to the West Bank to protest for Palestinian rights, he said.
John Mooney, 39, a former token booth agent who now is a full-time TWU staffer, is the son of Scottish and Irish parents and grew up in a union home. His father, an engineer who ran the boiler room of a high-rise, periodically would go out on strike, he recalled.
"You have to stand up to the boss and fight for what you want sometimes," he said. "Sometimes going without pay and suffering is part of the process."
He tried self-employment for a while, operating food carts, before becoming a transit worker in the early 1990s.
Ainsley Stewart, 46, who left Guyana when he was in his early 20s, landed a mechanic's job with the Transit Authority in the late 1980s. He tussled with managers and survived an effort to fire him after he complained about an unsafe working condition, he said.
"If the TA didn't try and fire me, I probably wouldn't have gotten involved" with the union, he said.
Stewart was put on the union payroll as a division chairman in 2001 - only to be fired by Toussaint 17 months later. He was dismissed on charges of not attending to union duties, which he denies.
To Toussaint's dismay, Stewart survived. He was elected to a vice presidential post in 2004 and sits on the local's executive board - with Goodman and Mooney.
Originally published on January 21, 2006