QUILL, Michael Joseph ("Mike")

(b. 18 September 1905 in Gourtloughera, Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland; d. 28 January 1966 in New York City), labor leader and longtime head of the Transport Workers Union who crippled New York City in 1966 by shutting down the subway and bus systems during a mass transit strike.

Born to Roman Catholic farmers, John Daniel Quill and Margaret Lynch, Quill was the second youngest of eight children. After leaving Kilgarvan National School at the age of fourteen, he joined the Irish Republican Army as a dispatch carrier. When Great Britain gave the southern part of Ireland independence, and "The Troubles" ended, Quill decided to emigrate and flipped a coin to pick his new home. America won.

Arriving in New York City in 1926, Quill found a job as a night gateman on the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway line and soon rose to the position of agent. From 1929 to 1935, when twelve-hour, seven-day work-weeks were common, Quill worked in almost every station on the IRT circuit, thereby gaining a wide acquaintance with the subway workers and learning their grievances. In 1934 he helped found the New York–based Transport Workers Union (TWU), a Communist-backed group created to address poor pay and dangerous working conditions. He became president of the union in 1935, a position that he would hold for the remainder of his life. Known for his quick wit and aggressive, outspoken personality, Quill used militant rhetoric to achieve gains for workers. He became a U.S. citizen in 1931, and married Maria Theresa ("Mollie") O'Neill on 26 December 1937; they had one son. After years of taking orders and money from Moscow, Quill publicly repudiated the Communists in 1948. As the TWU expanded, he cemented his position as a labor leader in 1949 by becoming a national vice president of the Committee for Industrial Organizations, or CIO (later AFL-CIO).

When the 1960s opened, Quill was in the twilight of his life. Rank-and-file members had begun to protest his compromises with the New York Transit Authority (TA) by withholding their dues, while splinter unions emerged in New York to challenge his authority. Mollie had died in 1959, and Quill's health had been on the decline since a 1950 heart attack. Now nearly bald, with a gray fringe of hair, blue eyes, and a round face, and a chronic limp from a faulty hip joint, Quill walked with a trademark silver-tipped black cane and spoke with a strong Irish brogue. On 20 January 1961 he married his longtime secretary, Shirley Garry.

Believing that walkouts hurt workers as well as the public, and that they never assured a higher settlement for labor, Quill, despite his rhetoric, always preferred to settle instead of strike. In 1961, however, he led his first strike. In September he shut down the nation's largest rail carrier, the Pennsylvania Railroad, for the first time in its 114-year history, to get better working rules for maintenance workers. Idling over 10,000 miles of track across 13 states, the strike lasted 12 days and prompted 6 governors and 11 mayors to call for its end. After resolving their differences, both sides claimed victory.

Although the TWU had branches in many cities, most of Quill's activity focused on New York City. Every two years, with the New York City TWU contract due to expire, Quill and the mayor of the day would engage in the same charade. Quill would loudly demand the sky for his membership, threaten to shut down the public transportation system, quietly negotiate, and then accept a far less costly settlement.

Unfortunately for New York, changes in the political climate brought an end to this arrangement. In 1965 John Lindsay won the mayoral election. Quill and Lindsay lacked any understanding of each other. To Lindsay, Quill was a corrupt, irresponsible man who periodically bullied the city and needed to be put in line. He wanted to do away with Quill's inflationary and pressure-packed deals every two years. Often booed when visiting union meetings, Quill's hold upon his membership had become tenuous, and he worried about his legacy. He thought that the union's survival could only be assured by the experience of a good strike. Disliking the patrician Lindsay, Quill believed that the new mayor had contempt for the working class.

The TWU contract with the Transit Authority expired at midnight, 31 December 1965. Following the November 1965 election, Quill began contract negotiations with a list of seventy-six demands that included proposals for a four-day work week and a 30 percent pay raise that would cost the city an estimated $250 million over a two-year period. By law, transit expenses could only be covered by fares, and the fare would have to jump from fifteen cents to a politically unacceptable forty-seven cents to satisfy the workers. As usual, Quill's demands exceeded the package that he was willing to accept. Lindsay refused to join the negotiations and sent Quill a telegram urging him to bargain in good faith with the TA commissioners. An insulted Quill publicly categorized Lindsay as a "coward." The TA made one offer, rejected as inadequate by Quill, and the TWU declared a strike to begin on the day Lindsay took office, 1 January 1966.

As scheduled, all buses and subways stopped. New York traffic, normally heavy, became so congested that few commuters could get to work. Schools shut down and business losses were estimated at $100 million a day. With freight trains from the city halted, the strike also had nationwide impact. By this time, Quill's health was in serious decline, but he ignored a doctor's order to go to the hospital. On 3 January New York State Supreme Court Justice Abraham Geller ordered Quill to halt the strike by 11 a.m. the next day or go to jail for civil contempt of court. On 4 January Quill was arrested when he arrived at the bargaining table. While awaiting a medical examination at the jail, he fainted and was moved to Bellevue Hospital for treatment of congestive heart failure. On 13 January the TWU, with a membership of 135,000, won a $62 million settlement with the city that included a 15 percent wage hike recognizing the cost of living increases generated by the Vietnam War. Quill left the hospital and returned to his apartment on 24 January, but died there on 28 January of coronary occlusion. His wake at the Plaza Funeral Home drew about 14,000 mourners. Following a funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral on 1 February, Quill was buried in the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County, next to his first wife.

The man that many loved to hate, Quill is remembered as one of the most controversial labor leaders that the United States has ever produced. In the 1960s he managed to achieve the impossible by bringing New York City to an almost complete stop and, in the process, cemented his legacy as a protector of the American working class.

Quill left no collection of personal papers, but union papers and some of Quill's papers and interview transcripts are held at the Transport Workers Union Collection at the Robert Wagner Archives at New York University. Two biographies of Quill are L. H. Whittemore, The Man Who Ran the Subways: The Story of Mike Quill (1968), and Shirley Garry Quill, Mike Quill—Himself: A Memoir (1985). Biographical information is also in Michael Marmo, More Profile Than Courage: The New York City Transit Strike of 1966 (1990), and at the TWU Web site at http://www.twu.com. An obituary is in the New York Times (29 Jan. 1966).

Caryn E. Neumann