NEW YORK (AP) - The war of words over the transit strike took an ugly turn after Mayor Michael Bloomberg described union heads as "thuggish," a remark some said was racist in the context of a predominantly black union.
 
During his first briefing on the strike Tuesday at City Hall, Bloomberg complained that union leaders had "thuggishly turned their backs on New York City and disgraced the noble concept of public service."

A group of City Council members and black leaders said Wednesday that Bloomberg's comment was racist because it was directed at leaders of a union that is less than 30 percent white.

"We resent the idea that you would characterize a predominantly black and Latino union as a bunch of thugs," said City Councilman Charles Barron.

Ed Skyler, the mayor's spokesman, replied: "It's despicable to inject race into this situation."

Bloomberg has no official role in the labor negotiations, since city subways and buses are managed by the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority. But he is responsible for keeping New York running during the shutdown of the nation's largest transit system.

The Rev. Herbert Daughtry, an influential black minister, said the mayor, governor and MTA leaders were risking comparisons to Eugene "Bull" Connor. The Birmingham, Ala., segregationist police commissioner turned fire hoses and police dogs on black civil rights marchers in 1963.

Daughtry said Bloomberg was using as his "bully club" the state law prohibiting strikes by public employees.

"Be cautious how you use the law to beat people into submission," Daughtry said.

In the past, Barron and Daughtry have used the word "thug" to describe white attackers involved in bias crimes. Barron stressed that the context of the predominantly black union is what made Bloomberg's comment racially insensitive.
 
Transport Workers Union President Roger Toussaint stopped short of joining the accusations of racism, but said Wednesday that the "thuggish" remark showed the mayor's "lack of respect" for his members.

"We wake up at three and four in the morning to move trains in this town," Toussaint said. "That's not the behavior of thugs and selfish people."

When New York's transit workers chose Toussaint as their president five years ago, they knew exactly who they were getting: Toussaint had been a leader of a highly militant faction within the union.

The New Directions Caucus ultimately wrested control of the Transport Workers Union from its old guard leadership. And now, Toussaint has taken his 33,700 subway and bus workers into the New York streets despite bitter weather, a lack of support from the parent union, and court-ordered fines of $1 million a day for violating a state law that bars public employees from striking.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ripped the union boss two days running, and a tabloid editorial Wednesday urged, "Throw Roger Under the Train!"

The transit strike is the city's first since an 11-day walkout in 1980. To older New Yorkers, Toussaint's pugnacious manner evokes comparison with Mike Quill, the bombastic Irish immigrant who founded the TWU in the 1930s, led a 12-day strike in 1966, and became famous for insulting the city's patrician mayor, John Lindsay.

The outspoken Toussaint may have stunned some New Yorkers when he told Bloomberg in 2002 to "shut up" after the mayor said the union should be fined heavily for a threatened illegal strike.

But blunt language has been the 49-year-old Toussaint's style since his boyhood in Trinidad, where he was born into a poor family of nine children. He spoke out as a youth against local politicians who had replaced the long-time British colonial government in 1962.

By Toussaint's own account, that subjected him to "harassment and intimidation" and eventually prompted him to emigrate to the United States, where his mother worked as a nurse's aide in Brooklyn.

At Brooklyn College, he joined groups supporting minority programs and other social causes. After finding a job with the MTA in 1984 as a track maintenance worker, he almost immediately turned his activism to union affairs, publishing a newsletter on complaints about working conditions.

When the union's New Directions faction arose in the 1990s out of rank-and-file dissatisfaction, its leaders included Toussaint, whom labor expert Joshua B. Freeman called "very charismatic, with a very sharp tongue."

Toussaint was fired in 1998, allegedly for doing union business on company time, but sued to get his job back -- and won. A courtroom disclosure that the MTA spent $10,000 for a private detective to trail and videotape Toussaint for seven weeks helped give him a kind of folk-hero image among union members.

Toussaint rode that image to the union's top job, winning election over incumbent Willie James in 2000.

The strike over wages and pension contributions could determine Toussaint's labor legacy. It could inspire other unions to become more militant, particularly on employee benefits issues. Or it could be a disaster.

"I think it could have a lot of influence," said Freeman, a labor historian at City University of New York's Graduate Center. "Employers all across the country are trying to roll back benefits such as pensions and health care, and it could be very influential elsewhere if it succeeds in stopping or diminishing these efforts."

One of Toussaint's key demands -- a sticking point in the deadlock -- is that future MTA employees not receive lesser benefits than present-day workers.
 
The union chief defined this himself in 2003, saying: "I think there is a certain drumbeat and bias to roll back the gains of the middle class and the working-class people. That's part of the agenda of the right wing of this country, which we intend to fight tooth and nail."

Toussaint, a man with a pronounced Caribbean accent, publicly conveys a humorless, no-nonsense demeanor, and some colleagues say he is imperious in handling union affairs.

"He runs his office like a dictatorship," bus driver Donald Yates told The New York Times. "It doesn't mean he isn't effective, but he angers a lot of people."
 
Toussaint was re-elected in 2003 despite angering some TWU members by agreeing to a $1,000 bonus for workers in lieu of a pay raise, along with the loss of layoff protection, in a contract reached in 2002.

He has his own critics within Local 100. But the dissidents were silent -- or drowned out -- by the membership's overwhelming endorsement of his call for a strike.