Mike Quill

Michael Joseph "Red Mike" Quill (September 18, 1905 – January 28, 1966) was one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), a union founded by subway workers in New York City that expanded to represent employees in other forms of transit.

He served as the President of the TWU for most of the first thirty years of its existence.

Connolly had been a revolutionary and high profile labor activist in Ireland until his death in 1916 following the Easter Rising, an event that eventually sparked the two wars in which Quill had participated.

Two of Connolly's thoughts came to guide Quill's political philosophy; the ideas that that economic power precedes and conditions political power, and that the only effective and satisfactory expression of the workers’ demands is to be found politically in a separate and independent labor party, and economically in the industrial union.

He was a dispatch rider for the Irish Republican Army from 1919 to 1921 while still a teenager; then a volunteer of the Anti-Treaty IRA in the Irish Civil War that followed.

One canard has him robbing a bank to raise funds for the IRA.

He participated in fighting between Pro and Anti Treaty IRA units over the town of Kenmare in Kerry.

Quill's IRA record of service was confirmed by his commanding officer John Joe Rice, Kerry 2nd Brigade years later to Quill's widow Shirley.

Following the wars, Quill worked as a carpenter's apprentice, then a woodcutter.

Having fought for the losing side in the Civil War, Quill's prospects in Ireland were low and so he was brought to the United States in 1926 by his uncle Patrick Quill, a conductor in the subway who got him his first job there.

Mike's brothers, Patrick and John, had already moved to the city before him.

In New York City, Quill first lived with family in Harlem.

Quill worked various odd jobs to make ends meet, including at one point bootlegging alcohol, as prohibition was still in effect at the time.

Eventually by 1929 he returned to New York City where his uncle arranged for him a job with the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), first as a night gateman, then as a clerk or "ticket chopper".

The job was a punishing one; Quilled worked 84 hours a week, 12 hours a night, seven nights a week for 33c an hour.

At the time there was no sick leave, holidays, or pension rights.

Moving from station to station, Quill got to know a large number of IRT employees, many of them also Irish immigrants.

They would joke that IRT stood for "Irish Republican Transit" on account of how many of their peers were also Irish Republicans.

It was during this time that Quill used the quiet of the late hours to read labor history and, in particular, the works of James Connolly.

In 1933 Quill, along with others such as fellow Irish immigrant and Irish Republican Thomas H. O'Shea, moved to create a Trade Union free and independent of the IRT's complacent company union.

The name that Quill and others chose for their new union, the Transport Workers Union, was a tribute to the Irish Transport and General Workers Union led by Jim Larkin and Connolly twenty years earlier.

The new union was mainly compromised at its core of members of Clan na Gael, a secretive Irish-American organization that supported "physical force" Irish Republicanism, and members of the Communist Party USA, who supplied organizers, operating funds, and connections with organizations outside the Irish-American community.

The Communist Party was at that time in the last years of its ultrarevolutionary Third Period, when it sought to form revolutionary unions outside the American Federation of Labor.

The party, therefore, focused both on organizing workers into the union and recruiting members for the Party through mimeographed shop papers with titles such as "Red Shuttle" or "Red Dynamo".

Another source of the core membership of what became the TWU were the Irish Workers' Clubs, setup by James Gralton who had been essentially exiled from Ireland for his left-wing political activities in 1933.

Two Trade Union Unity League organizers, John Santo and Austin Hogan, met with the Clan na Gael's members in a cafeteria on Columbus Circle on April 12, 1934, the date now used to mark the foundation of the union.

The new union appointed Thomas H. O'Shea as its first president, assigning Quill a secondary position.

Quill proved to have more leadership potential than O'Shea, however, and quickly came to replace him in the top position.

He was a persuasive speaker, willing to "soapbox" outside of IRT facilities for hours, and capable of great charm in individual conversations.

He also acquired some renown after an incident in 1936, in which some "beakies", the informants used by the IRT to spy on union activities, attacked Quill and five other unionists in a tunnel as they were returning from picketing the IRT's offices.

Arrested for inciting to riot, Quill came off as a fighter in his defence of the charges, which were eventually dismissed.

Quill was closely associated with the Communist Party from the outset but proved rebellious as well.

When the Third Period gave way to the Popular Front era, Santo and Hogan directed O'Shea and Quill to abandon efforts to form a new union and to run instead for office in the IRT company union, the Interborough Brotherhood.

A close ally of the Communist Party USA (CP) for the first twelve years of his leadership of the union, he broke with it in 1948.

Quill had varying relations with the mayors of New York City.

He was a personal friend of Robert F. Wagner Jr. but could find no common ground with Wagner's successor, John Lindsay, or as Quill called him "Linsley", and led a twelve-day transit strike in 1966 against him that landed him in jail.

However, he won significant wage increases for his members.

He died of a heart attack three days after the end of the strike.

Quill's leadership is not only noted for his success in improving workers' rights but also for his commitment to racial equality, before the Civil Rights Era.

Quill was born in Gortloughera, near Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland.