Michael Joseph "Red Mike" Quill (September 18, 1905 – January 28, 1966) was an Irish-American labor leader and politician who co-founded the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), a union of 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. 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. He served on the New York City Council from 1938 to 1939 and again from 1944 to 1949 on the American Labor Party ticket.
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. 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 noted for his success in improving workers' rights and for his commitment to racial equality, before the Civil Rights Era.
Early years in Ireland and immigration to America
Quill was born in Gortloughera, near Kilgarvan, County Kerry, Ireland. 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. 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 limited. In 1926, he was brought to the United States 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. In 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.
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.
In the 1940s, Quill spoke out against the Anti-Semitism of Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic Priest of Irish ethnicity who had become a sensation in the United States on the radio. "Anti-Semitism is not the problem of the Jewish people alone. It is an American problem, a number one American problem. We all know how Hitler came into power—while he was persecuting one section of the people, other sections of the people were asleep. The merchants of hate picked their spot and picked their cause. We too must pick our cause—freedom of all peoples in a democratic America.” said Quill in relation to Coughlin. When the TWU's contract with the city expired and Lindsay did not immediately accede to the union's specific pay raise demands, Quill called a strike which lasted twelve days. The world's largest subway and bus systems, serving eight million people daily, came to a complete halt.
The City obtained an injunction prohibiting the strike and succeeded in imprisoning Quill and seven other leaders of the TWU and the Amalgamated Association, which joined in the stoppage, for contempt of court. The labor lawyer Theodore W. Kheel mediated the agreement that ended the strike.
Quill did not waver, responding at a crowded press conference: "The judge can drop dead in his black robes!". The union successfully held out for a sizeable wage increase for the union. Other unions followed suit, demanding similar raises.
Quill died at age 60, three days after the union's victory celebration. He had an initial heart attack when he was sent to jail for contempt. He was interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, after a funeral Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, his casket draped with the Irish tricolor.
Speaking after his death, Martin Luther King eulogised Quill with the following: