Pay cuts of ten percent by both the IRT and the BMT, along with the layoff of thousands of employees and a speed up of work for those who remained, spurred new organizing efforts in 1932.

Used to the secrecy of Clan na Gael, they proceeded cautiously, first seeking help from Irish organizations, such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.

John Santo and Austin Hogan, Trade Union Unity League organizers, met with the Clan na Gael's members in a cafeteria at Columbus Circle on April 12, 1934.

The TWU declared its aim to represent all public transit workers in the City, regardless of craft, and campaigned to reverse the ten percent wage cut, increase wages to meet increases in the cost of living, limit the workweek to forty hours and hire more workers to eliminate the speedup and to establish safe and sanitary working conditions.

The union proceeded clandestinely, forming small groups of trusted friends in order to keep informers at bay, meeting in isolated locations and in subway tunnels.

Management at the Jerome Avenue barn in the Bronx attempted to make the cleaning crews work faster by forcing the use of a 14-inch squeegee instead of the customary 10-inch tool.

When six Car Cleaners were fired for insubordination, a two-day walkout inspired by the TWU caused the management to acquiesce and reinstate the workers.

A second incident that helped establish the union's reputation among transit workers was initiated the next month by the IRT, when Quill and a number of colleagues were jumped by goons at Grand Central Station.

Strangely, this led to Quill and four other union activists, including Herbert C. Holmstrom, Thomas H. O'Shea, Patrick McHugh and Serafino Machado, being arrested for inciting a riot.

Nonetheless, the incident was retold in the media and at various work locations, where it epitomized and typified the cumulative history of abuses suffered by transit workers throughout the city.

Two days later, however, at 3:00 p.m., the 498 employees there, all wearing TWU buttons, began a sitdown strike, seizing control of the plant until management reinstated the workers it had fired.

The BMT folded a half-hour before the deadline and agreed to meet to discuss the union's demand for recognition as the exclusive bargaining representative of its employees.

While the union did not win that demand, its victory at Kent Avenue established it as the de facto representative of these workers and, in time, all of the BMT's employees.

Even though the TWU, in coalition with the Amalgamated Association, swept the election to determine which union should represent the IND's employees, the Board refused to bargain with it.

With the support of the national CIO, the union was able to maintain its collective bargaining agreements and the right to represent the IRT and BMT employees after the City took over those systems in 1940.

After winning a contentious strike against the privately owned bus companies in early 1941, during which La Guardia had announced plans to have the police guard strikebreakers in the event that the companies attempted to operate, the union made public preparations for a strike against the City if it challenged the union's right to represent these employees or to roll back their contract rights.

La Guardia responded by directing the Police Department to develop plans to run the subways in the event of a strike and supporting legislation that made it a crime for workers to leave transit equipment unattended.

The union, which faced significant resistance within its own predominantly white membership to elimination of employment discrimination against blacks, nonetheless joined with the NAACP, the National Negro Congress and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in pressuring privately owned bus companies the other transit companies to allow blacks to work in positions other than the porter and heavy maintenance positions to which they had been relegated.

The union soon expanded to represent transit workers in other eastern cities, such as Philadelphia and Boston, Massachusetts, and beyond, in Chicago, San Francisco, Akron, Ohio, and Louisville, Kentucky.

The Philadelphia organizing drive, held during World War II, was especially difficult: the incumbent union, the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Employees Union, and the Amalgamated Association, TWU's AFL rival, both seized on the resistance of many white employees to government-ordered elimination of job discrimination against blacks to argue that a vote for TWU "is a vote for Negroes to get your jobs".

The strike collapsed two weeks later, on August 17, 1944, after the government arrested the strike leaders, The union also began representing utility workers outside the transit companies when the Brooklyn Union Gas Company employees voted to join it; it lost most of its opportunities to organize in this area several years later, however, when the CIO gave the newly formed Utility Workers of America jurisdiction over this industry.

In 1945 the TWU expanded its jurisdiction to pursue the ramp service employees of Pan American Airways, then the largest airline in the United States, in Miami.

He was able to enlist the City, in the form of Mayor William O'Dwyer, in his support, winning a large wage increase for subway workers in 1948 that cemented his standing with the membership.

The City obtained an injunction prohibiting the strike and succeeded in imprisoning Quill and even other leaders of the TWU and the Amalgamated Association, which joined in the stoppage, for contempt of court.

On December 16, 2005, after failed negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) of New York City, the Local 100 of the TWU announced it would halt operations on bus and subway lines.

[7] On April 10, 2006, Justice Theodore T. Jones sentenced Local 100 President Roger Toussaint to ten days in jail[8] and a week later, the union was fined 2.5 million dollars and the automatic deduction of dues from all members was suspended.

[9] Transit workers in Long Island, New York, in Akron and Columbus, Ohio, in Omaha, Nebraska, and in Hackensack, New Jersey joined the union around 1941.

Expansion also came in the form of other industries, namely, the railroads, air transportation; public utility and university service employees also joined the union.

In 1945 the workers of Pan American World Airways joined the TWU with the union's successful negotiation of a collective bargaining agreement, three years in the making.

Today the union represents employees of many other railroad companies, including Conrail, Amtrak, SEPTA, Metro North, and PATH.