and replicated many of his tactics. Quill worked odd jobs to make ends meet, including at one point
bootlegging alcohol, as
prohibition was still in effect. 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. On April 12, 1934, 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, 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, and quickly replaced 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 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. Quill denounced the plan vociferously, to the point that he was nearly expelled from the union. Quill came around, by the next party meeting and began attending Brotherhood meetings — while still recruiting workers there to join the TWU. Given the level of surveillance, and consistent with the conspiratorial traditions of Irish political movements, 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. Those few workers, such as Quill, who were willing to accept identification as union activists, spread the word about the new union by handing out flyers and delivering soapbox speeches in front of company facilities. After a year of organizing, the union formed a Delegates Council, made up of representatives from sections of the system. In the meantime the new union continued its patient organizing campaign, conducting a number of brief strikes over workplace conditions, but avoiding any large-scale confrontations. That changed on January 23, 1937, when the
Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT) fired two union members at the Kent Avenue powerhouse plant in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn for union activity. The union launched a successful
sitdown strike two days later that solidified the union's support among BMT employees, helped lead to its overwhelming victory in an
NLRB-conducted election among the IRT's 13,500 employees later in 1937, and helped bring thousands of other transit employees into the union. ==TWU leadership==