Samuelsen, the TWU international president, described the whole episode as “absurd.” “The cops themselves have dozens of employees who are trained to drive the buses. Dozens!” he said, noting that the NYPD owns its own fleet of prisoner-transport buses it can use, and that there are several NYPD employees who used to be bus drivers—they just couldn’t seem to find any of them. “That’s an epic management failure.”

All in all, the six bus operators who walked off the job that night stopped the gears of the NYPD’s mass-arrest machine from turning for at least a few hours. And their union leadership stood behind them—because this isn’t the first time bus operators have refused to participate in the policing of mass movements. In New York, bus drivers’ refusal to be co-opted can be traced to Occupy Wall Street. After at least one driver refused to cooperate with the NYPD, the union tried to get a temporary restraining order against the police in order to forbid them from using MTA buses. Though the restraining order was not granted, the case was not dismissed. The union marched in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street that same month and continued to do so for the years following.

For over a century, those who would try to make the city run without its trained workers have suffered the consequences. In 1918, a Brooklyn Rapid Transit drivers strike led to a similar scramble for operators. As a result, a nonunionized driver crashed a train not far from Grand Army Plaza, where protesters were arrested Tuesday. It was the worst transit accident in New York City history.

And the Transit Workers Union has a long history of anti-war leadership. Mike Quill, the Irish immigrant and IRA veteran who founded the union, was one of the earliest labor opponents of the Vietnam War. The MTA’s Patafio, who is responsible for the 3,500 bus drivers working in Brooklyn, sees Quill as a forebear worth emulating—especially as he is aware now that members of his own union have family in Gaza. “I always come back to ‘all workers,’ right? Working families in Palestine, working families in New York City,” he told The Nation. “They all have the same simple demands. I want to be able to raise my family, live in peace and have some security.”

Leadership at the Transport Workers Union is unanimous that MTA bus operators are not required by contract to comply with police commandeering of their vehicles. For some, like TWU International President John Samuelsen, it’s a straightforward contract violation. “It’s not within our job description to transport arrestees. That’s the work of—I don’t care who it’s the work of, it’s just not the work of transit workers. It’s not within the scope of our duties,” he said. “And it’s freakin’ dangerous!”

Back in 2011, when Samuelsen was president of TWU Local 100, bus drivers refused to drive during Occupy Wall Street, both because of threats from protesters (Samuelsen recalled one “smarmy, entitled, rich, white” protester calling a Black bus driver an Uncle Tom) and because of threats from police, who at one point pepper-sprayed a bus operator. “Our people are not trained for this,” he said. “They are under enough mental and physical stress when they come to work every day.”

Once Samuelsen became international president of the TWU, the policy he’d put in place for New York—that TWU members do not transport arrestees—became the national union’s line. And, he said, transit workers across the country embraced that rule during 2020’s George Floyd protests. “Even our bus operators all across the South embraced it,” he said. “Even our bus operators who carry guns in Houston and Miami embraced it. Nobody wants any part of this. This isn’t what we do. We transport working people.”

Samuelsen said he doesn’t see the Transport Workers Union calling for a cease-fire anytime soon, though other unions, such as the United Auto Workers, did so as early as December. “We don’t take positions on these issues, even if it’s an issue of great consequence,” Samuelsen said. “It would have to be a massive unanimously held position of the membership, and it’s just not.”

Patafio disagrees on that point. “Our trade union came out of migrant workers’ being denied basic rights,” he said, noting that TWU took positions on the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement before other unions. “I think [our history is] something we should look to.”

Regardless of why the drivers walked off, the protesters waiting in their plastic cuffs on that late night took one message away from the incident: Solidarity forever. “[The drivers] were refusing to let NYPD claim ownership to their labor, and to a public service,” Solomon said. “City buses are for the people.”