The Cult of ACRE*

I think all of us would agree that the Association of Commuter Rail Employees is a rather unique and unusual group, no matter what side any of us individually stand on. Most definitely ACRE is unique to Metro-North. It's also highly unusual in the rail industry in that it is not a union "national in scope" (i.e., it does not represent employees other than on Metro-North and has no standing in the larger rail labor movement, with no representation at the First Division of the National Railway Labor Board in Chicago).

One fine day, while surfing the Internet, I found The Advanced Bonewits' Cult Danger Evaluation Frame (Version 2.6) by Isaac Bonewits. Mr. Bonewits is a well-known teacher and researcher, with a particular interest in religion, sociology, group dynamics, and minority belief systems. To him, the mere fact of a group being "unusual" or "unique" is neither a good thing nor a bad thing taken alone. One must also evaluate a group by their written and spoken words, and by their deeds in public and in private.

Bonewits writes:

"...(Ordinary people faced with friends or loved ones joining an "unusual" group, or perhaps contemplating joining one themselves, need a relatively simple way to evaluate just how dangerous or harmless a given group is liable to be, without either subjecting themselves to its power or judging it solely on theological or ideological grounds (the usual method used by anti-cult groups)...

"In 1979 I constructed an evaluation tool which I now call the "Advanced Bonewits' Cult Danger Evaluation Frame" or the "ABCDEF" (because evaluating these groups should be elementary)... The purpose of this evaluation tool is to help both amateur and professional observers, including current or would-be members, of various organizations (including religious, occult, psychological or political groups) to determine just how dangerous a given group is liable to be, in comparison with other groups, to the physical and mental health of its members and of other people subject to its influence...As a general rule, the higher the numerical total scored by a given group (the further to the right of the scale), the more dangerous it is likely to be...

"This tool can be used by parents, reporters, law enforcement agents, social scientists and others interested in evaluating the actual dangers presented by a given group or movement...It should be pointed out that the ABCDEF is founded upon both modern psychological theories about mental health and personal growth, and my many years of participant observation and historical research into minority belief systems."

I continued reading, and looked over the various factors Bonewits used to construct the frame. I saw immediately where the frame could readily point out potential problems and red flags for a member or potential member of a religious "cult," or for that matter any other type of organization.

As I continued reading, though, the image of ACRE kept popping up in my mind, and I didn't like what I was seeing. The more I read and thought about the factors covered in the ABCDEF, the more and more the behaviors and actions of ACRE members and officers - and the organization as a whole - appeared cult like in a negative sense.

Bonewits cautions in his introduction to the frame that one should not only listen to the official pronouncements of a group or organization, but also look behind the official statements to the actions of the leaders and officers of a group. The scoring scale runs from 1 (low/nonexistent) to 10 (high).

The first factor in the ABCDEF is "Internal Control: Amount of internal political and social power exercised by leader(s) over members; lack of clearly defined organizational rights for members." All the political and social power in ACRE is exercised for the benefit of the leaders (the officers in this case), as best as I can see. While there are written rules in ACRE's constitution relating to members' rights, the impression I have from the members and their attempts to exercise those rights is that members' rights are subject to the whims of the officers. On a scale of one to ten, from their actions I would rate ACRE a ten for their regular attempts to maintain tight control over their membership.

The second factor is "External Control: Amount of external political and social influence desired or obtained; emphasis on directing members' external political and social behavior." We all know ACRE wishes to have enough influence in Albany, Hartford, and Washington to allow their activities to continue unimpeded, so I'd give them at least a seven for wanting enough outside power to be able to perpetuate themselves. Going back to my experiences as a BLE member when Mike Doyle was BLE General Chairman, the flip side of this is a distinct desire to keep the rank-and-file from socializing with people who have information that even slightly disproves the officers' statements. I'd give ACRE a ten on this part, based on my own experiences.

Number three on the list is "Wisdom/Knowledge Claimed by leader(s); amount of infallibility declared or implied about decisions or doctrinal/scriptural interpretations; number and degree of unverified and/or unverifiable credentials claimed." Well, we all know Mike and Tony are infallible when they speak on union matters, they decide and the rank-and-file has to go along. Ten again.

"Wisdom/Knowledge Credited to leader(s) by members; amount of trust in decisions or doctrinal/scriptural interpretations made by leader(s); amount of hostility by members towards internal or external critics and/or towards verification efforts." On this fourth point, I can't understand why otherwise intelligent folks credit Mike Doyle and Tony Bottalico with infallibility on union matters, but many people do seem willing to "go along" for the mere sake of getting along. I've caught a great deal of static when I've proposed to individuals that maybe Mike and Tony aren't the second coming of Eugene Debs and Mike Quill, as if I'd just committed sacrilege. As far as hostility of the "true believers" towards verification efforts, anyone who has posted a leaflet or made a comment mildly critical of ACRE's Great Leaders in the presence of a True Believer knows the receiving end of that. Score ten again, blessings on the True Believers.

"Dogma: Rigidity of reality concepts taught; amount of doctrinal inflexibility or 'fundamentalism;' hostility towards relativism and situationalism." We do know, of course, that Metro-North is a highly unique establishment, and normal-railroad rules don't apply here. That's both because we are Metro-North, and we have Mike and Tony to guide us. Situations on other railroads do not affect us, and anyone who doesn't believe the entire Gospel of Mike and Tony and their view of themselves and the world around us is regarded as a heretic or worse. I would judge around a seven.

As far as Recruiting is concerned, Metro-North brings a steady stream of new recruits in with every assistant conductors' and engineers' class, so ACRE doesn't have to work that hard at recruiting. I'd say a five is fair, here, as they don't have to go out and chase down members, and they certainly don't push people away.

"Front Groups: Number of subsidiary groups using different names from that of main group, especially when connections are hidden." We all know about the Conductors' Entertainment Committee, sponsors of the annual dinner-dance. I remember when they were making donations to various charities, but of late I haven't heard much. As a subsidiary of ACRE, in the sense that it is run by ACRE officers and members in order to make ACRE look good, no one seems to have access to its books, and the membership really doesn't know where the money is going. Are there any other groups like this operating under the ACRE umbrella? I say seven, because I don't know where the CEC money comes from or goes to, and there are rumors of other groups in the shadow of ACRE's umbrella.

The eighth point is "Wealth: Amount of money and/or property desired or obtained by group; emphasis on members' donations; economic lifestyle of leader(s) compared to ordinary members." To the best of my knowledge, Mike Doyle and Tony Bottalico live a lifestyle that the rest of us might be able to aspire to if we were inclined to work eight starts in a week, every week, at 100% rate of pay. And they have no shame at admitting that they are definitely in union-representation work for the money. Ralph Sanzari stated as much on January 22, 2006, in front of a group of UTU, BLE, and TCU members. Clearly, many of the ACRE leadership are in office in order to pick all of our pockets, by their own admissions. I have extreme difficulty with Mike Doyle's reasoning that one may only get quality union representation when one pays the representatives an exorbitant amount of cash while they continue to work their regular runs and days off, with very little actual work time and money lost. A ten is a fair score to me.

Bonewits' ninth and tenth items in his frame deal with Sexual Manipulation and Sexual Favoritism. These topics are not relevant to our current discussion, since Metro-North's (and therefore ACRE's) position can best be described as asexual male, leading to sex being a non-issue.

Point eleven is "Censorship: Amount of control over members' access to outside opinions on group, its doctrines or leader(s)." This has been a long-standing problem on the engineers' side, as I can attest from personal experience. Anyone who dares contact someone from the outside who sheds a different light on a given subject (a light which does not cast Mike Doyle as the Sun King) and attempts to act on that information is greeted with great hostility, to say the least. Not to mention that information from the outside is spun to reflect ACRE in a good light, whether warranted or not. Judging from actions and reactions I've seen, I would rate the ACRE organization a ten on this one, too.

I count Isolation ("Amount of effort to keep members from communicating with non-members, including family, friends and lovers") as the flip side of Censorship. Social stigmatizing of those who dare question the regime falls under this category, too. I know any number of people who have been basically declared "non-persons" by ACRE and subjected to verbal abuse and worse for expressing their opinions on ACRE. As ACRE can't keep people from going home at night and expressing their frustrations to friends and family, I would rate this point about a seven.

"Dropout Control: Intensity of efforts directed at preventing or returning dropouts," ties back in with Isolation and Censorship. The fear of signing an A-card that may or may not result in ACRE's being decertified is a classic example of this. People do fear for their jobs and their livelihoods when they express an anti-ACRE sentiment, much less when they step over the line and join the UTU or the BLE. Before the advent of ACRE, the fear of union officers and the bullying to keep people in line as members that I've seen over the last several years did not exist. Ten points for efforts at keeping members from dropping out in order to keep the organization viable.

Bonewits' fourteenth point relates to "Violence: Amount of approval when used by or for the group, its doctrines or leader(s)" I worked for a pretty darned tough railroad before I worked for Metro-North, and I'm a New York City street kid and know more than anyone wants to know about schoolyard bullies. The level of bullying, verbal abuse, and flat-out intimidation used both by Mike Doyle and Tony Bottalico and by their officers, minions, and spear carriers is beyond anything I've ever seen in my life. Verbal and economic violence are clearly approved and well used by ACRE officers. Ten points, again.

As far as Paranoia is concerned, Bonewits defines it as, "Amount of fear concerning real or imagined enemies; exaggeration of perceived power of opponents; prevalence of conspiracy theories." ACRE officers show all signs of being flat-out terrified of being busted as a bunch of phonies by hard-working folks like me who do the research and bring to the membership the truth of ACRE's actions. Then again, there really are a number of folks who would like to see ACRE taken down as an organization (and their higher leadership with it), so maybe their paranoia has a basis in reality. I'd say the paranoia level is getting pretty high in 420 Lexington Avenue, so I'd go with a nine for this one.

"Grimness: Amount of disapproval concerning jokes about the group, its doctrines or its leader(s)." This is Metro-North, so no one is supposed to see the humor and the absurdity in day-to-day life around here anyway. Nine, but that's a function of the lack of sense of humor generally.

On item number 17, "Surrender of Will: Amount of emphasis on members not having to be responsible for personal decisions; degree of individual disempowerment created by the group, its doctrines or its leader(s)," this is emphasized time and again by ACRE officers and the organization as a whole, and was also emphasized by current ACRE officers when they were BLE/UTU officers. Members are expected to blindly believe that whatever ACRE officers sign off on is for the good of all the membership, and are expected not to question them.

The last item in Bonewits' list is "Hypocrisy: amount of approval for actions which the group officially considers immoral or unethical, when done by or for the group, its doctrines or leader(s); willingness to violate the group's declared principles for political, psychological, social, economic, military, or other gain." ACRE as an organization, and its officers as individuals, have shown time and time again that they are willing to do and say anything that Metro-North wants them to say and do, no matter the effects on present and future members of our crafts. Any organization claiming to be a union - a union defined as being for the betterment of its working members, not for the benefit of the Company - scales the heights of hypocrisy when they sell out their members time and time again the way ACRE and its leadership has.

After thinking over all this, I came to an inescapable conclusion:

ACRE shows all the signs of being a cult that is dangerous to its members, run strictly for the benefit of its leaders. It has all the external trappings of a union, but at base it does not function that way.

I have no intention of belonging to a destructive cult. I signed my A-card long ago.

Mary Donch
BLE&T Division 127
MNCR

*Some background information, for those who've never been personally stomped on by ACRE:

The Association of Commuter Rail Employees is the group which holds the contracts covering Locomotive Engineers, Conductors, Rail Traffic Controllers, Yardmasters, Signal Maintainers, and Power Supervisors on Metro-North Commuter Railroad. (I cannot with a straight face call it a union). It is active solely on Metro-North, except for a nasty little bite they've taken on NJTransit, detailed below. ACRE was created in a well-orchestrated raid by several BLE, UTU, and ATDA officers (including the then-General Chairmen at the time) who then became officers in ACRE, and with the assistance and approval of Metro-North and MTA upper management. It has no status with any outside labor organization, is not "national in scope" according to the Railway Labor Act (and never will be), and is a pariah among the Metro-North Coalition of unions.

ACRE's roots lie in a hodgepodge of Hatfield-and-McCoy style fighting within the UTU dating back many years, cults of personality around certain BLE and UTU officers, outrageous greed, "this is how we've always done it," and extreme nervousness among the greedy about what might happen if the Internationals got wind of what was really going on. Couple that with open political cronyism (New York's Governor George Pataki is a longtime friend of ex-UTU-now-ACRE conductors' GC Anthony Bottalico), Carrier support and convenience, and some good old-fashioned schoolyard bullying and intimidation games, and ACRE was the toxic stew that resulted.

When ACRE raided the Signal Maintainers on MNCR (after specifically telling the Coalition of Metro-North Unions that they would *not* raid another union), they also got the Signal Maintainers on NJTransit's Pascack Valley and Port Jervis Lines, which are owned by Metro-North. ACRE gave the West-of-Hudson maintainers two choices: either join ACRE, or exercise their Norfolk Southern seniority. Those who chose to remain and join ACRE were charged anywhere from $250 to $1000 (on a sliding scale) as "initiation fees."

Reference: Bonewits, Isaac. "The Advanced Bonewits' Cult Danger Evaluation Frame, Version 2.6." January 22, 2006. Copyright 1979, 2001, 2004 Isaac Bonewits. http://www.neopagan.net/ABCDEF.html