Transport Workers Union leader Mike Quill is ejected from a Dies Committee hearing for denouncing the committee during questioning, May 8, 1940. This moment helped vault the transit workers into being one of the most militant unions in the growing American labor movement, based on the workers’ shared Irish identity. Again, many of the transit workers were Irish, and no small number of them were immigrants. Probably half of the New York transit workers in the early 1930s were born in Ireland. He organized both non-Irish transit workers in other cities and Irish workers in other industries who had nothing in common with the transit workers except for a shared Irish nationalism and identity.