in effect at the time. Eventually by 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. Moving from station to station, Quill got to know a large number of IRT employees, many of them also Irish immigrants. They would joke that IRT stood for "Irish Republican Transit" on account of how many of their peers were also Irish Republicans. It was during this time that Quill used the quiet of the late hours to read labor history and, in particular, the works of James Connolly. Connolly had been a revolutionary and high profile labor activist in Ireland until his death in 1916 following the Easter Rising, an event that eventually sparked the two wars in which Quill had participated. Two of Connolly's thought came to guide Quill's political philosophy; the ideas that that economic power precedes and conditions political power, and that the only effective and satisfactory expression of the workers’ demands is to be found politically in a separate and independent labor party, and economically in the industrial union. In 1933 Quill, along with others such as fellow Irish immigrant and Irish Republican Thomas H. O'Shea, moved to create a Trade Union free and independent of the IRT's complacent company union. The name that Quill and others chose for their new union, the Transport Workers Union, was a tribute to the Irish Transport and General Workers Union led by Jim Larkin and Connolly twenty years earlier. The new union was mainly compromised at its core of members of Clan na Gael, a secretive Irish-American organization that supported "physical force" Irish Republicanism, and members of the Communist Party USA, who supplied organizers, operating funds, and connections with organizations outside the Irish-American community. 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