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	Workers Vanguard No. 1131	6 April 2018

Two Killed in One Week

New York Transit: Death Trap for Workers

In the space of one week, two New York City transit workers died on the job: 23-year-old St. Clair Ziare Richards-Stephens and 59-year-old Stephen Livecchi. Both were members of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100. Richards-Stephens, a track worker, plummeted to his death at the 125th Street station in East Harlem on March 20. Seven days later, Livecchi, a bus helper, was crushed by a bus at the College Point Depot in Flushing, Queens. After 37 years on the job, he was due to retire soon.

Since 2001, 16 transit workers have been killed performing labor crucial to keeping this city running. Responsibility for the death toll lies with the slave-driving Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) bosses, and with the capitalists and their Democratic and Republican politicians who have let the transit system rot while the bondholding banks rake in billions.

Working the night shift, at 4:50 a.m. Richards-Stephens fell headlong from the upper tracks at 125th Street when a dilapidated “protective” wooden railing snapped; he died from head injuries. His company-issued helmet, which did not even come with straps, flew off during his fall. The death of this young black worker, who had been on the job for only six months, was industrial murder.

Andy Byford, the new president of New York City Transit (NYCT), which runs the subways, immediately went into damage-control mode, intoning that “we lost a dear NYCT colleague.” He then had new fiberglass railings installed the day after Richards-Stephens died, including in the area where his crew had been working. This was essentially an admission of guilt by NYCT for its dangerous working conditions. Many transit workers recall the horrific death of subway conductor Janell Bennerson in 2003. Following work rules, she was holding her head outside the conductor’s subway car window as her train left the station when she was struck and killed by a gate. It was only after Bennerson died that the transit bosses lowered the gate, while blaming Bennerson for her own death.

The anti-union New York Post (22 March) gave the transit bosses cover by trying to blame Richards-Stephens for his own death, harping on how the six-foot-four worker weighed 350 pounds. His grieving brother, Addis Kaire, told the simple truth: “This shouldn’t have happened.... You can’t have a railing and not make sure the railing is secure.”

After Richards-Stephens’s death, the union announced a “stand down” for Maintenance of Way workers, during which they suspended work on the tracks. Some response! Transit workers told Workers Vanguard that during “stand downs” workers are lectured on safety by the same managers who endanger them daily through speedup and other means. Meanwhile, other NYCT workers as well as contractors were kept working on the tracks.

Any union leadership worthy of the name would have called on the entire membership to stop work in response to the deaths of both Richards-Stephens and Livecchi. Such a leadership would enforce the right of any worker to shut down unsafe worksites on the spot and would establish union safety committees, made up of elected reps and completely independent of management, to fight against hazardous working conditions. The only way that workers, including the MTA’s multiracial workforce, ever won anything was by wielding their collective power. This would require defiance of anti-union laws like New York State’s Taylor Law, which bans strikes by public employees.

In the best of times, track work is especially dangerous in the New York City subway system, which runs 24/7. Repairs have to be made while trains roll along a 600-volt third rail, with very little space for workers to get out of the way. Overnight crews are under the most pressure to finish work and “clear up” before the start of the morning rush hour. And these are certainly not the best of times.

Everybody knows the subway is a ticking time bomb, for both transit workers and riders: decrepit tunnels, tracks and signals, power outages, train derailments and, now, more deaths on the job. Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who controls the MTA, a New York State agency, declared a “state of emergency” last summer. But this is just a cover for an all-sided attack on the TWU. The capitalist class and both of their political parties have starved transit and other infrastructure for decades. That the subway system could be degraded to this desperate state in one of the wealthiest cities in the world reflects the irrationality and decay at the heart of this racist capitalist society (see “NYC Subway Shambles,” WV No. 1123, 1 December 2017).

There is a huge backlog of repairs, a measure of severe cuts to maintenance jobs over the years. Train crews frequently have to work without meal and bathroom breaks; bus mechanics do their job while inhaling toxic fumes; and everyone else labors under brutal conditions as well. Constantly pushed into long shifts, many workers suffer injuries and deteriorating health or die within a few years of retiring. Management relentlessly pushes speedup and pressures workers to cut corners to the point of violating the MTA’s own minimal safety regulations, which the bosses treat as so much paper. These hellish conditions are enforced by vicious disciplinary procedures—from the petty to the draconian—that are aptly dubbed “plantation justice” by unionists.

The purpose of a union is to defend the workers against the transit bosses, whose indifference toward safety means injury and death. But this requires combating the policies of the pro-capitalist TWU bureaucracy. Whether it is productivity, discipline or safety, one regime after another of TWU misleaders has preached the lie of a partnership between the union membership and the bosses.

Following Richards-Stephens’s death, TWU Local 100 president Tony Utano alibied the bosses by telling the press, “These are things that happen.” He also gave credence to the irrelevant point that Richards-Stephens’s size might have been a factor, saying, “He was a big worker and the railing broke.” He then added Cuomo’s perfunctory Twitter condolences to his own on the union’s website. This is the same governor who has bled the MTA dry!

Progressive Action, an opposition group in Local 100 led by Tramell Thompson, shares the class collaborationism of the current leadership. Thompson took Utano out for talking about Richards-Stephens’s weight. At the same time, in a Facebook video announcing a vigil organized by Progressive Action on March 21, Thompson called Andy Byford a “genuinely nice guy.” Tell that to transit workers in Toronto, where Byford ran the system before taking over NYCT. Along with introducing minimum-wage jobs and bringing in more transit cops, Byford pushed massive speedup, leading to a rise in deaths on the job, while going hard after the Amalgamated Transit Union (see “New NYC Transit Boss: Union Buster,” WV No. 1127, 9 February).

Labor needs a leadership based on the policy of class struggle, unleashing union power independent of and in opposition to the capitalist rulers and their government. Workers need their own party—a multiracial workers party that fights to overturn the system of production for profit and replace it with a socialized economy under a workers government. When those who labor rule, the immense riches today pocketed by a tiny class of exploiters will be put to work to rebuild this society and its decayed infrastructure. That will be the most fitting memorial to all the victims of capitalist industrial murder.