NYC Subway: Death Trap for Transit Workers

Just after midnight on November 3, an oncoming G train slammed into two transit workers as it rounded a blind curve near Church Avenue station in Brooklyn. Unable to get out of the way in time, 53-year-old Louis Gray Jr. was crushed to death. His partner Jeffrey Fleming, 49, survived with severe injuries, including nine broken ribs. The responsibility for Gray’s death lies squarely with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), whose crumbling transit system is a deathtrap for its predominantly black and minority workforce.

Members of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100, Gray and Fleming were working as construction flaggers, one of the most important and dangerous jobs in transit. They had been assigned to mark out a safe work zone for maintenance workers. More often than not, the MTA does not suspend service for routine track work. Until successfully setting up a series of lanterns to warn train operators that crews are on the tracks, flaggers are like sitting ducks in the dark, slippery tunnels, exposed to speeding trains and the live 600-volt third rail that powers them. More than a week after the deadly incident, the MTA remains tight-lipped, but few transit workers doubt that the company will try to pin the blame on the victims or other transit workers involved.

For America’s rulers, public infrastructure and services are subordinated to their drive for profits, and spending on them is willfully starved. Measures that protect the lives and safety of transit workers and others who make society run are kept to a minimum. The overseers of the MTA plantation are determined to see wheels turn, whatever safety platitudes they spout. For the transit bosses, if keeping the trains running leads to a few deaths on the tracks, well, workers’ lives are cheap.

The 41,000 members of TWU Local 100, a historically militant, integrated union, have plenty of potential power to fight for the installation of modern safety technology to replace the antiquated system of flags and lanterns. But they are blocked by a union leadership firmly committed to a supposed partnership between labor and capital. Following Gray’s death, TWU president John Samuelsen commented in an interview on the NY1 news channel: “The work environment is so incredibly dangerous that industrial accidents like this are bound to occur.” What he hides is that the union can fight to change the work environment. This “accident” was entirely preventable industrial murder.

In an email to Local 100 members, the TWU tops offer for the union to serve as an adjunct to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is investigating. But by design this agency of the capitalist government can only issue recommendations. Where the NTSB has advised the introduction of technology that would save the lives of workers and passengers alike, the bosses have balked and stalled. For example, despite a series of deadly train derailments including on the MTA’s Metro-North in the Bronx in 2013 and on Amtrak in Philadelphia in 2015, positive train control has still not been widely adopted because U.S. rail lines do not want to cover the costs.

With contract negotiations swinging into gear, Samuelsen proposed to the MTA to trade blood for money, declaring: “You can’t protect us, so you better damn well pay us in this contract.” But any union leadership worthy of the name would link a fight for worker safety to the fight for better pay and benefits. That message could have been sent if there had been an immediate call for the entire membership to stop work in response to the death of Louis Gray.

Flagmen should never have to put their lives on the line. If power must be removed from the third rail, so be it. When track work is about to begin, no train should move through the area until flaggers have deemed it safe. The union must enforce the right of every worker to shut down any unsafe work site on the spot. Union safety committees, made up of elected reps and completely independent from management, would fight against hazardous conditions on the job. Union control over safety would go a long way toward preventing injuries like that suffered by Monique Brathwaite, a 36-year-old signal helper and single mother who recently had her forearm amputated after she fell onto the third rail. For workers involved in accidents, the union should at minimum ensure they receive full pay and benefits for the duration of their recovery.

Industrial atrocities underscore how much the working class needs a class-struggle leadership—one committed to the understanding that the interests of the workers and the capitalists are counterposed and irreconcilable. The only way workers ever won anything was by wielding their social power against the bosses, including in defiance of anti-union laws like New York’s Taylor Law. A class-struggle leadership would understand that the enemy is capital and its system of production for profit, and would broaden the fight against the bosses into a fight against the capitalist system itself.