NYC Transit: “Safety Stand-Down” Sham

(Letter)

7 May 2018

Dear Workers Vanguard Editor,

I am a retired transit mechanic with 26 years on the job, with a lot of time walking the subway tracks. I was angered to read about the deaths of Stephen Livecchi and St. Clair Ziare Richards-Stephens, who was a young track worker, and the lying MTA [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] cover-up stories about “safety.” Your article referred to safety “stand downs,” which are a farce. [See “New York Transit: Death Trap for Workers,” WV No. 1131 (April 6).]

As you say, a Safety Stand-Down or SSD in the industry is a meeting where the workers are lectured on safety by the same managers who endanger them through speedup and criminal neglect of infrastructure. These occur via collaboration between the bosses and the union. When these company-organized meetings occur, work goes on elsewhere throughout the system: Business as usual.

The union leadership has to fight the slave-labor Taylor Law, which acts as a means to ensure that the workforce works, regardless of safety conditions.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has defined an SSD as follows:

“What is a Safety Stand-Down? A Safety Stand-Down is a voluntary event for employers to talk directly to employees about safety. Any workplace can hold a stand-down by taking a break to focus on ‘Fall Hazards’ and reinforcing the importance of ‘Fall Prevention’.”

Taking a break has nothing to do with safety, but it is a way for the bosses to CYA whenever a worker loses life or limb. SSD does not equal shutting down unsafe work! In the case of the recent death on the tracks of Richards-Stephens, other TWU [Transport Workers Union] Local 100 members and contractors were kept working on the tracks! There needs to be elected union safety committees with the power to shut the system down in the event of any death or maiming of subway workers on the job, like what happened to Richards-Stephens. An online article on Richards-Stephens’s death by LaborPress (March 21) states: “There is a 24-hour ‘stand down’ right away, where no workers go on the tracks anywhere in the system.” This is not true!

The capitalist government, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, gives the owners virtually free rein to run their factories and mines as they see fit with no regard for workers’ safety. Then, when fatalities do occur, government officials intone that there are no indications of criminal activity by the bosses. Between its founding in 1970 and 2013, OSHA has prosecuted 84 cases involving fatalities, with those sentenced serving a total of 89 months in jail. During this time, there were more than 370,000 workplace deaths. Under the Clinton White House, a “new” OSHA initiative stressed “partnership” with business and “voluntary compliance.”

So, OSHA works to alibi the bosses and does not act in the interest of the working class. A union leadership worth its salt would organize independent union safety committees in every shop, gang, crew, depot and work location. These committees should have real power to shut down unsafe work as opposed to MTA “for the record” safety meetings.

Yours in Struggle,
A retired Transport Workers Union member