NYC Transit: Murder by Speedup

On the night of April 24, 41-year-old subway track worker Daniel Boggs was killed on the tracks beneath Columbus Circle in Manhattan, hit by a rerouted No. 3 train. Just five days later, 55-year-old track worker Marvin Franklin was struck and killed by a G train entering a station in Brooklyn; his co-worker Jeff Hill was hit by the same train and seriously injured. These were not “accidents” but industrial murders, caused by the bosses’ relentless drive for greater “productivity” through speedup in an antiquated subway system maintained by triage.

Boggs, who was of Irish descent and grew up in the Bronx, had worked since 1992 in the transit system. He was popular with his workmates, the go-to guy who could get the tough jobs done. Shortly before Boggs died, management had rerouted a train but did not bother to alert his crew. Believing service had been stopped for the night, Boggs stepped out onto the express tracks to place a warning lantern and was struck by the unexpected train. He was dragged, still alive, and wedged against the third rail. When the train stopped, workers desperately sought to cut off third-rail power but could not. The nearest emergency box was broken, as was a second one, so the workers had to run to a station booth—which the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) wants to eliminate systemwide—to try to cut power. Daniel Boggs died with 600 volts of electricity surging through his body. He is survived by his wife and three children.

On the afternoon of April 29, while other Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 members were attending the wake for Boggs, track work was being rushed to completion in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station on the A and C lines in Brooklyn. NYC Transit president Howard Roberts was driving to get the project finished a week ahead of schedule. Franklin, a black worker with 22 years on the job and an accomplished painter who taught art at a Brooklyn school, was working overtime. He and Hill were ordered by a supervisor to retrieve a dolly across live tracks. Safety lights apparently had not been placed on the tracks to warn train drivers of their presence. A split second before the train struck the two, Franklin shouted his last words—“Man under!”—as much to get help for Hill as for himself. Franklin leaves behind a wife, a son and two stepdaughters.

Twenty-five NYC track workers have been killed in “accidents” since 1980. Government agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration protect industry bosses, not the workers, and rarely enforce their own workplace safety rules, even in the face of life-threatening violations. Whether it’s the thousands of poor and black people along the Gulf Coast left to die in the face of Hurricane Katrina or those working to keep NYC transit running, lives are expendable for a ruling class intent on squeezing out every penny it can in the name of the bottom line. The government at all levels knew for decades about the dangers facing New Orleans, but did nothing about the city’s inadequately built and crumbling levees. The NYC transit system and much of the rest of the country’s infrastructure is rotting because the obscenely rich capitalists refuse to spend the money to maintain and upgrade it.

Track workers have for years demanded radios for everyone working in the dark, filthy, dangerous subway tunnels, so that they can be connected with train crews and control centers. But for the MTA, a worker’s life is not even worth the cost of communications equipment. Safety technology far more sophisticated than radios and lanterns has long existed—deploy it today! The way to establish and enforce safety on the job is through mobilizing union power. The TWU must fight for elected union safety committees with the power to shut down unsafe worksites on the spot. Indeed, Marvin Franklin might still be alive if the TWU had shut down the NYC transit system immediately after Daniel Boggs was killed on the tracks.

After the deaths of Boggs and Franklin, NYC Transit head Roberts ordered 6,000 workers to be immediately “reinstructed” on safety procedures. Once again, the transit bosses are blaming the victims when workers are killed on the job. Grotesquely, Local 100 president Roger Toussaint alibis the MTA bosses by speaking of how “transit work is inherently dangerous work,” pushing their safety crash course and trying to sell workers on a toothless “track safety bill” being pushed in Albany. At Franklin’s funeral on May 5, Jeff Hill gave an impassioned speech repudiating the lies being spread that he and Franklin did anything wrong. He explained how the two were following the direct orders of a foreman when retrieving the dolly, declaring, “It wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t doing what we were told to do.”

Following the deaths, WV salesmen outside a transit maintenance facility were mistaken for TWU members by a black sanitation worker who yelled out: “What’s happening? You guys are dying every day! They’re killing you every day!” Many workers are angry over the deaths of Boggs and Franklin and have real respect for the TWU, particularly following its three-day strike in December 2005 in defiance of the state’s Taylor Law. That strike crippled the financial capital of the world. But it was knifed by the trade-union bureaucrats of the NYC Central Labor Council and the TWU International and called off by Toussaint as the union was showing its muscle. Now Toussaint promotes boss Roberts as a “nice guy” appointed by the MTA’s new management under Democratic Party governor Eliot Spitzer, whose election the TWU tops supported. This is the same Spitzer who, as state attorney general, threw Toussaint in jail and went after the union with fines for going on strike!

What labor needs is a leadership based on the policy of class struggle, one that would unleash union power independent of and in opposition to the capitalist government and its politicians. We need a workers party that will fight for socialist revolution to sweep away the murderous profit system and replace it with a planned economy under workers rule. Until then, workers will continue to be crushed under the wheels of a system that cares nothing for their lives.