MTA management killed Trackworkers Danny Boggs and Marvin Franklin within one week. Both the MTA bosses and Local 100 leaders have so far failed to release a report on these killings. But our understanding is that supervisors sent Brothers Boggs and Franklin and their partners on the track without proper flagging. That’s manslaughter – at least! And the supervisors’ bosses, management, are just as responsible, because they scheduled and pushed the jobs under unsafe conditions.
As a result, Danny Boggs died in agony under the train. Danny’s co-workers could not turn off the current because the emergency shut-off didn’t work. As it turns out, many of theses shut-offs don’t work because the MTA bosses employ too few workers to maintain them.
At Brother Franklin’s funeral, Brother Jeff Hill, who survived the accident that took Marvin’s life, bravely denounced the boss whose failure to provide flagging protection set them up. Pres Toussaint seemed to agree with Brother Hill. But he said, “This has been a sad, horrible week for transit workers and the entire transit family,” meaning both the workers who died and the bosses who killed them! When it comes to enforcement, Toussaint joins with the murderous MTA bosses in a joint union- management safety committee. At the very least, the union should demand: Arrest, Try and Jail the Killer MTA Bosses!
For years, RTW has argued that Local 100 should shut the entire system down in response to any members’ death on the job! That would teach the entire city a lesson in the value of transit workers’ lives. It would also get the union’s fighting spirit back and teach the bosses a lesson about our power. Such action is particularly necessary now: Toussaint’s leadership of the Local, especially since he killed our strike after less than three days, has management feeling like they can push us around, including into unsafe work.
In fact, even after Brother Franklin’s death and management announced a four day “stand down” from track work until safety conditions were reviewed, Toussaint agreed to make exceptions and allow some track work to go on so as not to inconvenience rush hour commuters! That’s what labor-management cooperation gets us: more unsafe and potentially deadly work. Now the ranks have to fight for even the most basic safety enforcement.
Every day Track and other Maintenance of Way workers experience injuries or near misses because of the bosses’ unsafe practices. Supervisors and managers routinely wink at safety violations. When safety-conscious workers have demanded safe practices, which take time, the bosses have threatened to keep the crew working longer. That is, they’ve used safety as punishment against the workers.
Further, Track bosses blatantly assign safety-conscious workers away from major jobs in order to speed the work up. For years Shop Steward and RTW supporter Eric Josephson has been fighting such segregation by T1 (Bronx Track Maintenance day shift) Superintendent Natalizio and Supervisor Level II Hines. (When Josephson reminded Hines at a safety stand-down that he had admitted as much, Hines said, “I don’t recall that.”). Efforts by militant workers, including Josephson, have forced management to end such discrimination – for a while. When management sees that the union leadership doesn’t back the militants up, they’ll go back to their old ways.
And if the union lets the outcry over the deaths of Brothers Boggs and Franklin die down, management will let safety go out the window again. That’s what happened after on-the-job transit worker deaths in the past.
Local 100 could stop this right away: designate hundreds of members as safety inspectors and send them throughout the system to shut down unsafe jobs. The Safety Dispute Resolution clause of the contract gives any NYCT worker the power to do this.
The urgent need for this action is obvious. The deaths of Brothers Boggs and Franklin show that there is a safety crisis on the tracks. No more business as usual! Track Sub-division T1 alone (Bronx Maintenance day shift) saw at least two potentially deadly accidents in one recent month. Luckily, no one was badly hurt. Local 100 can’t let the MTA get away with this, or they’ll kill more of us!
The forces exist to do this. Local 100 has hundreds of elected officers and who knows how many hirelings on the union payroll. There are hundreds of shop stewards and many other militant workers who want to enforce safety. We don’t know how many because Toussaint and the rest of the leadership haven’t bothered to find out. He repeatedly sends regiments of officers and staff into the field to encourage dues payment (which RTW supports: see the article “We Must Pay Our Dues – But ...”). But he has barely mobilized the Local’s resources to save our lives, despite his recent vague noises about increasing union safety presence.
With Toussaint’s blessing, management held their “safety stand- downs” for MoW and other personnel. These stand-downs, as in the past, were a sick joke: the bosses completely ran them. They read flagging and other safety rules for hours to sullen workers – as though we don’t already know most of these rules! The same bosses who cut corners and rush our jobs told us, often with straight faces, to cultivate “good safety habits.” In other words, they blamed the workers for following the bosses’ orders.
Toussaint & Co. made no attempt to organize and educate us on safety. There was rarely an official union presence or even literature at these affairs and no union format. Militants who attended had to expose management’s plan as individuals. Toussaint & Co. aren’t just collaborating with management – they abandoned us to them.
Indeed, Toussaint RTO staffer and Executive Board member Joe James appeared in the field to tell T/Os to bang faulty flagging in. This could get trackworkers, not bosses, in trouble. It’s the same individualistic, worker-blaming line that management pushes. Union strength comes from mobilizing mass fights, not individual complaining.
Toussaint’s only large-scale “organizing” effort after the killings was a mass mailing which said nothing about the safety fight. Rather, it defended Toussaint’s right as Local President to ignore elected officers who oppose him politically. In current circumstances that means not sending opposition officers on the road to organize safety shut-downs – which the members elected them to do, among other tasks.
The members should demand: Toussaint, send out the officers and staff: appeal to the ranks to come out and enforce safety on the tracks after their shifts, on their RDO’s and on union leave, paid or unpaid. Officially certify them as TWU Safety Inspectors. Call a mass meeting for this purpose – start a campaign to save our lives! RTW has been calling for this for many years. We should demand the same from opposition elected officials: instead of just complaining about Toussaint’s sidelining them from their jobs, they should try to lead the mass mobilization for safety outlined in this article.
There’s been union-boss safety collaboration for decades. It disarms workers and covers for the killer bosses. New MTA and NYCT Presidents Sander and Roberts’s “new-improved” joint safety committee will be no exception. As a token of good will to management, Pres. Toussaint appointed the meek and passive Curtis Tate, V.P. for RTO, to the new joint safety committee. Toussaint and Sec. Treasurer Watt say they’re giving the new bosses the benefit of the doubt and hope to become full partners with them.
RTW opposes any such collaboration with the bosses, our assassins. But if there are any union reps on this joint committee, let them openly, clearly and honestly denounce management’s deadly practices! Let them enforce open and public functioning of the joint committee, instead of the current silence. Let them use the committee to raise up the ranks to shut down unsafe jobs. Just let a union rep use the opportunity of this committee to mobilize a worker safety fight, and we’ll see management’s reps run out the door, exposing their real agenda: their budgets over our lives.
Finally, a mass union safety fight-back like that urged here will help prepare the ranks for the over-all class struggle. Toussaint’s betrayal of our strike and other boss-loving, bureaucratic misleadership have demoralized many members. With the bosses’ encouragement, they practice or accept unsafe practices. They say, “Let’s just finish the job any old way and get off the track.” Now more of us see how deadly this can be. We need a leadership which mobilizes our power now, when workers are looking to defend themselves. Demand that Toussaint & Co. carry out the tactics here.
But we can’t afford to depend on these bosses’ partners: we’ve got to build a new leadership for the union. The tragic deaths of our brothers on the job, and our continuing dangerous work are just more examples of how this capitalist system, and the pro-capitalist bosses of our unions, puts the bottom line before workers’ lives. Only a leadership committed to overthrowing the capitalist system, a revolutionary socialist political leadership, can be trusted to fight to defend workers’ interests regardless of what it costs the bosses!