In December of 2005, during the busiest shopping time of the year, during the coldest week of the year, and at a time when New York City relies on tourism to fill the registers of the various stores around the city, the Transit Workers’ Union, led by then-head Roger Toussaint and a bunch of his thugs decided to hold the city hostage.
At issue, amongst many others, was Toussaint’s claim that all workers should be paid more because in 2005, in the age of terrorism, the average MTA employee, as much as FDNY and NYPD officers, was a first responder. Their eyes and ears were valuable resources to the safety and security of New Yorkers everywhere and they deserved both praise and financial reward for being a critical part of the safety of every New Yorker.
I’m not kidding. They really did lay it on that thick.
What Toussaint and his band of merry first-responders weren’t counting on, however, was a lawsuit from a rape victim.
In June of 2005, Maria Besedina was raped on a subway platform in Queens in the plain view of two MTA employees. As if a token both clerk staying put in their own little glass box and radioing Central Command wasn’t bad enough as Besedina was screaming for help, a conductor who also saw the attack let his train leave the station as the violent attack continued and did nothing beyond call Central Command. A lawsuit was thrown out of court this week as a judge ruled that radioing Central Command was “prompt” enough for the case to be without merit.
Here’s the annoying part of it. While the MTA claims that employees are trained to not get involved and call the police or EMS when something is happening, the union has continually used the first-responder argument to bolster itself when negotiating for salaries. It’s been particularly vocal about the capacity of its workers to respond to safety concerns when the subject of closing a token booth or conductorless trains comes up, as evidenced in an article in the New York Times in 2004 (a full year and two months before the strike mentioned above):
Much controversy has centered on whether the transit authority will eliminate conductors on the new trains, leaving them with only one crew member, because train operators, who no longer have to worry about running their trains, can open and close the doors, which conductors now do. Transit officials say they are still evaluating. But union officials have been issuing warnings, saying that in a time of terrorism fears, more crew members are needed on trains, not less. They point out that packed trains in rush hours can have more than 2,500 passengers. In an emergency, one crew member, located at the front of the train, would have trouble.
“It’s important to be at the technology curve, but it has to be sensible,” said Roger Toussaint, president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union.
And here’s a clip from the TWU Local 100 (the Union behind Subway Workers) Station Division that explains of how a decision to order employees out of the kiosks to avoid overtime would compromise the safety of riders.
I have to wonder; what safety would be compromised? We’ve heard stories again and again about unsafe attacks and incidents on Subway platforms, so what exactly are these self-annointed guardians of our safety actually protecting the city from? Seeing as they aren’t allowed to act, and aren’t expected to intervene, what the hell good are they as far as safety is concerned?
One commenter on Gothamist really summed it up best.
Isn’t there a law that makes it an automatic felony to assault a transit worker? If that’s the case then the transit workers should have to do what is reasonable to prevent assaults on passengers.
Keyword, of course, is reasonable. A woman, alone on a platform, being sexually assaulted… Sounds reasonable to me to intervene.
That’s just me. I’m not a subway worker and I’m not a guardian of safety for millions of riders every day.