NEW YORK CITY, November 20—NYC Transit bosses are guilty of murder, and the transit workers’ union leader is guilty of helping them get away it.
On November 3, train conductor Louis Gray was struck and killed by a subway train in Brooklyn.  Another worker, Jeffrey Fleming, was badly injured. They were setting up warning lights for a construction zone when a train came around a curve and pinned them. Louis was the fourth worker killed on the tracks in the last 10 years, but there have been countless injuries and near misses. A woman worker recently lost her arm when she tripped and touched the third rail. The blood of these workers and anyone hurt before or in the future, is on the bosses’ hands.
Before the body was cold, Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 President John Samuelsen defended the racist MTA bosses and called this murder a “perfect-storm.” He said the operator and the track workers could not see each other because of the curve in the tracks. He said the union and MTA will create new rules for work zones with curved tracks, to which one worker responded, “All these rules are written in blood!” He said they wait until someone is killed before they address a problem that has existed for decades, like curved tracks.
Fighting Racism in all Workers’ Interests
The MTA bosses try to spend the bare minimum on pay, training and safety and claim there’s no money for better benefits, but they spend millions on overtime, that they dish out like treats, instead of hiring more workers. The bosses’ media then focuses on a few high seniority workers who make big bucks and tries to paint us as rich, lazy and greedy in order to undermine any unity with the millions of our fellow workers and students we carry to work and school every day.
The union is no better. In the last negotiations, the union sold out the not-yet-hired member, expanding the pay progression to top pay from three to five years, while giving billions to the biggest banks year after year in interest on bonds used to pay for capital projects.
Transit workers are also directly affected by the rise of racist terror, on and off the job. The sister of Eric Garner, who was killed in a NYPD choke hold in 2014, is a transit worker in TWU Local 100. And a few months ago, an off duty copy brutally assaulted a train conductor, slamming her to the ground in front of horrified passengers because the train was delayed! Yet the union leadership did not make an issue out of the attack on the conductor and gave little more than lip service to the murder of Eric Garner. A large number of white transit workers supported Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant racism, however, we must win them to see these racist attacks are attacks on them, too. Their futures are threatened because the futures of their black and Latin co-workers are threatened.
Workers’ Power Can Cripple Bosses
On November 15, thousands of transit workers rallied to demand wage increases in their next contract. The current contract expires on January 15, and with the Trump administration about to take power on January 20, the union leaders are feeling the pressure to get what they can before the promised cuts in federal spending. (SEPTA transit workers in Philadelphia recently went on strike and CTA transit workers in Chicago are also in contract talks.) A fare increase takes affect on January 1, which will hit Black, Latin and immigrant workers and youth the hardest. Not surprisingly, the union has taken no stand against the fare hike.
Globally, transit workers have the power to bring capitalism’s daily functioning to a screeching halt. Populations and production are more concentrated in congested urban areas. Therefore, transit workers are a vital link in the profit chain of the big corporations, finance capitalists like banks, and big retail. PLP is building a base in transit under the conditions of growing fascism and spreading war. The challenges of our contract, the Trump election, and racist police terror offer both danger and opportunity for building the revolutionary communist movement among transit workers. It won’t be easy. But we have confidence in our co-workers, and will learn from them how to be better communists.