Why Are More Transit Workers Being Attacked on the Job!?!
The number of attacks on transit workers nationwide resulting in death or hospitalization has tripled over the past 15 years, from 168 in 2008 to 492 in 2022.
By Steve Wishnia
“If it keeps going the way it’s going, there’s going to be a murder,” New York City subway-train operator Evangeline Byars tells Work-Bites.
On Feb. 16, a 58-year-old station agent in the Wall Street station suffered a fractured eye socket when she was attacked by a man she’d woken up from sleeping under a bench.
“He got irate and started following me down and then ultimately hitting me,” she told WABC-TV a few days later, speaking with a severely swollen eye. On Feb. 11, a passenger pulled a knife on a bus driver in Lower Manhattan and punched him, apparently enraged that the bus had been stuck in traffic. On Jan. 15, a station agent in the Jamaica-179th Street station in Queens was knocked down when a woman hit him from behind with a bottle. And last September, in the Nereid Avenue station in the north Bronx, a man attacked a 74-year-old station agent who was on his way to work, breaking his nose and another facial bone.
In the subways, Byars says, station agents are the most vulnerable, as they work alone on the platform, but train operators and conductors often get punched and spat on.
City bus drivers are “sitting ducks,” says Bronx bus operator Celso Garcia. “Everyone feels the same way. It’s out of control. It’s been out of control.”
The number of assaults on city transit workers has been rising steadily since 2019, according to Metropolitan Transportation Authority figures. There were 150 reported to police last year, up from 121 in 2022 and 89 in 2019.
There were 1,890 harassment incidents reported to police last year, down from 1,983 in 2022. The numbers fluctuate from month to month, but in general, subway and bus workers are assaulted in about the same numbers, while bus workers report roughly twice as much harassment.
Assaults on subway workers almost doubled last year, however. They jumped from 45 in 2022 to 80 last year, according to the MTA.
Byars blames that increase on the MTA’s policy of phasing out having agents work in the booths. In December 2022, it announced an agreement with Transport Workers Union Local 100 to move them from working exclusively inside the booths to being at turnstiles and MetroCard machines and on platforms, to answer passengers’ questions and report “quality of life” issues.
“By enhancing the station agent role, the era of customer support being offered only through a glass wall has gone the way of the token itself, and agents will be able to connect directly with the riders they’re serving.” NYC Transit President Richard Davey said in a statement at the time. A separate agreement gave a $1-an-hour raise to station agents who volunteered for new jobs as “customer service ambassadors.” Local 100 later won a grievance that the MTA wasn’t paying workers with less than five years’ experience that raise.
Byars says those changes have left station agents, who are mostly women, much more exposed to assaults. “They should be given more than a dollar for the change of title,” she says. “They should get hazard pay.”
Many who have enough seniority to choose their schedules, she adds, are asking to work the midnight shift, because they can stay in the booths then.
Local 100 did not respond to calls and email messages from Work-Bites.
Garcia says the MTA numbers are low, because drivers have to report incidents to their supervisor, who then decides whether to call police. Drivers can’t call police directly, except in emergencies, he adds, and they fear running afoul of the MTA’s ban on using cell phones on the job, which carries a 30-day suspension. Harassment such as verbal abuse or spitting is hard to document to the point where it can be proven enough of a crime to make the MTA and police consider it worth their time.
Assaults on transit workers are rising dramatically nationwide, according to a study released in December by the Urban Institute. It found that the number of attacks where the worker was killed or hospitalized tripled over the past 15 years, from 168 in 2008 to 492 in 2022.
“They have an animus, they have a hate,” says Garcia. “They see us as an authority figure.” Trouble often starts, he explains, when a driver tells a passenger to stay behind the white line at the front of the bus, or to get off at the last stop.
A year-and-a-half ago, Work-Bites reported on “Bus Drivers in Crisis” and the attack on BX40 bus operator Sacha Alvarez in the Bronx who was assaulted by a crazed man wielding a foot-long tree limb less than six months after taking the job.
In December, the Federal Transit Administration ordered all urban transit agencies to conduct a risk assessment for assaults on their workers, and to develop strategies to prevent them. Transport Workers Union International President John Samuelsen at the time called it “an unprecedented and clear directive from the federal government that transit agencies must do much more to protect bus operators, conductors, and other transit workers,” but said that it was “a national shame” that it had come eight years after Congress directed it to set minimum protection standards for transit workers.
The partitions installed in buses over the last few years, Garcia says, “partially helped,” but “don’t really protect us from being spit on or being attacked. People can get around them.”
Passengers are reluctant to intervene he adds, because “they don’t want to be victims either. Who’s going to protect them if they get involved?”
What would help, Garcia says, is assisting drivers, making sure police are watching out for them, and focusing on problem spots and areas. Also, for the MTA to take complaints from drivers seriously, and for the union to pay more attention to them.
A lot of drivers are leaving, he says, both older ones retiring and newly hired ones quitting. “I hope that things change, that there’s a political will to protect the workers and the riding public.”
Byars says station agents “should be allowed back in the booth, where they are safe.” If they’re on the platforms, she adds, they should work in pairs, instead of alone.
“No one should come to work and get their eye socket broken,” she says.