Letters to the Editor
Don't Give in on Track Safety

To the Editor:

For a few hours after reading TWU Local 100 President Roger Toussaint's letter in the May 25 Chief, I felt reassured that he was leading a comprehensive, whole-hearted effort to upgrade track safety.

But then I happened to bump into some Local 100 officers who stated that Toussaint had informed them, just a few days earlier, that he was not pushing forward aggressively on the union's Track Safety Bill because, he said, opposition in the State Senate is too stiff for the bill to have any hope of passage. That's the same bill that Toussaint, in his May 25 letter, called "a centerpiece" of the union's Lobby Day this past April in Albany.

The union's bill is designed simply to bring NYC Transit workers under the same standards that have covered the rest of the nation's railroads, including sister MTA railroads LIRR and Metro-North, for the past decade. In the 10 years since the adoption of the Federal Railroad Administration standards, deaths on the tracks nationwide have been cut in half.

The exclusion of NYCT workers from the life-saving protection of this standard is part and parcel of the second-class citizenship that Transit workers - all Transit workers - are so intimately familiar with in wages, benefits, pensions and other areas of their working life. The Toussaint of a decade ago would have felt honor-bound to combat this inferior status with all the resources at his disposal.

The push for this legislation should not be seen as being in conflict with Toussaint's current efforts to work in cooperation with management. The Federal standard is itself the product of what was hailed as an unprecedented example of labor-management cooperation. It was the result of years of work by a rail safety advisory committee, convened by the Federal Railroad Administration, that included all segments of rail management and rail labor, including the MTA and TWU.

Former TWU Safety Director George McDonald, who sat on the committee, insisted that TWU was responsible for much of what went into the Federal standard. It is unacceptable that Transit workers should be excluded from the benefits of something they helped create.

One measure of the sincerity of MTA management's current professed commitment to improved track safety should be whether or not they are now willing to drop their opposition to this standard that they, too, helped create, and that the rest of the nation's railroads accepted a decade ago.

President Toussaint, it's exactly the wrong time to hesitate on the Track Safety Bill. What politician can, today, look Track Workers in the eye and say he or she opposes this bill? Now is the time to redouble, not abandon, the effort to pass it. And it would be fitting to name the new law the Boggs-Franklin Memorial Track Safety Act.

JOEL FREDERICSON