Safety Bill Misnamed

To the Editor:

When I heard that TWU Local 100's Track Safety Bill had passed the State Legislature June 20, I started to write to thank The Chief for its June 15 editorial in support of the bill and for its part in this victory.

Then I read the bill that was passed and discovered that the only thing it had in common with the bill the union originally proposed was its title. The new bill is not a step toward state-enforced track-safety regulations, but rather, a law that will shield NYC Transit from such regulation for years to come and substitute endless meetings and "recommendations" for any real enforcement.

A flyer on the union's Web site today proclaims that the bill just passed "ends NYCT self-enforcement." This is false. Whether it is wishful thinking or deliberate deception on the part of President Toussaint, I leave for others to decide. But every transit worker can read for him- or herself the text of the bill, and compare it with the union's original bill, on the State Senate's Web site, http://public.leginfo.state.ny.us/menuf.cgi

The original bill (A.2325) contained and would have enacted into law a comprehensive set of specific regulations enforceable by the state Department of Labor. Certain practices still permitted by NYCT would have been outlawed, and additional personnel - the sticking point for NYCT - would have been needed to provide higher levels of protection.

In stark contrast, the bill just passed (S.4580-A) contains no specific regulations whatsoever. All it does is set up a committee to study track safety and issue reports. There is not the slightest indication that these reports are intended to serve as a basis for state legislation or regulation.

Rather than unannounced inspections by the Department of Labor at any time to check for violations of state regulations, with authority to stop unsafe work, the new bill provides for just one yearly inspection to check for compliance with NYCT's own internal regulations.

The committee set up by the bill only has the power to make recommendations. It gives the state no enforcement power whatsoever. Just the opposite: it explicitly states that NYCT is free to ignore these recommendations and continue to do whatever it pleases regarding track safety.

This is a giant step backwards. Up into the mid-1980s, NYCT maintained that it had "sovereign immunity" from state safety regulations. But it never managed to get this written into law. Just the opposite: when they tried to maintain this position, they found out it wasn't so.

In 1987, a gang of Track Workers refused to work in pouring rain on the elevated track at St. Lawrence Ave. NYCT bosses wrote them up and fired those who were probationary. State Attorney General Robert Abrams forced NYCT to put everyone back to work with back pay and, in the process, established the state Department of Labor's enforcement authority over NYCT.

In a similar case in 1989, Abrams forced NYCT to drop charges against this writer for calling in Department of Labor inspectors on a track project where we were working with no respiratory protection in clouds of dust so thick you couldn't see five feet ahead. Besides putting me back to work, Abrams made NYCT re-write the rulebook to affirm that workers had the right to call in state inspectors to correct safety violations. Up to then, the rule had prohibited us from doing so. (In the current rulebook, it's rule 4(d), which now says "Employees are not prohibited ... from ... reporting safety violations to government authorities ...")

Ten years later, crane operators were taken out of service for refusing to operate in windspeeds over the legal limit, and for insisting on compliance with NYCT's own rules requiring use of rubber mats over the third rail when lifting and dropping rails on live track.

Again, it was the state Department of Labor that forced NYCT to put everyone back to work with full back pay.

Over and over, the union and individual workers have been able to take a stand and win advances in safety, only because we had back-up from the Department. of Labor.

Today, however much they don't like it, NYCT officials must accept that they are subject to Dept. of Labor enforcement of Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations. These cover a wide variety of situations, but there is still a gap. There are no OSHA rules on flagging and most other track-safety issues. (The crane operators were put back to work under the Labor Law's anti-discrimination provisions, not because the state found any violations of specific safety regulations by NYCT.)

The union's original bill sought to fill this gap with rules crafted and proven effective in a decade of use by the Federal Railroad Administration. It would have brought flagging violations under the jurisdiction of the state Dept. of Labor's inspectors.

Giving NYCT immunity from state enforcement of track safety now gives them what they were unable to win in the '80s, in just that area that is most crucial to survival of everyone working on the tracks.

President Toussaint, you were on the job, on the tracks in the '80s and '90s, and helped fight some of the battles I described above, and others like them. You know the crucial role state enforcement played in the advances we made. If it's true that you collaborated in this travesty of genuine safety legislation, you should hang your head in shame.

Transit workers must now be even more vigilant than before. The State Legislature, apparently with our union leadership's consent, has just endorsed the right of NYCT to do whatever it pleases with track safety, giving it an additional level of protection against outside regulation. Some will shrug and say this is "just politics." But transit workers will pay the price in yet more lives lost and yet more bodies broken.

JOEL FREDERICSON, Retired Track Equipment Maintainer, Vice Chair, TWU Local 100 Track Safety Committee 1991-2000