Toussaint Foes: Track Plan Not Good on Safety;
Call Approach Wrong And a Threat To Seniority Rights

By ARI PAUL

Elected officers from Transport Workers Union Local 100's Maintenance of Way Division blasted a joint track-safety report authored by union and New York City Transit representatives, claiming its recommendations were weak and that the report excluded worker input.

TONY UTANO: Angered by exclusion.

The task force reviewed NYC Transit's safety protocol and inspection reports on work sites for six months after two Track Workers, Daniel Boggs and Marvin Franklin, were killed on the job in April. The report made 63 recommendations including that NYC Transit's Department of Subways inspect emergency alarm boxes and emergency telephones more frequently. Much of the report was devoted to rehashing existing track-safety rules.

Beef Over Flagging

In a letter to Local 100 President Roger Toussaint, the six officers, including Track Division Chairman Carlos Albert and Power Division Chairmen Tony Utano and Thomas Creegan, took particular umbrage with the notion of creating a centralized flagging department.

"In Track Division, there are over 100 flagger jobs which members can now utilize their seniority to pick," the letter stated. "Over 20 of these jobs include flagging for track supervisors performing inspections on the right of way. The fight to win the right to pick these jobs was long and hard, as was the fight to restore the picked flagging jobs back into Track Construction. Is it your intention that these jobs will be eliminated in favor of titles other than Track Worker? We do not know the answer because our president thought it was appropriate to exclude us from the discussion."

They also charged that the recommendations failed to adequately address the safety concerns of workers on the tracks.

Waste of Personnel?

"Your so-called safety improvements focus on training and clarification of existing rules," the letter continued. "There seems to be only one new rule, and frankly, it seems too onerous and impractical to be implemented. The additional manpower which would be required to engage a red and portable tripper, potentially dozens of times during the course of a point-to-point flagging operation such as track inspection, could be better utilized in other ways. Frankly, the number of fatalities and near-misses caused by the absence of a portable tripper during point-to-point flagging is very low, if non-existent."

They charged that the task force's recommendations were incomplete because the body lacked input from elected officers from MoW, since workers in that division, in addition to Rapid Transit Operations, are the ones most affected by track safety rules.

The Local 100 representatives on the task force were Curtis Tate, the vice president of Rapid Transit Operations Division; former MoW worker and union staffer Leroy Jardim, and Susan O'Brien, who was replaced in October by Robin Gillespie. The other letter-signers were Line Equipment and Signal Division Recording Secretary John Chiarello and Track Division Recording Secretary Jack Blazejewicz. Line Equipment Chairman Pete Foley's name appeared on the letter, but he is not listed as an officer on Local 100's Web site.

The union's latest newsletter argued that changes will increase flagging and improve communication between work crews.

Critics of Toussaint

The officers claimed that their exclusion from the task force was politically motivated, as most of them ran on slates in the 2006 election that opposed Mr. Toussaint, who is also a former Track Worker and a former Track Division chairman.

At the time of the report's release, Mr. Toussaint praised it as a good example of management and labor collaborating to improve track safety and said that "it offers concrete measures for making safety an integral part of our work."