No, Daily News -- Transit Workers Pull Their Weight

President Utano and VP John Chiarello defended transit workers and set the record straight in a Letter to the Editor published in the New York Daily News on 7/20. The TWU Letter was in response to a Daily News editorial that disparaged subway maintenance crews. They wrote:

Brooklyn: The Daily News Editorial Board sometimes doesn’t know what it is talking about. You claimed in a July 15 editorial that subway maintenance workers don’t pull their own weight and are partly responsible for some of the big problems that developed underground (“Grab the third rail”). You also claimed that successful efforts to “get the trains running better by cleaning the drains, and fixing the switches and repairing signals, largely relied on outside contractors.”

That is 100% wrong and an insult to the men and women of Transport Workers Union Local 100.

The News’ own transit reporter reported just one month ago that “decades of mismanagement” led to the horribly clogged drainage system. Management didn’t have a maintenance plan or even a systemwide map of the drainage network. Managers ignored a report on this mismanagement that former MTA Inspector General Barry Kluger issued in 2006.

This is not, as the editorial claimed, an “indictment” of the workforce. We do the work we are assigned to do — and we do it well.

Contractors, meanwhile, were only used under the Subway Action Plan because the MTA didn’t have enough in-house workers, or the right equipment, to tackle the drainage crisis on its own in the relatively quick time frame the plan demanded. There is now a schedule for transit workers to properly maintain the drains.

Contractors, meanwhile, did not fix subway signals or switches under the plan. Con Ed workers and contractors, accompanied by in-house forces, performed an electrical analysis of signal-related equipment. Local 100 members made the repairs.

Tony Utano, President, TWU Local 100 and John V. Chiarello, Vice President of Local 100 Maintenance of Way