Boost track worker safety: feds
Federal transit officials are set to put stronger protections in place for track workers on the nation’s subway systems, a move that comes less than six months after a New York City Transit employee was fatally struck by a train.
A new rule, proposed Friday by the Federal Transit Administration, would set the first federal mandate for safety standards for transit track workers.
If adopted, the rule would require mandatory safety briefings, the reporting of near-miss incidents, and training. It would also federally protect the right of workers to refuse to work in unsafe conditions.
“This rule will ultimately save lives,” Veronica Vanterpool, the FTA’s acting administrator, said in a statement. “Once this rule is finalized, it will support safer conditions for workers who perform critical tasks that keep transit operating efficiently and safely.”
The rule will be open for public comment until late May.
An MTA spokesman said that agency brass was still reviewing the proposal, but that many of the potential federal requirements were already part of MTA rules.
“New York City Transit is committed to protecting the safety of track workers, has a robust safety program inclusive of track worker protection training and requirements for reporting near misses, and processes for disputing a rule believed to violate safety rules and regulations,” Lucas Bejarano said in a statement. “We look forward to reviewing the verbiage of the proposed rule in the spirit of maintaining a safe operating environment.”
John Samuelsen, international head of the Transport Workers Union and a former MTA track worker, told the Daily News that the rule would put the weight of the federal government behind the safety provisions in negotiated contracts.
“It’s unprecedented for the FTA to do specific rule-making like this,” Samuelsen said. “They’ve now put standards in place that these transit agencies have to abide by — that’s an enormous leap forward.”
The FTA proposal would give transit workers “the right to challenge and refuse in good faith any assignment based on on-track safety concerns and resolve such challenges and refusals promptly and equitably” — language lauded by Samuelsen.
“The federal government is now saying there is a right to refuse an unsafe work order,” he said.
Officials with TWU’s Local 100, which represents over 40,000 of the city’s subway and bus workers, said it was doing just that — refusing unsafe work — when trains ground to a halt on the A and C lines last month in the hours following the slashing of conductor Alton Scott, who was ambushed while sticking his head out of an A train in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
MTA officials at the time accused the union of orchestrating a work stoppage, a possible violation of New York’s Taylor Law which limits union work actions for public sector workers.
The FTA’s proposed rule focuses specifically on workers whose jobs require them to be on the tracks.
Hilarion Joseph, an MTA track worker, was killed in November while working on a track cleaning crew.
Joseph, 57, was working as a flagger — alerting trains to the crew’s presence on the tracks — when he was hit and killed by an uptown D train just south of the 34th St.-Herald Square station.
As previously reported by the Daily News, the train had come to a stop to allow the work crew to clear up off the tracks.
The train began to move after Joseph removed his red light from the tracks.
Joseph was hit and killed some time after the train began to move again. It remains unclear whether Joseph was able to make it to safety before the train began moving. The incident is still under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.