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WHITEWASH CAN'T CLEAN THINGS UP: While a consultant's report praised the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for taking 'early, proactive and decisive action' to cope with the coronavirus and the threat it posed to both workers and riders, union officials branded it an attempt to cover up the agency's initial resistance to equipping employees like this Cleaner with protective masks, a stance they contend was a factor in the deaths of 132 agency employees, most of them assigned to city bus and subway work.
The unions representing tens of thousands of Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers are blasting the findings of a consultant lauding the agency for its response to the COVID-19 virus that has so far killed 132 of their colleagues, with one major labor leader terming it "revisionist history."
"The MTA took early, proactive, and decisive action to help reduce the risk of COVID-19 to employees and riders, with demonstrated action prior to the first case of COVID-19 being confirmed in New York," according to a 38-page analysis from WSP, a global-management consultant, submitted June 26.
Compared Transit Agencies
The analysis was the second part of a $100,000 project, which included a comparison of the practices employed by other transit agencies around the world to protect the health of their employees and the public in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the last installment, WSP compared the MTA's decisions with the best-practices guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state Department of Health, the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and the American Public Transportation Association.
WSP cited the MTA's "distributing face masks to employees on March 27, 2020" ahead of the CDC's shift early the next month advising the public to wear them in all settings where maintaining six feet between people was not possible.
For several weeks, the CDC recommended against the general public using masks, insisting the top priority was protecting the existing inventory because of a critical shortage of personal protective equipment for health-care workers, first-responders and patients.
The WSP said its report assessed MTA actions against "prevailing U.S. public health guidance, and benchmarks them against other transit industry practices. This Review does not judge if or how MTA's actions could have reduced the loss of human life."
'MTA Failed Its Employees'
But John Samuelsen, president of the Transport Workers Union of America and an MTA board member, dismissed the report as "revisionist history."
TWU Local 100 President Tony Utano said in a statement, "The MTA is using high-paid consultants to rewrite history and whitewash its own failings, but transit workers who saw more than 130 of their co-workers die know the sordid and painful truth. "The MTA failed its employees. Not only was the MTA late to provide masks, it initially told workers they couldn't wear their own masks, outrageously saying it wasn't part of the official uniform."
Michael Carrube, president of the Subway Surface Supervisors Association, which lost a dozen members to the virus, said the best way for the transit agency to determine the quality of its COVID response was by surveying its front-line employees. Noting in a phone interview that he was an early advocate on the subject, "I said to Transit, we should all be issued masks because we could be asymptomatic [with COVID] but still be passing it on. But they did not listen to us."
"They should be consulting people like myself that happen to have a licensed background in safety and health and canvassing their employee base because nobody knows better than we do," he continued. "We are out there every day."
A Waste of Money?
He added, "They want to complain they don't have money to give us a contract but yet they hire an outside consultant firm that doesn't know anything about the actual transit working environment to come in and assess something you could have gotten for free by sitting down with union leadership and membership."
Car Cleaner Paul V. Tordabona works at the 95th St. Terminal in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and started wearing a mask back in January.
"We have a big homeless population where I am at, and I kept saying to my wife I could get tuberculosis or COVID because there is a lot of airborne stuff down there," he said. "I didn't get any flak from my supervisors, who were like, 'If you feel safer wearing it, fine,' but Train Operators and Conductors started wearing them and when the pandemic hit, [managers] were saying we could not wear the mask because of what passengers might say. And I saw that at my location, when people would ask and I would say it was for my safety, they were pretty much cool with that."
Mr. Tordabona said his concerns about safety resurfaced recently when the MTA ordered him to take a refresher course in a classroom setting.
Tough to Believe MTA
"We are still in a pandemic with over 130 dead co-workers—a terrible thing," he said. "Our Governor and Mayor don't want to open indoor restaurants yet where people want to sit and eat. They tell us they are sanitizing, but often what the MTA tells you is not true."
In a phone interview, Abbey Collins, the MTA's Chief Communications Officer, said the agency was "in constant communications with the unions at every level of our organizations from the CEO, the president of [New York City Transit] to the head of buses" throughout the pandemic.
She continued, "We have had an ongoing discussion with the union, and as soon as they bring something to our attention, it is implemented and we continue to be interested in ways we can better protect our workers. And the MTA has led the country during this pandemic on the issue of worker safety."
In early spring, when illnesses among transit workers were at their highest and MTA CEO Patrick Foye tested positive for the virus, management and union officials expressed frustration with the lack of public compliance with the state's social-distancing mandate and the number of New Yorkers still using the system who were not part of the essential workforce.
On April 14, the MTA and TWU Local 100 reached an agreement that extended the $500,000 death benefit they negotiated last year for line-of-duty deaths to the families of workers who died from COVID-19.