The overwhelming majority of MTA transit workers say they’ve faced harassment or assault on the job, according to a new survey released Wednesday by New York University’s School of Global Public Health.
The study, published in the Journal of Urban Health, queried members of Transport Workers Union Local 100 — the union representing over 40,000 subway and bus employees — and found that 89% of respondents had experienced some form of harassment or assault between 2020 and 2023.
In the online survey of 1,297 members of Local 100, conducted from late 2023 through early 2024, nearly half of respondents said they had faced verbal harassment or intimidation (48.7%) or physical assault (48.6%) on the job over the three-year period. One in five workers said they had experienced theft, while another 6.3% reported having been sexually assaulted or harassed at work.
Robyn Gershon, a clinical professor of epidemiology at NYU, says the amount of transit workers being victimized is “remarkably high, and far exceeds the rates of attacks against other workers.”
“We hope that providing evidence of the harassment and violence that workers face can lead to better data on transit worker safety and improved policies protecting this vital workforce,” said Gershon.
Female workers, only about 20% of the subway and bus labor force, reported higher levels of victimization than males; female bus workers were more likely to face physical harassment than other groups, while female subway workers were more likely to experience sexual harassment.
The troubling results come as the union raises concerns publicly about a wave of violence against transit workers, with assaults increasing nearly 200% between 2018 and 2022, according to the Urban Institute. The incidents run the gamut from being cursed at, to being spat on or punched, groped, or even slashed or stabbed.
Local 100 president Richard Davis has described the assaults as a “new form of terrorism” against the MTA workforce; in February, after a conductor was slashed in a train cab in Brooklyn, TWU members staged an unofficial work stoppage in protest, grinding the A and C lines to a halt.
But the MTA found the methodology of the new survey to be flawed.
In a letter to NYU President Linda Mills, Demetrius Crichlow, the interim head of New York City Transit, said the TWU study as well as another one on air quality in the subway system “raise serious questions about quality assurance and the university’s commitment to fairness and accuracy in academic research.”
Crichlow characterized the work as a mere “poll” coordinated with TWU itself. He criticized the all-volunteer survey as “using open-ended questions designed to generate a maximum response from only those most motivated to participate.”
He also criticized the findings as well beyond what’s reported to the MTA: in the first seven months of the year going back four years, only about 11% of transit workers reported being the victim of assault or harassment.
The research is “beneath the standards that we have come to expect from a world-class university like NYU,” wrote Crichlow.
Even the study’s authors admitted the limitations of their findings. The response rate was low, at about 11%, and women were far more likely to respond than men. The results “cannot be considered representative of the MTA worker population overall,” they note.
NYU spokesperson John Beckman noted in response that the research was funded by the National Institutes of Health — “a rigorous, competitive process” — and was conducted by established scholars and reviewed by their peers; he also noted the university was open about having collaborated with the union.
A representative for TWU Local 100 did not immediately return requests for comment.
Updated with a response from NYU.
