The MTA has launched a new ad campaign highlighting the 50,000 people that keep New Yorkers moving — a bid to humanize the transit workforce amid a spate of assaults against them.
“I Move NY” will feature on physical and digital signage on city buses and subway stations over the next year, featuring stills and videos of workers discussing their lives, personal and professional.
The campaign aims to get New York commuters to see transit workers as their fellow New Yorkers, not just cogs who get them from point A to point B.
“Transit workers are parents, grandparents. They’re mothers, daughters, sisters. They coach Little League. They have garden clubs, book clubs,” said Demetrius Crichlow, the interim president of MTA New York City Transit. “More importantly, they are our neighbors. New York would not be possible without the dedicated public workforce that comes in every day to support the greatest city of this world.”
More to the point, the attempt to humanize the transit workforce seeks to dissuade any riders from feeling emboldened to go on the attack, verbally or physically.
“We’re glad to see you; without you coming on, it would be a very boring job,” said George, a bus operator from the Fresh Pond Depot in Queens featured in the campaign’s launch video. “Just remember, we like courtesy and manners too, and respect toward us and we’ll definitely respond in kind.”
Thirty transit workers have been assaulted on the job so far this year, according to MTA statistics. The campaign launch comes after a particularly brazen attack this month, wherein a 30-year veteran subway operator was stabbed as he made the rounds on a train at the Crown Heights-Utica Avenue terminal in Brooklyn.
In that case, the alleged perp — who is charged with attempted murder — has an extensive rap sheet of attacks specifically against transit workers and riders.
The union representing tens of thousands of MTA workers, Transport Workers Union Local 100, blasted the new campaign as a “feel-good” patting of the back by management, without listening to the union’s requests to ensure workers’ safety.
Specifically, the union is calling for a policy change wherein both operators, who drive the train, and conductors who make announcements walk the trains at terminals together, instead of just one of them doing it alone, as operator Myran Pollack was when he was stabbed.
“Our proposal is reasonable, cost-effective, and will do a lot to allay our members’ justified fears of being confronted in the performance of their duties,” said Local 100 President Richard Davis. “Instead, NYCT is talking about how our members excel in customer service. It’s tone-deaf.”
The union has said it is prepared to escalate pressure further should the MTA not enact the union’s proposals. Earlier this year, workers ground A and C trains to a halt at rush hour in an unofficial work stoppage protesting a conductor’s brutal stabbing in Brooklyn.
