Transit Talk : New York's Bus and Subway Workers Tell Their Stories - Softcover

Snyder, Robert W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813525772 ISBN 13: 9780813525778

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1998

Synopsis

New York City may seem to be a place where everyone is a stranger, yet transit workers provide a human presence on a late-night bus or an empty subway platform. Few of us give any thought to these invisible workers-until something goes wrong. Transit Talk takes readers into the world of MTA New York City transit employees, as they describe their lives and work, from the most visible subway conductor to the seemingly invisible mechanic.

There are nearly 44,000 transit workers like those you will meet in Transit Talk , and every day they help five million of us travel to work, to school, to weddings, to funerals, to hospitals, to vacations. These workers labor daily on subway tracks inches from high-voltage powerlines, risking their lives for passengers they'U never know. The city can feel large and fragmented, but the transportation system and its workers create common threads in the lives of all New Yorkers, threads we take for granted.

Together, their stories create a human tableau of life and labor in the city within a city that is the MTA New York City Transit. Transit workers find satisfaction in fixing a damaged subway car, gain wisdom from mastering a dangerous workplace, nurse emotional wounds from tending to someone injured in an accident, battle frustration from difficulties with management, and express satisfaction when reflecting on a productive career. They tell of how years spent in the same shop create bonds between workers. They talk of the burden of laboring in a twenty-four-hour system with night shifts and weekend workdays that take them away from families. You'U hear painful tales of informing next-of-kin of a death on the tracks as well as joyous anecdotes of workers delivering a baby in a subway car.

About this title

Review

This testimony to working life illuminates the stories, adventures, and wisdom of New York transit workers. More than 100 transit workers were interviewed to discover just what goes on behind the scenes of public transportation. The challenges are legion: the danger of working next to high-voltage power lines in a system that operates 24 hours a day for 7 days a week; workers risking their own lives to save others, an act that often leaves them as witnesses to pain and death. In their testimonies, workers express the importance of bonding with their colleagues for protection as well as companionship.

Then there are the scams that workers cope with daily, such as the "blind" man who puts egg membrane in his eyes to implement his begging routine; "token suckers" who use soda cans to trap fare tokens for resale; holdups and gang activities that make many workers' jobs even more difficult and dangerous. For most passengers, the transit workers are a nearly invisible part of their own daily routine. Snyder's book gives transit workers both voices and names. --Susan Swartwout

From Publishers Weekly

Snyder, managing editor of Media Studies Journal, dedicates this book to his grandfather, who was a transit worker for 48 years?and this paean would make any grandfather proud. Snyder gets right to the point: there are 44,310 transit workers in the system and they somehow manage to transport five million people daily. Adopting an approach reminscent of Stud Terkel's, he lets the workers tell their own "war stories." Some are sweet, like when a baby is born in the last car of a train and is named after the nervous worker who helped in the delivery. Others are more grim, as when a jumper lands under a train and miraculously lives. "Why did you do this?" the worker asks the woman. "No one loves me," she replies. He says, "I love you. Why would I crawl under all these cars?" The transit authority, we learn, has traditionally been a haven for immigrants, from the Irish of the 1920s to the Jamaicans of today. It provides jobs, as one worker points out, of "secure poverty"?you'll never get rich, but you'll pay the rent. The author goes on to tell of scam artists in the subways, such as the "token suckers" who actually suck tokens out of turnstile slots; and of how quickly death can come to a track worker when he or she steps on the third rail. There are tales of ghosts of dead track workers (the "ghost" turns out to be the smoke of a track fire) and a heart-warming story of a bus driver who used to wait for the "scrubbies"?the cleaning ladies from the Empire State Building?every night so they wouldn't have to wait another hour for a bus home. This is a terrific book for railroad buffs and Big Apple aficionados.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0813525772
• ISBN 13: 9780813525778
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 198