300 union transit jobs created in MTA's capital plan

The MTA will hire 300 additional unionized employees to renovate, upgrade and repair stations in the aging subway system, leadership of the MTA and the Transport Workers Union announced last week. The proposed increase in staff would be tasked with carrying out the state-of-good-repair jobs laid out in the MTA’s $68-billion capital plan for 2025-2029. 

These jobs include installing platform barriers, fixing stairwells, painting stations and repairing railings, said Demetrius Crichlow, president of New York City Transit in an interview last week. Crichlow insisted that it’s “more efficient” for the MTA to use in-house union labor than to outsource to contractors for this work.  

“The more we can get our in-house folks to do, the better it is for management and the union,” he said. “The contractor just isn't able to do the quality of work or be as efficient at installing [barriers].” 

The work for these 300 employees represents only a small slice of the $6 billion budgeted for employees in the capital plan, David Solimon, vice president of facilities for NYCT, told the MTA’s board last week. But awarding the work to these employees who have “more flexibility and technical expertise” instead of allowing outside contractors to bid for it will save the MTA between $50 million and $100 million, he said.  

The 300 will become members of TWU Local 100 once they’re hired.  

“We successfully made the case that work done by TWU members is of higher quality, more cost-effective, and is completed more quickly than projects given to private contractors,” Local 100 President John Chiarello said in a statement.  “We fully support this capital plan and want to see it funded and implemented. It’s essential in order to have a safe and reliable system, and to avoid slipping backward to the bad old days of rampant break downs and delays.” 

John Samuelson, international president of TWU, said union members doing the work is the best way of "ensuring that the final product is better and less expensive."  

"It’s higher quality for a lower price,” Samuelson said. "We're the best at it and its not a question." 

But the union leader argued that MTA’s openness to using union labor is not a given under Janno Lieber, the agency’s CEO. Samuelson said Lieber is prone to outsourcing work to consultants or contractors and otherwise implementing policies "destructive to the TWU.” 

Just days ago the MTA's board greenlit $186 million to two large infrastructure consulting firms to oversee the Second Avenue subway extension.

Crichlow argued that in the case of the 300 additional staffers, the union and transit management are in “lockstep” and “making good use of the funds we have.” 

“This is an instance that management and union agree on the skill and talent of the workforce and we both see the value of utilizing our resources, our people who are doing a great job, and utilizing them to the best that we can,” he said. “We're trying to install a level of confidence in our riders that every dollar we receive, every dollar that we put out and all the projects that we're doing are being managed efficiently.” 

The MTA’s capital plan relies on $14 billion in funding from the federal government, which has been sparring with Governor Hochul and the MTA and threatened to withhold money over congestion pricing and a false assertion that subway crime is on the rise.  

Samuelson said that “everybody should be concerned” about the threats from the Trump administration. But both he and Crichlow said leadership in the state legislature and assembly have offered assurances that the state will be able to cover at least the state-of-good-repair  portions of the capital plan.