Public Employee Press

TA workers fight anti-immigrant slurs

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Local 375 members are angry over a top New York City Transit manager’s slurs against immigrants.

Local leaders have demanded that the agency transfer Vice President Frederick E. Smith out of the Capital Program Management unit. The local also wants him ordered to apologize in writing and to attend sensitivity training regarding his reported racist and bigoted remarks.

During an Oct. 7 labor-management meeting, Smith brazenly stated that the professional immigrant workers represented by Local 375 “should be kissing the ground with the opportunities they are receiving” at NYC Transit.

Smith’s offensive comments came as his response to remarks about the workers’ inadequate pay and low morale by Behrouz Fathi, the local’s NYC Transit chapter president. Smith said the “personnel are paid at a respectable rate” and “many of the staffers could not be paid or recognized in their home countries as they are here.”

Transfer the boss, say members
Within days, the agency was enveloped in a workplace scandal. Local 375 members in the CPM unit circulated notes of the labor-management meeting taken by Second Vice President Michelle Keller, who attended the meeting along with Executive Chair George Lawrence.

On Nov. 17, the local’s delegates voted to demand that Smith be transferred out of the CPM unit, write a letter of apology and attend sensitivity training.

Outraged, Local 375 President Claude Fort wrote NYC Transit President Lawrence G. Reuter, charging that Smith’s remarks reflected a “clear discriminatory animus toward ethnic minorities and foreign-born employees.”

Local attorney Rachel J. Minter protested the Nov. 7 incident in a letter to Christopher Johnson, head of labor relations at NYC Transit. She noted that many Local 375 members believed Smith should be fired. But Minter said in the interest of resolving the matter swiftly, the local was open to a less drastic resolution.

Smith’s remarks came at the end of the Oct. 7 meeting called by Local 375 to oppose Smith’s request for photos of all CPM employees.

Many members considered the request coercive and unnecessary, since workers are required to have ID tags with their photos. Smith said he sought the photos to “get to know” his staff better, but Fort charged that the manager’s discriminatory attitudes left the impression that the purpose of the photos was to allow for “racial profiling.”

Fort and other top Local 375 officials also addressed the racist incident in a follow-up meeting with NYC Transit managers, as well as at the agency’s Diwali celebration.

So far, more than 200 employees have signed a petition condemning Smith’s comments. Fathi has reported the incident to the agency’s equal employment opportunity office, which interviewed him, Keller and Lawrence.

In a Nov. 4 letter to Fort, Smith contended that his quote in Keller’s notes was “false and fabricated.” He said he intended to file a personal suit against Keller for “defamation of character.”

Ten days later, Smith sent all CPM employees a memo about “Diversity at NYC Transit” in which he also denied making “disparaging comments” at the meeting. At the same time, Smith described the diversity of the workforce as “a strength of the agency.”

“As long as there is no official response, this matter will continue to fester,” Fathi said.

“The agency needs to take action. We have very talented members from all around the world — including Europe, the Caribbean and Asia — and they were very offended by the remarks.”

“It’s difficult to see how somebody like this can work as a supervisor in an agency with such a diverse workforce,” said Fort, vowing that the local will continue its pressure to resolve the dispute.

DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts said she would like to meet with leaders of the local and top management of the agency in an effort to mediate the situation.