Kevin Hagen/AP Photo
Cleaning subway trains is one of the few jobs available to immigrant New Yorkers out of work at the height of the pandemic.
“Good morning Mrs. Lucía, I wanted to let you know that I disagree with you denying me the opportunity to work, knowing that we’re in a pandemic, because I didn’t play along and flirt with the supervisor,” texted train cleaner Claudia Barbosa (in Spanish) to her supervisor at NV Maintenance, one of the 21 third-party contractors hired by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to clean and disinfect New York City’s subways during the COVID-19 pandemic. Barbosa had to wait a month to collect her last check. She says her supervisor didn’t give it to her until she showed up in person at the 96th Street and Second Avenue station and spoke to MTA staff about her situation.
“You know how I work. But it’s okay, I’ll turn in the vest and hours I worked this week. Like we don’t have the right to use the restroom. It’s not fair what they did to me. That guy treated me like a dog, and she took his side,” wrote Maria Torres to a co-worker through WhatsApp, shortly after she was fired following an argument with another NV Maintenance supervisor for using the restroom. Maria Torres is a pseudonym. Some workers asked to remain anonymous because they feared their undocumented status would be used against them for speaking out.
The pandemic economy continues to wreak havoc among low-income immigrant New Yorkers.
In early May, the MTA hired private contractors on the heels of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s order to shut down the subway system, which historically runs 24 hours a day, from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., so trains and stations could be cleaned and disinfected. NV Maintenance is one of the companies to which the MTA outsourced its emergency subway cleaning.
Private contractors have received a windfall of at least $371 million from the MTA, according to data released in November. To enrich their own bottom lines, these private contractors have recruited immigrant contract workers—who, contractors know, have little recourse if underpaid or abused on the job. Workers at NV Maintenance and other private contractors charged with these grueling scrubdowns recount stories of economic hardship that has driven them to risk their lives cleaning trains at the height of the pandemic. They also complain of a pattern of poor treatment by supervisors, including retaliation and open sexual harassment.
Sara Feldman, worker rights director at New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), an immigrant-workers advocacy organization in Jackson Heights, Queens, says NICE members have reported a range of abuses and risks to which they’ve been subjected. “Workers either did not receive cleaning equipment or received inadequate cleaning equipment; several workers were paid less than the prevailing wage [they were paid $15 to $16 an hour instead of $20 or more]; workers have constantly been threatened with retaliation,” she says.
One NICE member, Astrid Villalba, a carpenter by trade, was hired in April to work for another private cleaning company, LN Pro Services of Floral Park, Queens. But she quit because she received inadequate personal protective equipment and was not paid the $20-per-hour prevailing wage the cleaners are supposed to earn.
Feldman pointed to the economic desperation spurring people into these exploitative jobs to stay above water.
“Immigrant workers have absolutely been the hardest hit by the pandemic since the very beginning,” wrote Feldman in an email. “Either they are forced to work and are therefore exposed to the virus, or they have lost their jobs and are not able to count on any government support or relief. Due to this situation, many immigrant workers have been forced to take exploitative, underpaying jobs in order to make ends meet.” The pandemic economy continues to wreak havoc among low-income immigrant New Yorkers, according to a recent report from Community Service Society of New York.
“What would New York be without its bakeries and its bodegas? Its flower districts, and fish markets and shoe-repair shops? Its falafel stands and taco trucks, its tiny restaurants filling the streets with sweet aromas from every corner of the world?” the New York Times editorial board rhapsodized recently about the city’s decimated service economy powered by immigrant labor.
Beyond food delivery, on which the city’s white-collar professionals able to work at home have come to depend, employment options for immigrant New Yorkers are scarce. Bereft of their livelihoods in pandemic-related layoffs, immigrant workers, especially the undocumented locked out of any state and federal relief, have wagered that any job, even one that brought them closer than they’d want to microbes and other hazards, is better than unemployment, eviction, or hunger.
Despite the windfall private contractors have raked in from the MTA’s coffers, the transit authority has no oversight over their hiring and firing practices.
UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, New York’s subway cars are cleaned by the MTA’s own employees, who are members of the Transport Workers Union (TWU). As the pandemic ravaged the city’s working class last spring, however, the agency turned to contract workers.
“The union only allowed the temporary use of outside contractors because many of our cleaners were out sick or quarantined, and there was an enormous surge in additional cleaning and disinfecting tasks that were mandated as a result of the health crisis,” wrote Tony Utano, president of TWU Local 100, in an emailed statement. “We recognized the need to take extraordinary measures to protect both transit workers and riders from the disease.”
The exposure of TWU members to the pandemic has been considerable. Among the more than 20,000 New Yorkers killed by the coronavirus at the apex of the curve in May, the New York Daily News reported, were 123 MTA employees. Now, more than eight months into the pandemic, the livelihoods of TWU workers, once lionized as heroes, are on the chopping block—this time cut down by the heavy hand of austerity. Train ridership has plummeted, and MTA officials are threatening mass layoffs and a 40 percent reduction in subway and bus service unless it receives $12 billion in relief.
ENRIQUE MARTINEZ OF ELMHURST, Queens, the neighborhood that was the city’s epicenter of the pandemic at its April peak, was laid off from his job as a building assistant that month and started cleaning the trains for NV Maintenance in May. The job carried the danger of exposure to the virus, but he was earning $20 an hour. In August, however, after finishing his shift at the New Lots Avenue station in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood, Martinez refused an extra shift because he had to care for his son. He explained that to his supervisor, Olga Carbonado—the woman known to the workers as Lucía, who’d fired Claudia Barbosa—adding that he was willing to take additional shifts but would need prior notice because of his family obligations. She responded by asking if he thought he was “a VIP.” He was subsequently fired.
Martinez tried to appeal to NV Maintenance owner Victor Noce to save his job. He reasoned that he shouldn’t have been terminated without a warning, and wanted an answer for why he was fired for refusing an extra shift—the only infraction he could think of having committed. He never got an answer.
Despite the windfall private contractors have raked in from the MTA’s coffers, the transit authority has no oversight over their hiring and firing practices. “We have no control over the hiring process or hiring decisions made by any of these contractors,” reads a disclaimer on a public listing of the private contractors.
Carla Palacio came to work cleaning the trains after she was laid off in May from the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Central Park, where she worked as a cook. Like many of her co-workers, she learned about the job through an informal network of immigrant workers. She worked at several stations, including New Lots Avenue and 96th Street/Second Avenue.
Palacio describes a work environment where workers are subjected to constant video and photo surveillance, strictly enforced time intervals between train-car scrubdowns, male supervisors openly making lewd comments about women as they worked, and firings resulting from minor complaints—as she was after she raised her voice to warn a homeless person away from an off-limits part of the subway station where she worked.
Anthony Behar/Sipa USA via AP Images
Subway trains wait to be cleaned at the Wakefield-241st Street station in the Bronx.
Another worker, who asked for anonymity, saw Maria Torres get fired. “The supervisor was about to hit my co-worker because she went to the bathroom and the supervisor told her that we weren’t in an amusement park, and that one of the trains had left without being disinfected. This is an absolute lie.”
“I got to the bathroom at 2:30, and by 2:32, I was already leaving the bathroom,” Torres says.
But as she was walking down the stairs to return to the train, she encountered the supervisor, who told her, “You can’t be going to the bathroom.”
At first, she thought he was joking. But he began to raise his voice, shouting, “Are you stupid? You’re nobody here, and I’m giving complaints about everything I’m seeing.” He then told her that he was going to report her to Carbonado, and raised his hand as if he was about to strike her.
He then walked away, and Torres recounts that she screamed back, “Listen to me, I’m not an animal. I’m a human being. And we all have needs, and so do you.”
IN MAY, NEW YORK CITY Comptroller Scott Stringer wrote to MTA Chairman and CEO Patrick J. Foye, urging the authority “to ensure that contractors cleaning and disinfecting subway stations and cars are paying their employees prevailing wages and benefits.”
“The MTA must ensure that all workers have access to safe, dignified, living-wage jobs, during the recovery period from the pandemic and beyond,” NICE’s Feldman emailed the Prospect. “It is unacceptable to use this economic crisis as an excuse to exploit workers. The MTA must require and enforce that the contractors pay prevailing wage to all workers. They must ensure that employers do not discriminate, retaliate against, or abuse the workers, and the MTA should create a process for workers to report these abuses and receive justice.”
BANNER
The MTA’s decision to continue to employ contract workers to this day—well beyond the springtime COVID-19 peak when many MTA employees could not report to work—has enraged Transport Workers Union Local 100, which represents the city’s subway and bus workers.
“There’s no way in hell that Local 100 cleaners get laid off and outside cleaning contractors remain on the property,” union president Utano said in an email. “Cleaning subway stations and trains is the exclusive work of Local 100 members, and we have legally binding agreements with the MTA.”
Feldman acknowledges the justice of the union’s position. “We stand in solidarity with TWU workers and we deeply appreciate the work that TWU does every day to make sure that workers’ rights are respected,” she said. “Dignified, living-wage jobs are essential to economic recovery for all workers.”
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
