You’re Doing What Because Of Why?

With service sucking in the midst of contract negotiations, some suspect MTA workers of a slowdown:

The doors take forever to close. The subway inches down the tunnel. Then it screeches slowly to a halt. It sits there. Seconds turn to minutes. No announcements are made. Is this a work slowdown by angry transit union members, or just a regular day in the New York City subway system?

And how, precisely, can one tell the difference?

(That last part is vintage Sewell Chan!)

Some riders insisted that something about their commute seemed awry: buses in eastern Brooklyn missing their schedules by 10 minutes or more; trash bins overflowing on Wednesday night in the subway stations at 72nd and 86th Streets under Broadway; clusters of station cleaners milling about early yesterday in Inwood, at the northern terminus of the A line.

A Brooklyn-bound N train was taken out of service at Lexington Avenue after its emergency brakes were applied repeatedly, holding up service on the N and W lines for nearly an hour.

Some at the authority say they suspect that disgruntled workers are deliberately slowing trains and buses to show their displeasure with the pace of negotiations. On Wednesday, management made a wage offer that union leaders rejected. Officials suggested that the workers were using minor and fixable problems as pretexts to slow down the workday.

“There are isolated incidents of rule book slowdowns,” said Tom Kelly, a spokesman. He said that because of the sensitivity of the talks he would not provide specific examples, other than to cite a string of buses that were delayed from leaving a depot in East New York, Brooklyn, early on Tuesday, by union members who said they had identified equipment defects.

The question is why, in advance of a giant public relations battle, MTA employees would want to unnecessarily anger riders. It’s not clear:

Daniel J. Walkowitz, a labor historian at New York University, said that since the Industrial Revolution, workers have found ways to assert control by “doing a job in a minimal, perfunctory way, that doesn’t allow anyone to claim you aren’t doing what you’re paid to do.”

Such strategies have a place in the city’s transit history.

In 1983, train operators began a rule-book slowdown to protest accusations that they were speeding recklessly and causing derailments. They asserted that the derailments were the result of failure to repair and replace tracks during the fiscal crisis of the 1970’s.

“Spontaneously, all the motormen slowed down,” said Marian Swerdlow, author of “Underground Woman,” a memoir about her years as a conductor, from 1982 to 1986. “They were going to show management: ‘You say we’re driving too fast. O.K., we’ll go slowly.'” She drew out the last word for emphasis.

Ms. Swerdlow, now a high school social studies teacher, said that conductors had their own strategies of resistance. “One thing you can do is hold your doors fully open 10 full seconds in every station, as it says in the rule book,” she said. “That’s all you need to do, at the beginning of your run, and the delay becomes cumulative. Usually, conductors instinctively hold their doors open for just a few seconds if there are few passengers on the platforms.”

. . .

Bruce C. McIver, who was the city’s director of labor relations under Mayor Edward I. Koch and then a top official at the transportation authority, said a slowdown can be effective – but can also backfire.

“It’s almost more infuriating to the public than a strike,” he said. “In a strike, at least the lines are clearly drawn and everyone knows which side they’re on. People can relate to workers taking a stand. A slowdown is viewed as a sneakier kind of thing.”