Reinstate Andy Valentine!

On 4 January 2024, like every day of his eight-year career at NYC Transit, Train Operator Andy Valentine worked his job with skill and integrity. But that day, Valentine also acted with selfless courage, when a train with malfunctioning brakes on which he was working as a guide—not as the operator—collided underground with a train in passenger service, causing at least 24 injuries and millions in damages. Valentine did everything humanly possible to try to stop the train, helped to save his conductor in the seconds before impact and remained in the smoke-filled wreckage to assist evacuating passengers with Fire Department personnel.

As a reward, Valentine’s bosses at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) viciously fired him, after plotting to scapegoat him and cover up their own criminal mistakes and disregard for safety. Burying the truth about the 96th Street crash and derailment was no easy feat because news reports, interviews and the extensively researched National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report unquestionably prove that Valentine was innocent.

Management’s biggest problem was that one of their own, a Train Service Supervisor, was actually operating the train, supervising and overall in charge when it crashed. He was the one who should have stopped the train the moment that radio communication with Valentine ceased or upon getting Valentine’s repeated calls to “stop the train!” Management should have known that train crews’ handheld radios are unreliable in this area. Equally damning, it was supervision who routed the two trains onto a collision course.

MTA Labor Relations cooked up bogus charges against Valentine for rules and procedures that didn’t even exist before the crash. They then used one of their so-called “neutral” arbitrators to terminate him this April. When the arbitrator blatantly pandered to the bosses by disallowing the NTSB report into evidence, Valentine told coworkers that his heart dropped, sensing that he was about to become another victim of the company’s notorious system of “plantation justice.”

Afterwards, angry transit workers from different rank-and-file groups within Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100—including Transit Workers for a Fighting Union (TWFU), Local 100 Fightback and the Stronger Together caucus headed by Evangeline Byars—founded the “Ad Hoc Committee to Reinstate T/O Andy Valentine” to publicize his case, raise funds for his legal defense and militantly demand that he be rehired with full back pay and a clean record. Upon hearing about Valentine’s plight, Railroad Workers United, a national pan-union organization advocating for rank-and-file railroad workers, also publicized the case and gave welcome support. Importantly, these groups came together in a united front to fight for the defense of Valentine and the union, despite their differences over how to transform Local 100 into a fighting force. Every Local 100 member has an interest in taking up the fight to reinstate Andy Valentine!

Service Over Safety

The real cause of the 96th Street crash was the MTA’s de facto policy of service over safety, which directly threatens workers and passengers alike. As summarized in the Ad Hoc Committee’s June 12 leaflet: the transit bosses “inexcusably placed a train full of passengers in front of a disabled train with faulty brakes, while making a risky move in a notorious radio dead zone!”

Management was undoubtedly furious that Valentine spoke powerfully to the press soon after the crash about the bosses’ total safety meltdown, telling an ABC reporter that “I felt like I was a spectator about to watch myself be killed.” That isn’t hyperbole to millions of NYC subway riders, who experience the MTA’s crumbling infrastructure daily. In fact, there were two other subway derailments within 22 days of the January 4 collision.

NYC’s subway system is a microcosm of U.S. capitalism in decay. The city’s huge extremes of wealth—with gleaming skyscrapers rising just blocks from dilapidated housing projects—are mirrored underground. The MTA is slowly upgrading to modern communications-based train control, yet still relies on obsolete signal systems inside over 100-year-old tunnels! It is a metropolis gutted of necessary investment in infrastructure. Just to keep the trains running under such decay, the MTA bosses give a backseat to safety.

During last year’s Local 100 elections, TWFU fought for safety under the slogan “We shouldn’t have to kill ourselves to do our jobs!” Valentine’s case underscores the urgency of strengthening the union as the front-line defense against the bosses’ contempt for workers’ lives and livelihoods. Workers Vanguard agrees with TWFU that transit workers need to fight now for elected union safety committees with the right to shut down unsafe work, in other words workers control of safety. Of course, this must be coupled with the broader struggle to get billions of dollars for maintaining and rebuilding the country’s mass transit systems. If workers, not management, had been in charge of moving the trains under 96th Street that day, the collision would not have happened.

Arbitration Is a Trap

Going into arbitration, Valentine received some support from union reps and legal representation from Local 100, but there was no attempt to highlight the MTA’s outrageous vendetta against him or to mobilize union members in his defense. Moreover, since his firing, top TWU officers have been maintaining a guilty silence over what happened to him, not offering a penny or even a word in Valentine’s defense. Because the TWU’s pro-capitalist bureaucrats hang their careers on cozy relations with the MTA bosses and their politicians, they defend and have no alternative to the rigged system of binding arbitration. While the bosses routinely violate the contract, the TWU tops just as routinely hide behind New York’s anti-strike Taylor Law as an all-purpose excuse to not wage real fights.

At the very least, every union member should have been informed about the company victimization of Valentine as soon as he was handed a DAN (disciplinary action notification). On the day of his kangaroo court arbitration proceedings, hundreds of TWUers should have been mobilized to demonstrate outside of the MTA’s “House of Pain” at 2 Broadway to demand the dropping of all charges and opening up of the phony proceedings to the watchful eyes of the union ranks. Harsh company discipline should always be met with a harsh response that brings union power to bear. This frame-up should have been spiked in a militant and timely fashion.

It is not too late to win Valentine’s job back and in the process chip away at the weakness felt by transit workers. Through efforts like those of the Ad Hoc Committee to Reinstate T/O Andy Valentine, fighters within the ranks can begin to establish the union as the kind of organization that it needs to be—one that aggressively defends every worker against any and all of the bosses’ attacks. To make this happen, it is important to realize that binding arbitration is a trap. Arbitration removes agency from the union and blunts its power. With Trump shredding the union contracts of federal workers, now is the time for serious defensive struggles, not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Underscoring how biased and vicious the MTA’s “plantation justice” system is, an MTA arbitrator reportedly ruled in late July that the supervisor operating the train during the 96th Street collision can return to full safety-sensitive service. So, while Valentine lost his job and health insurance and struggles daily just to feed and support his family, guilty bosses are back on the job like the crash they caused never happened.

Valentine recently filed a complaint in New York State court to have his arbitration ruling vacated, a necessary step in the fight to get his job back. However, TWU members must understand that the bosses’ court system is no more “neutral” than the MTA’s system of “plantation justice.” Transit workers need to turn Valentine’s case into a clarion call to fight management in every corner of the industry. “An injury to one is an injury to all” may be just a platitude for sellout union bureaucrats, but it’s a burning reality for workers everywhere, especially in this period of expanding attacks on labor, immigrants, leftists and all the oppressed.

Workers Vanguard encourages our readers to join the fight to get Valentine rehired: Donate to the “Fired! MTA Ignores NTSB Report! Blames Andy” GoFundMe page for his legal defense and check out the “All Out for Andy” Facebook page for more information about his case. Also, learn more about TWFU at twfu.org and on Facebook, X and YouTube.