Jake Ephros
An employee of NJ Transit reached out to me before this strike was announced, and I’m grateful that he trusted me to talk. We chatted, and he shared his perspective from the inside as a worker at NJ Transit. We cowrote a piece that he wanted me to put out in my name, addressing the strike and the fact that the CEO — he’s a temporary CEO just for this year, Kris Kolluri — was brandishing this anti-union sentiment during the strike. It was very disturbing because one of the basic demands was pay parity with other train engineers in the tristate area.
It costs so much to live here. If you want NJ Transit engineers to be able to actually live here and have families here, we’ve got to pay them enough. To pit the workers’ demands for a salary commensurate with the labor that they put in and commensurate with other workers in the same field in the region — to pit that against “the riders are going to be affected, the commuters are going to be affected, ordinary people are going to be affected” — this is just pitting working people against working people.
What we really should be doing is hammering away at this new corporate transit fee that the state of New Jersey set up. We should be expanding that, because the corporate transit fee now takes a little money off the top of the biggest corporations in New Jersey and puts it into NJ Transit funds. For the first time, there’s this permanent source of funding. Which is nuts that we don’t have other permanent sources of funding for our mass transit here — but we need to be expanding that instead of saying, “Workers deserve less.”
The vast majority of the transit here is either the NJ Transit buses or the PATH [Port Authority Trans-Hudson] train in and out of the city. There’s also the light rail, which folks depend on. The PATH is controlled by this joint board between New York and New Jersey, the Port Authority. Just the other month, I was speaking with some other folks from Jersey City at a board hearing, because conditions on the PATH are so bad and there’s really inadequate service, especially for off-peak and weekend hours.
[We need to] invest more in service for working-class people for all of these times. Let’s remember, not everyone works a 9–5 job, and even folks who do work 9–5 jobs are packed like sardines into these trains. We need more service during normal hours too. But at least as a first demand, these off-peak hours need way better attention.Meanwhile our state is considering a turnpike expansion — widening the highway that runs through Jersey City and Hoboken. This is disastrous environmentally and public health–wise. We’d likely see high increases in asthma rates in the area, and [widening lanes] does nothing to alleviate traffic. So instead of investing untold amounts of money into widening a turnpike, let’s put that into mass transit. Let’s put that into increasing bus service. Let’s put that into increasing PATH service. We are one of the areas of the country that has some of the lowest car ownership rates, but that is not matched by the kinds of access to public transit we have.
Great Job Jake Ephros & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
