This testimony to working life illuminates the stories, adventures, and wisdom of New York transit workers. More than 100 transit workers were interviewed to discover just what goes on behind the scenes of public transportation. The challenges are legion: the danger of working next to high-voltage power lines in a system that operates 24 hours a day for 7 days a week; workers risking their own lives to save others, an act that often leaves them as witnesses to pain and death. In their testimonies, workers express the importance of bonding with their colleagues for protection as well as companionship.
Then there are the scams that workers cope with daily, such as the "blind" man who puts egg membrane in his eyes to implement his begging routine; "token suckers" who use soda cans to trap fare tokens for resale; holdups and gang activities that make many workers' jobs even more difficult and dangerous. For most passengers, the transit workers are a nearly invisible part of their own daily routine. Snyder's book gives transit workers both voices and names. --Susan Swartwout
Snyder, managing editor of Media Studies Journal, dedicates this book to his grandfather, who was a transit worker for 48 years?and this paean would make any grandfather proud. Snyder gets right to the point: there are 44,310 transit workers in the system and they somehow manage to transport five million people daily. Adopting an approach reminscent of Stud Terkel's, he lets the workers tell their own "war stories." Some are sweet, like when a baby is born in the last car of a train and is named after the nervous worker who helped in the delivery. Others are more grim, as when a jumper lands under a train and miraculously lives. "Why did you do this?" the worker asks the woman. "No one loves me," she replies. He says, "I love you. Why would I crawl under all these cars?" The transit authority, we learn, has traditionally been a haven for immigrants, from the Irish of the 1920s to the Jamaicans of today. It provides jobs, as one worker points out, of "secure poverty"?you'll never get rich, but you'll pay the rent. The author goes on to tell of scam artists in the subways, such as the "token suckers" who actually suck tokens out of turnstile slots; and of how quickly death can come to a track worker when he or she steps on the third rail. There are tales of ghosts of dead track workers (the "ghost" turns out to be the smoke of a track fire) and a heart-warming story of a bus driver who used to wait for the "scrubbies"?the cleaning ladies from the Empire State Building?every night so they wouldn't have to wait another hour for a bus home. This is a terrific book for railroad buffs and Big Apple aficionados.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.