NEW YORK CITY, July 25—As I began my training for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) as a track worker, there has been a lot of safety talk at orientation and training. The indoctrination has begun, and the first order of business is making sure that workers know safety is our responsibility, and ours alone.
The topic came up about our fallen MTA brother St. Clair Richards-Stephens who was murdered by dangerous working condition in March 2018. He was a track worker who tripped, grabbed a handrail that broke, and fell to his death. The company and the union both stuck to their lame response to questions about his death: “Well we don’t know all the facts yet. This is why we say safety begins with you. But there’s still an ongoing investigation. What we can say is that he was a big guy.” They speak as if it were his fault that the wooden handrail didn’t support his weight, rather than emphasize the fact that wooden handrails have been proven unreliable!
During the “safety training”, the trainer informed us of lead paint in our work areas, wooden catwalks and handrails still in use. He described the many ways workers continue to get hurt by getting their fingers cut off, falling off elevated structures, or getting struck by trains. Yet, he claimed 90 percent of workers’ injuries are caused by our actions and the other 10 percent are from working conditions. Of those 10 percent, he claimed, “The only time when working conditions become unsafe is through acts of nature, like storms.”
At this point, I knew the instructor was full of it. He is paid to brainwash workers into believing injures are mainly caused by the workers and not the bosses that exploit them. I asked, “Couldn’t we improve upon the unsafe working areas to make them more safe?”
He said, “But we are designed to fail being victims of probability.” He began to use an exercise with numbers to prove his point, saying once you get used to something and it suddenly changes, you’re unable to adapt before your mistake is made.  
A co-worker defended the instructor, “We will never be able to completely ensure everyone’s safety. Not even in a perfect world could we ensure everyone’s safety, that’s what he’s trying to say!”
I disagreed: “It is possible to ensure everyone’s safety! For example, getting a G.O. (general order) to shut down service on one track can prevent anyone from getting struck by a train, or we can get safety nets for those who work on elevated structures.”
The instructor initially agreed, then he again parroted his boss’s lie and said, “Safety is hard to control because humans are hard to fix.”
I realized this wasn’t an argument I could win. I approached my co-workers on break to ask them what they thought.
 “I understand what he means but I’m too tired to really think about it,” one worker said. He’s onto something. That’s another trouble the MTA puts us through. The training was from 3-11pm. The day before, our schedule was 7am-3pm. A recent training required us to work from 10 pm-6 am. Our schedules are in constant fluctuation, making us tired and less able to think critically. This jeopardizes us workers and the riders who depend on us for transportation.  
I persisted in my point about ensuring the workers’ safety. An individual may be flawed, but as a collective, we’re strong. In factories in other countries like Russia and China where the workers took state power in the last century, workers were able to dramatically reduce injuries because profit wasn’t the driving force of labor, necessity was. It’s capitalism that is at fault 100 percent of the time! After my rant, my coworkers agreed.  “True, true,” one co-worker said.
It’s hard struggling against the bosses’ lies, especially when “the experts” present them. It’s a long fight, and we won’t win them all, but what’s important is that we drop the seeds for others to find and pick up. Stay patient, brothers and sisters, for the workers are always listening to what we say, and to what we don’t say. Stand tall! The fight continues.