The MTA bosses have yet another worker’s blood on their filthy, racist hands!
Conductor Moet McCullum, a 41 year old mother of three and probationary employee, was working as a construction flagger on the subway tracks when a train struck and killed her on September third in The Bronx.
While the train operator was apparently found to be operating his train at higher speeds than he was supposed to, after a warning from a flagger at the previous station, McCullum’s death is another example of how little the MTA’s head stooges care about worker safety, while lying they do.
McCullum was helping to set up lights (“flagging”) that would alert train operators to workers performing maintenance work on the tracks. Days after her death, MTA management, more concerned with making train “service” than protecting its workforce, reimplemented rule changes to hold back trains when flaggers are setting up the light arrangements. While this has been a policy the Transit Authority bosses used in the past, it was done away with in the years before McCullium’s death. Why? Because MTA is in service to capitalism, a system that prioritizes profits over safety and workers’ lives!
This is the first such death in the system since track worker Hilarion Joseph in 2023, and another in 2016 with conductor Louis Gray Jr. Both workers were also struck by trains. After Gray’s death, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that the Operations Control Center (OCC), which oversees subway trains, failed to notify train dispatchers that Gray’s team of flaggers would be on the track.Transit bosses had also failed to develop a risk assessment strategy for flagging that could have prevented Gray’s death.
To any worker down here, the failure of the OCC to safeguard workers is no surprise. They routinely order mostly Black and Latin train operators and conductors to “isolate” train cars containing human waste, without proper protective equipment, a known safety violation. They also regularly order workers to investigate other dangerous conditions, such as armed workers. for example.
The NTSB’s audit found that Transit’s repeated failures to provide adequate safety for its workers lead to a 58 percent surge from 2022 to 2023 in what are called “near misses,” which are incidents which could have resulted in worker injury or death.
In summer 2025, the Federal Transportation Authority called out the MTA for repeatedly failing to submit proper safety risk assessments aimed at protecting workers.
TWU Local 100–which represents MTA NYCT workers–is complicit in McCullum’s death. They talk a tough game, but have allowed Transit to consistently drop the ball with protecting workers, and they collude with MTA bosses.
A day after McCullum’s death, the union bosses failed to have mental and emotional support services available for workers who needed it. A 24 hour “safety stand down” took effect, where management temporarily suspended non-emergency track work to have employees review safety protocols, the same ones that failed McCullum in the first place!
Communications Based Train Control, a computer based system that enforces train speed limits, could have been another way to prevent this from happening. However, the MTA bosses are taking their time installing the technology systemwide and are more focused on paying off their exorbitant debt to Wall Street than anything to keep workers secure.
While it is a worthy fight to struggle for better flagging rules to protect workers on the tracks, only communism can ensure that as many safeguards as possible can be in place to stop these tragedies from happening. Under communism, regard for protecting workers would be primary and not making as much dirty, blood soaked money as possible. We owe it to McCullum to continue to struggle with coworkers on the job that a better world is possible!
