It’s time once again for everyone’s favorite activity: scandal round-up time! First up, signals. The Daily News reports today that the MTA is going to fire a “subway manager and several workers” who were caught faking signal inspection reports. These employees are the first to confront sanctions and dismissal for their roles in this ongoing scandal. Those fired are among the employees who were caught with photocopies of signal barcodes last month.
Transit officials defended the firings while TWU President John Samuelsen claimed the rank-and-file workers were being scapegoated for management failures. Management, he said, is “trying to deflect attention to workers and away from senior management who caused the whole problem to begin with.” Criminal investigations are ongoing.
In other news that should have happened months ago, the MTA Board voted this morning to cancel its contract with SAIC, the contractor currently embroiled in the CityTime scandal. The board had approved a $118 million deal last month for a new FCC-mandated radio system, but after pressure from the comptroller’s office, management said it was “no longer comfortable” with the deal. The contract will be reopened for bids, but time is of the essence. The MTA will face a $1-million-per-day fine if its radio network is not modernized soon.
6 comments
Greg Mocker of PIX11 News will be pleased with the SAIC decision. He had, rightly in my opinion, been railing on that contract choice for weeks now. Though I do worry if this will make him TOO self-righteous.
When you cut back and leave yourself understaffed, it should not be surprising that things like this happen.
There is never any excuse for faking inspections. Never.
Samuelsen is a jackass and the workers should throw him out.
If you’re understaffed, you simply report that you got through thus-and-such many inspections and that’s as far as you could get. And you do so day after day. The result is reports of *missing* inspections, not *falsified* inspections. Then if management punishes you you have a LEGITIMATE complaint.
Samuelsen’s TWU local makes itself look worse and worse daily. I suggest the honest workers reform the union.
Reading deeper, I see that the workers claimed that the photocopies of the bar codes on signals were in the office because the bar codes on the signals themselves were unreadable.
Excuse me, how did they photocopy them then?!?!
Why didn’t they issue a “signal requires cleaning” order and get a new sticker to affix to the signal?!?
In fact, with all of the cut backs, I would not be surprised if every department is faking inspections: train inspections, track inspections, strucutre inspections, bus inspections, etc. I gurarantee that there are more fake inspections out there waiting to be uncovered.
Where there’s smoke…