![]() “They're not, they don't look for the security, the pension, they're looking for the quick dollar,” he said. ![]() “I called him a racist because it was service cuts and he was the manager of the Department of Buses at the time, and they were service cuts that were really impacting the Washington Heights area and not necessarily the downtown area.”Īs for the next generation, Yates now has kids of his own, and despite his clashes with management, he’d still recommend they work for the MTA. “I actually, one time called him a racist,” Yates said. Yates recalled that his relationship with Irick was sometimes contentious - and said that having a Black executive at the agency didn’t keep racial tensions from erupting. Irick worked for the MTA for 33 years and retired in 2019 after serving as the agency’s head of buses for eight years. Then there’s Darryl Irick, who like Yates came from a family of bus drivers and rose to a management position. Ronnie Hakim, the former head of subways and buses who later served as the MTA's managing director, one of the agency's top positions, has Haitian ancestry, according to an MTA spokesperson. There’s Demetrius Crichlow, the current senior vice president of subways, who was appointed to the role in 2021. The MTA has had some Black managers get close to the top. Richard Davis, the union’s current president, is Black and is also the group’s third Black leader. ![]() The leaders of TWU Local 100, which represents a majority of the MTA’s employees, are more reflective of the workforce. “So I had like an understanding of what labor was back then, or at least fighting back, what that meant,” Yates said. It’s a lesson that stuck with Yates for the rest of his life. ![]() When Yates was 11 years old, his father took him to the picket line of the 1980 transit workers' strike and coached him on the fight for higher pay. Yates was able to climb the ranks through Transport Workers Union Local 100, where he now works as a vice president representing the agency’s bus workers in Manhattan and the Bronx. “I’m very proud of the diversity and most of all the caliber of the people, I don’t know the stats that you’re talking about and I don’t have any comment on what my predecessors or anybody else may have done,” he added. “I don’t like to talk about our team in demographic terms, but since you’re insisting on it, I will,” Lieber said. When Gothamist asked Janno Lieber, the MTA's current chair and CEO, about the racial disparity between the workforce and management, Lieber cited several hires on his watch. And only 17% of New York City Transit executives are Black, according to agency statistics. There’s never been a Black chair of the MTA. And at New York City Transit, which runs the subways and buses, 47% of the workforce is Black.īut Black transit workers in New York City also hit a ceiling that persists into the present. Yates is one of more than 71,000 MTA workers, roughly 40% of whom are Black. “They know it's a guaranteed payment, so they're gonna loan you the money to buy a home. “You can buy a home with Transit, you can earn the money, you can save the money and creditors will give you the credit to purchase your home because you work for Transit,” Yates said. And he also went on to buy his own home: a two-story house in Woodhaven, Queens, 10 miles away from his dad’s place. When he was 25, he joined the MTA as a bus driver. Yates followed in his father’s footsteps. It was a fixer-upper with a good amount of land that he’d spotted on his route, the Q84. After raising his son in Mitchell Lama housing in Jamaica, Queens, he bought his own home in Cambria Heights in 1990 for $130,000. Like many Black transit workers of that era, Yates' father was never promoted higher than a bus operator. “My father was my most favorite person in the world back then,” Yates, now 54, said. He was one of thousands of Black New Yorkers who in recent decades carved a path to the middle class through the reliable pay and pension benefits offered to transit workers. The elder Yates, also named Donald, was a single dad who raised his son on an MTA salary. While he loved the trips through different neighborhoods, he was most enamored with the bus driver - his father, who gave him snacks and sometimes took him bowling after a shift. Yates’ fondest memories are of riding the bus around Queens in his youth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |