MBTA workers rail against job inequities

Liz Hoffman

For the last 12 years, Joyce Washington has worked as a machinist for the private company contracted by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to run its commuter rail system. When a job posting went up in July for an opening as a foreman, the African American woman applied.

She said she never received an interview, and the jobs went to two white men with less experience.

“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know,” Washington said. “I’d been hearing a lot about how they were trying to change things, and I did have faith that I would be treated fairly. I wasn’t.”

The question of fairness is now a matter before the federal court. Washington and four other workers filed racial discrimination charges, claiming that they were kept out of the loop when new job openings were announced and passed over for hiring and promotion opportunities.

The plaintiffs argue that attempts to promote workforce diversity in recent years have been derailed by a pervasive culture of racist attitudes, family favoritism and organizational chaos.

The suit, filed Sept. 26, names the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Rail Company (MBCR), the private company that runs the commuter rail division of the MBTA, as the defendant.

The employees are “not an inherently litigious group of people,” said attorney Laurie Renea Houle, an associate at Pyle Rome, the law firm representing the plaintiffs. “They want to see that MBCR becomes a good place to work, and right now, there are real problems there with respect to fair employment practices.”

MBCR says it has worked over the past three years to address systemic problems it inherited from Amtrak, the rail system’s operator from 1986 until 2003, but cautioned that change comes slowly in the railroad industry. Last year, the rail company brought in Holland & Knight LLP to perform an independent review of its efforts, and received positive marks.

“People want change faster than you can deliver it,” said MBCR spokesman Scott Farmelant. “These jobs don’t have a lot of turnover — they’re good jobs and they’re union jobs — and we can only hire from the talent pool that’s there. Irrespective of race, these things take time.”

But for some disgruntled commuter rail workers, both time and patience have run out.

After nearly five years of internal negotiations between the Commuter Rail Workers for Equal Rights and both MBCR and the MBTA, the pro-labor group decided to take legal action on behalf of several of its members.

“We’re tired of hearing [from MBCR] that they inherited this workforce; that’s all we keep hearing,” said Teodoro Flattés, a retired commuter rail worker and a member of the Commuter Rail Workers for Equal Rights. “We understand that, but it’s time that the parent company get in there and pick the people to make the changes. You can’t throw people in there with no background in [workforce diversification] and expect them to do the right thing.”

The class action suit alleges discrimination in hiring and promotion, pointing to an unfair posting system for job openings that employees say announced positions only after they had already been filled, a lack of outreach and mentoring programs, and a pervasive “old-boy network” within the rail system reinforcing the historically white character of the workforce.

“It’s like a family plan,” said Henry Crawford, a crossing guard with MBCR who has applied for several promotions in over 30 years with the company. He has received none of them. “Their kids come out of school and they’ve got a job. If there’s an opening in the company, everybody should know about it.”

MBCR says it has taken steps to address the family patronage that has previously dictated its hiring practices. The company’s leadership has codified a formal policy limiting the hiring of family members and placing all final personnel decisions with the human resources department. It also recently created a new posting policy to increase knowledge of and access to new jobs as they become available.

“There was no infrastructure for workforce diversification in place when MBCR assumed the contract” in 2003, Farmelant said. “No matter what happens with the next contract, the framework now is in place in the commuter rail system to build upon the success that they have had in recent years. That’s progress.”

Another challenge facing the MBCR is persistent turbulence in upper management. The rail company is a partnership of three separate transportation operations: Veolia, a French company; Bombardier, a Canadian transportation company; and Boston-based Alternate Concepts. The three joined only when tapped by the MBTA in 2003; since receiving the commuter rail bid, the MBCR has had three general managers in less than five years.

The combination of instability at the top and a lack of organizational infrastructure has been a major impediment to its stated goal of workforce diversification, a shortcoming noted in the Holland & Knight report.

“For the first year, the company had a short-term focus on transitioning,” Farmelant said. “From year two onward, there has been a clear focus to actively address these issues and the record accurately reflects that.”

With MBCR’s historical and organizational obstacles, the plaintiffs are putting much of the responsibility at the feet of the MBTA.

“Ideally, we’d like to see the MBTA exercise some oversight in this,” Houle said. “They have the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the companies they have running the commuter rail are engaged in legal and positive employment practices.”

The Commuter Rail Workers for Equal Rights met with the MBTA board of directors in 2003 when the transit authority was taking bids for the new commuter rail contract. According to City Councilor Chuck Turner, the two sides discussed including reporting requirements for minority employment statistics and diversity training in the language of that contract.

But Turner says those promises have fallen by the wayside when it comes to the MBTA getting serious with its subcontractors.

“If you have a workforce that is embedded with the mentality that says that there’s nothing wrong with favoring white people, the only way it’s going to change is by the company that’s hiring them saying, ‘We’re not going to tolerate this,’” said Turner, who has been involved in the group’s negotiations with the MBTA and supports the legal action. “The MBTA hasn’t done that yet.”

MBCR says it has worked aggressively to diversify the workforce it was contractually required to hire from Amtrak. Of the more than 1,650 employees in that workforce, 90 percent were white males — a figure not uncommon in the railroad industry at that time. The company points to an increasing percentage of minority hires in the past four years as proof of an ongoing commitment to diversity.

Of the 428 new hires made by the MBCR from the time it won the commuter rail bid through September 2007, 25.6 percent were minorities. Additionally, 23.6 percent were women, another group that has been historically underrepresented in the railroad’s workforce.

“There is a mistaken belief amongst minority employees that nothing has changed since the Amtrak days,” said Farmelant. “The gains that have been made are certainly modest in the large scale, but they represent a change in culture that can be traced directly to a commitment by MBCR management.”

The company is in the process of developing a diversity awareness training program, which all its employees will undergo by December 2008. It has also made several promotions to higher-level human resources positions. Bill Perez, who is Hispanic, was appointed director of human resources last March, and Harold Hofman, an African American with 33 years in the MBTA, was named chief of equal opportunity and diversity in May.

“Is there work to do? For sure there is, but I’ve been given the green light [by MBCR management] and we’re working here to make those changes,” Hofman said. “For the first time, I feel like the human resources and diversity departments have been on the same page.”

Despite that commitment to change, Hofman cited several potential problems within the rail system, pointing to the clout of the 14 unions with which the MBCR negotiates and to a smaller talent pool of minorities and females in technical areas and engineering.

“Dealing with all these union contracts can be difficult because they have had a lot to do with hiring,” he said. “And it’s great to say you want to put people in higher positions, but you have to have somebody to promote. We’re trying to go out and find the talent, but this doesn’t happen overnight.”

But for workers like Washington, the problem is a lot simpler.

“This lawsuit is about equal opportunity,” said Washington. “That’s all we want.”