Slow Train
Promotion Track
Fades for Those
Starting at Bottom Decline of In-House Training,
Rise of Outsourcing Leave
More Stuck in Menial Jobs Lessons From N.Y.'s Subways
By JOEL MILLMAN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL June 6, 2005; Page A1
NEW YORK -- Unwed, unemployed and saddled with three young sons, Valerie Beatty hit bottom in 1989 when she was 25 years old. The daughter of a middle-class Harlem family, Ms. Beatty recalls she abandoned hope of what she calls "bettering myself."
Too broke to pay tuition at Bronx Community College, she dropped out and scraped by on food stamps, baby-sitting jobs and whatever cash her boys' father gave her to buy school clothes. "I had my kids," she shrugs, "and that was about it."
Then her life began to turn around, thanks to a cleaner's job she landed in 1992 with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency that runs New York City's buses and subways. The job paid only $18,000 a year but put her on a track for training and promotions. Within a decade, she advanced from cleaner to subway motor inspector. Today she makes $50,000 a year and lives in a tidy ranch home on Long Island. Now 41, she ticks off her next goals: seeing her sons graduate from college, building a retirement home and opening a restaurant.
But the train that Ms. Beatty and many other black New Yorkers rode into the middle class is slowing down. The MTA was once full of jobs like motor inspector or turnstile repairman -- jobs that a person with limited education could jump to with some training. As in the corporate world, many of those jobs have disappeared, often because technology upgrades mean fewer people are needed. At the MTA, for example, new subway cars last 138,000 miles between overhauls, compared with 8,000 miles in 1982. Around the system, the jobs that do open often require a college education and computer skills.
Overall, the pace of hiring has slowed since the 1980s, as the MTA reduced its staff by 13%, to 48,000. When the MTA does fill new jobs, it is less likely to promote from within because it believes it will attract better talent on the outside. In the 1990s, insiders got half the new jobs; today they get fewer than 40%. Car cleaners used to have the inside track for promotion to motorman, tower operator and token-booth clerk. Since 2001, those jobs have been thrown open to outsiders.
"For too many of our people, entry-level no longer means entry-level. It means dead-end," says Rodney Glenn, director of training for Transport Workers Union Local 100, to which 30,000 MTA employees belong.
The MTA's move toward hiring people for middle-income jobs who already have qualifications and training mirrors what has happened across America. Traders on Wall Street once started as floor runners out of high school. Newspapers would hire high-school dropouts to run sheets of inky carbon paper down to the print shop, and later promote them to be reporters. "Macy's used to fill its executive training corps by recruiting stock boys," says Phil Kasinitz, a City University of New York sociologist who studies the working poor. Many of those jobs no longer exist. Over the years, employers have outsourced positions such as cafeteria server, security guard and janitor that once might have offered a chance to move up.
Outsourcing and aggressive outside hiring have made many enterprises more efficient and profitable. But these trends raise the risk of workers in low-wage jobs getting trapped there. Annette Bernhardt, a sociologist at New York University Law School, studied the salaries of thousands of workers over nearly 40 years. She found that 12% of workers who started in the labor market in the late 1960s and early 1970s remained stuck in low-wage jobs 10 to 15 years into their careers. But for workers who entered the labor market in the 1980s and early 1990s, that percentage had more than doubled, to 28%.
African-Americans have extra difficulty making it out of poverty, according to a 2003 study by American University economist Tom Hertz. It found that blacks born poor are 2 1/2 times as likely as whites to remain poor as adults. Differences in family size and education may play a role, says Prof. Hertz, as may discrimination.
Traditionally, unions helped unskilled workers attain middle-class lives. But organized labor now represents only 11% of the work force, down from one-third in the 1950s. The fastest-growing unions, in the service industries, represent both low-wage workers and skilled professionals, but it's hard for members to move from one category to the other. On-the-job training may turn an orderly into a nurse's aide, but not into a nurse.
New York's MTA, with an annual operating budget of $8 billion, has been a haven for African-Americans seeking upward mobility since the 1940s, when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. joined other Harlem activists in pressing city-owned and private transit lines to hire more blacks. The Transport Workers Union's legendary president, Michael Quill (1905-66), was active in the civil-rights movement and once brought Martin Luther King Jr. to address workers, then mostly white, on the subject. Today, about half of the membership of the union's Local 100 are either African-Americans or West Indians. The local's president, Roger Toussaint, arrived in New York from Trinidad in 1974 and started at the MTA as a subway cleaner, as did several of the top MTA managers with whom he negotiates.
Ms. Beatty was born in New York in 1964 to African-American parents who had roots in Virginia's Tidewater region and the Caribbean. Her mother graduated from a New York vocational business high school and worked downtown as a clerk for a dry-goods wholesaler. Her father attended college at a time when fewer than 5% of all black adults had college degrees. He worked at a photography laboratory in midtown Manhattan finishing prints for the city's top portraitists. A competitive bowler, he took Valerie, the youngest of three children, to tournaments as far away as Ohio.
The Beatty household wasn't wealthy, but it was stable until the mid-1970s when the parents divorced. Valerie, then 11, stayed with her mother. Enrolled at Manhattan's Julia Richman High School, which emphasizes health-service careers, Ms. Beatty worked after school at a hospital and dreamed of becoming a doctor.
But Harlem was less conducive to such dreams. The black middle class had fled to the suburbs and urban unemployment swelled. When both of Ms. Beatty's parents saw their employers leave Manhattan, her mother retired and her father ended up driving a gypsy cab. The block on 112th Street where Ms. Beatty lived was swept up in drug violence and arson. At 14, she was on her bicycle when she saw a neighbor shot.
At 17, she was pregnant. She ignored her parents' pleas to get an abortion and had two more sons by the time she reached 25. Ms. Beatty says she was married once briefly but marriage wasn't for her.
She eventually turned to the MTA, where an older brother had found work after leaving the Army and three other relatives had risen quickly through the ranks. In 1991 she passed a civil-service exam -- a prerequisite in New York City for getting a public job -- and 10 months later grabbed an opening as an $8.56-an-hour subway cleaner.
Leaving her kids to be watched by a neighbor, Ms. Beatty worked from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., mopping subway-car floors and clearing trash from under seats. She would rush home to her South Bronx apartment at dawn to see her children to school.
A large, garrulous woman, Ms. Beatty jokes easily with co-workers and frequently dresses in the regalia of her beloved New York Giants football team. In four years on the midnight shift, she had plenty of scares: track fires, a token-booth robbery, and months being stalked by a homeless man. ("He was in love," she remembers with a giggle.) Once, a distraught man killed himself by jumping in front of a train, as she watched from the platform.
Besides the grueling shifts, Ms. Beatty spent many unpaid hours attending skill-training sessions offered by the MTA. There, she learned the basics of electrical circuits and the remedial math that she needed to qualify for a promotion. She hoped to enter an MTA training program that would propel her to a position as an inspector, checking subway cars when they roll into the maintenance shop and repairing or replacing any worn or damaged parts.
Once it was fairly easy for a motivated subway worker to get into a training program. In the 1980s, the MTA Training Center, housed at a converted elementary school in Brooklyn, bustled with day and night classes. Hundreds of cleaners, security guards and other entry-level workers passed through each year, some undergoing formal MTA training and others attending seminars to prepare themselves for promotional exams scheduled in the months ahead.
Between 1981 and 1991, the MTA offered a promotional exam for car-inspector jobs five times -- twice in 1986 alone -- and attracted more than 1,500 applicants from its own ranks. Since 1991, the MTA has offered the exam only once, in 1999, when Ms. Beatty was one of 145 applicants who took the test. She was one of 38 selected.
Ms. Beatty had to wait until 2001 to start her training. For 18 months, the MTA paid her to attend all-day sessions. Commuting with a fellow student from Long Island early on, she survived a serious car crash, which left her with a badly injured ankle. Warned she would have to wait years to requalify if she dropped out, she hobbled to classes on crutches.
She says she loved the technical classes dealing with power tools, traction motors, pneumatic brakes and propulsion systems. But she struggled with math, as did many others who hadn't been in a classroom in years. "Val was cool. She worked hard. She hung in there," says one of her former classmates, Bill Irwin. Today, along with standard tools, she uses a portable device to download the road record of trains that roll into her shop.
In 2002, the MTA started requiring that new entrants in the subway-car maintenance program either have a recent degree from a vocational high school or a community-college degree in technology because so many jobs demand electronic skills. Ms. Beatty, with her 20-year-old diploma from a regular high school, probably wouldn't make the cut today.
Over the past four years, the training center has graduated just 40 apprentices for various skilled jobs, with fewer than a dozen of those graduates coming from the Transport Workers Union. Three months ago, under pressure from the union, the MTA started a new subway-inspector training course with 13 students, all from the union's ranks. Of the 13, six are former cleaners, and all of them have the technical degrees. The others came from skilled jobs such as forklift operator or signalman's assistant.
One cleaner who made the cut for this year's class is Anthony McMikle, 28, an African-American from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. He passed the civil-service exam in 1993, but it took five years for a $9.91-an-hour job mopping subway cars to open up.
"I was basically unemployed all those years, killing time," he says. He stuffed envelopes in a temp job and later worked as a security guard at a White Castle fast-food restaurant, but quit after only two nights, worried about crime.
Once employed at the MTA, he waited an additional six years to be eligible for the inspector training course. Fortunately, he had one key credential -- a high-school diploma from the East New York High School of Transit Technology. He hit the books, pulling out his high-school notes on electrical circuitry.
"Now the chances come along so few at a time, you have to jump on it when it comes," says Mr. McMikle.
Richard Gorman, the assistant vice president for employment services at the MTA's New York City Transit division, says the authority would like to offer more promotions for low-level employees but the need for computer skills and rudimentary math ability sometimes makes it difficult. The union counters that many of those skills can be taught.
Both sides agree that improved productivity at a system that was once notorious for breakdowns and graffiti has reduced the pool of new jobs to which cleaners and security guards can aspire. Staff at a big maintenance depot in Coney Island has been cut to 650 workers from 1,000 over the past five years. When the MTA replaced subway tokens with prepaid Metro Cards, 120 skilled-machinist positions were eliminated, estimates the union. It persuaded the MTA to retrain the workers to repair card-vending machines.
Riders benefit from the productivity improvements and hiring flexibility, says Charles Seaton, chief spokesman for the subways division of the MTA. "We're better in a million ways," he says. "More reliable subway cars, better service. More ridership than ever."
But the reduced opportunity weighs heavily on workers like James Underwood, a 32-year-old subway cleaner, who would love to trade his mop and broom for a laptop computer.
The son of a hairdresser and a salesman, Mr. Underwood graduated in 1992 from All Hallows High School, a Catholic school in the Bronx. He took a job installing phone lines for New York Telephone rather than go to college full time. After a series of corporate mergers, Mr. Underwood was laid off, and he never finished the night classes he was taking at Bronx Community College. After taking a civil-service exam in 1995, he worked for four years as a security guard at a suburban shopping mall until the MTA called with a subway-cleaner's job. "I was gung-ho," he says.
Working a shift with Ms. Beatty at the Grand Concourse station in the South Bronx, he was turned down in 1999 for what turned out to be the MTA's last promotion-track class for car-maintainer trainees, he says. Since then, he says he has tried four times to qualify for a promotion. In 2002 he passed an exam to be a train conductor but he hasn't been called for a job. Twice he paid to take exams for train operator that were open to the public. He didn't get picked.
"I may not have all the knowledge of a train operator doing the job now, but I already work for the transit authority," he says in bewilderment. "I couldn't learn it better than someone they're taking in from off the street?"
The MTA says open testing enlarges the pool of qualified applicants. Twenty years ago, only MTA bus operators, tower operators and train conductors could apply for a train operator's job, says the MTA's Mr. Gorman, adding that many applicants were former cleaners. He says the policy began changing in the late 1990s because the MTA wasn't attracting enough good people for the job.
Mr. Underwood says he is considering leaving the MTA and recently passed a civil-service exam to qualify as a court bailiff. Starting pay is less than the $21 an hour he earns at the MTA, but he wouldn't have to work weekends and holidays and could spend more time with his 10-year-old son. And there's one more benefit, he says: A court officer doesn't need a mop.