Evangeline Byars Makes History as First Woman to Run for TWU Local 100 President

By Mary Alice Miller
Anyone familiar with student activism at Medgar Evers College more than a decade ago would recognize Evangeline Byars. She launched her career in organizing when she worked with students to form the student newspaper Adafi and led the Concerned Students of Medgar Evers College Movement to advocate for institutional reform, particularly around student financial aid. She also interned at SEIU 32BJ which gave her insight into labor issues.

Since then she joined the MTA and served an executive role at TWU Local 100 as a board member. She is Senior Officer of Women Uplifting Women, a sisterhood that empowers working women. Byars was the former Senior Advisor to the Amazon Labor Union and Senior Advisor to the Associate Worker Labor Union AWLU.

Byars has stepped forward as the first woman to run for president of Transit Workers Union of America (TWU) Local 100 in its 90 year history.

Seeking to center the union around pay parity and worker safety, Byars said Tier 6 workers now having a pension that would make them officially the first civil servants tier to retire in poverty. “I am running to ensure that we once again have access to the middle class, because we are losing everything,” she said.

“They are privatizing our work at the MTA. They have farmed out our work in the tracks department. They are basically undoing all of those agreements that were made distinctly under the Roger Toussaint era where you saw the gains and improvements coming under the contract.”

Byars says her candidacy prioritizes Safety Over Service. “We have been having derailments and members injured, including severe injuries,” said Byars. “There was a time in labor when someone was injured or severely injured or killed on the job that all work stopped. We didn’t just go on with business as usual.

Now there is this idea that when people are injured or severely injured on the job that there is no oversight anymore, no shut down of the shop or the job to make sure that we are more focused on the preservation of life than delivering services.”

Citing the March 2020 death of MTA motorman Garrett Goble who died after assisting passengers off a train when a shopping cart was set afire, Byars said, “No member should come to work and not make it home to their family.”

Byars is calling for all MTA workers to be issued Self Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCBA) used for entry into and escape from environments considered immediately dangerous to life and health, just like those issued to the fire department. She said SCBA masks would give transit worker 5 minutes of air that could save lives.

“Our job title is safety sensitive,” said Byars. “We are injured at an alarming rate. People jump in front of trains and bus operators get injured in the performance of their duties. Assaults are very high. We work on live tracks with equipment that can injure you.

Our workers get injured a lot: falling off trains, fingers getting caught in chairs because it is old equipment. A lot of injuries occur especially on stairs due to slip and fall. There are a lot of issues inside the infrastructure of transit that causes injuries.”

Byars said when workers are injured on the job often their documentation disappears. She said the MTA fight their worker’s compensation cases even when a doctor has already certified that this is a job related injury.

As a result workers are forced to fight their claims in court, which they cannot afford to do so they come back to work injured and usually wind up being more severely injured due to the fact they were not given time to heal.

Worse, Byars stated that there is a type of ‘profit sharing’ agreement where MTA management and the union benefit from injured workers showing up for work. Byars says the problem is so systemic even the NYS Comptroller’s office issued a report on the matter. “All of this has been documented that transit workers compensation cases are not being handled properly,” said Byars.

When Byars father became ill, she found that MTA was not honoring the state’s Family Paid Leave Law. Even pregnant transit workers were compelled to come back to work after 2 weeks maternity leave. Byars filed a grievance against the MTA in 2022 which led to the Union negotiating an increase in paternity/maternity leave of 4 weeks for men and 12 weeks for women, which she said still discriminates against men.

One of Byars chief peeves is the lack of pay parity with Long Island Railroad and Metro North, whose employees got a 17% pay raise while MTA workers did not. Byars is also calling for the restoration of retiree medical benefits away from Medicare Advantage Plans.
The election for President of TWU LOCAL 100 is scheduled to take place in November 2024.