The headline is vague, but this is about increasing the requirements to two operators per train.
It’s a make-work bill designed to maximize the number of operators on the payroll. As the article explains, the justifications don’t really add up.
> This is revealed in the last sentence, claiming that OTPO would cause “further loss of jobs to NYC.” This bill is not about safety, but rather an unfunded program designed to protect one single job type from eventual obsolescence.
Single operator has proven to be completely fine around the world. Some are starting to move to zero operator. Bills like this are designed to keep the number of jobs high. Given the expense, it inevitably comes at a cost of reductions in service elsewhere. There is no free money.
steveBK123 · 1h ago
MTA is already capable of OPTO on at least 2 lines (7 & L) and even ran a a train line (L) with it.. 20 years ago, but lost to the union.
So a classic NYC problem of paying for upgrades to infra to support OPTO, and then not actually being able to use it, for "reasons".
xcrunner529 · 2h ago
Yep I can’t stand this disingenuous behavior. Really the trains should even be automated at this point. Chicago constantly has staffing issues so their service gets worse and worse and yet they insist on staying in the past.
jordanb · 2h ago
When Chicago got rid of the conductors, trains got slower and less reliable. If you've ever had to wait on the train while the operator has to come out of the cab to help a disabled person, respond to a door fault or call button, you've been delayed by one man train operation.
In fact every time the train stops and there's a noticable pause before the door opens, that is caused by the operator having to move from the driving controls to the door controls.
Jensson · 1h ago
Sounds like a bad train system. That has never happened in my experience where I live, and I used to take the subway everyday for over a decade.
SllX · 1h ago
Same. The only time the operator leaves the cabin where I live is when they're switching which end of the train they're driving from or they're taking the train out of service at the last stop. There's almost no other reason for them to ever do so.
bobthepanda · 51m ago
One could simply just buy trains that have door controls and driving controls in the same ergonomic layout. Other places have OPTO without these problems.
dmix · 1h ago
Does any of that have to do with the conductor?
xcrunner529 · 1h ago
Nope. Seems more like symptoms of not automating things. As if I’m calling for immediate switch to no conductors with no work.
Apreche · 2h ago
Crazy idea here. Why don’t we just have the best of both worlds?
We want trains to operate more reliably, and be computer operated with just one or zero humans on board. OK, let’s do that.
MTA employees don’t want to lose their livelihoods. That’s reasonable. I’m perfectly happy to pay them their existing salary and benefits to sit at home and do nothing. We won’t hire anyone new, and the job will eventually disappear. In the meantime, anyone who already has that job, congrats. Early retirement, paid in full. Enjoy the beach. We were going to spend that money on your salary anyway, so what does it matter? There are worse things to spend taxpayer money on.
pclmulqdq · 2h ago
If you don't hire anyone new, the MTA union gradually loses power. That's a big no-no in the eyes of the union. Make-work bills aren't about saving jobs, but about saving power.
gruez · 2h ago
You're not taking into account two factors: union bosses don't like it because it means their fiefs shrink. Politicians/parties don't like it because it denies them a captive voting bloc. They'd actually have to do stuff like walking the length of Manhattan to get elected, rather than securing the major voting blocs by making a few backroom deals with the top unions/business leaders.
TylerE · 2h ago
This is ridiculous conspiracy. A few thousand people in a city of millions is not a dominant voting bloc.
djankauskas · 2h ago
What matters is who votes in the Democratic primary, a pool that is usually much smaller than the total number of eligible voters.
LeifCarrotson · 1h ago
Do union members reliably vote in primary elections?
Ericson2314 · 1h ago
Yes, and they canvas too. But Mandami just won despite the all the machine unions endorsing Cuomo, so the machine now looks a lot weaker.
(Yes, the leftmost candidate had a lot less union support. Chew on that.)
yoz-y · 2h ago
I’d much rather see these people being employed at the service level.
For example when automatic checkout machines came I thought “great, more people in the aisles that I can ask stuff”. Of course that never happened so now the reality is a queue of people waiting for a machine while three are blocked because nobody is there to help people.
onemoresoop · 1h ago
How about convert those jobs from train operators to bus operators and have more bus service from the same budget?
anonymousiam · 33m ago
In a sense, you are arguing in favor of a Fifth Amendment "taking", because the company (or government) loses money by being forced to pay people to do nothing.
No small business would tolerate being required to pay people to stay home, so why should taxpayers?
jordanb · 2h ago
Whenever I take the train at night I always sit in the front car because that's where the operator is and it's safer. Having trains with no MTA emlpoyees at all is not a way to have a safe and reliable transit system.
franciscop · 1h ago
How do other cities around the world make this work and make it safe then?
DanHulton · 1h ago
Well, typically, they start with safer cities, something that's out of the purview if the MTA.
franciscop · 10m ago
That totally flew over my head, sorry! Violence in the train didn't even occur to me while reading the comment, I thought they meant something on the lines of "the driver will have better visibility when opening/closing the doors on the front train so it's safer to go there so they cannot accidentally close them on me" or something similar. Now of course they meant there's less chance of violent behavior near the train driver, and the comment makes a lot more sense for me now.
Note: I do take the train daily, just I live in Tokyo
Spooky23 · 54m ago
How will they farm overtime and become disabled at home?
martin-t · 2h ago
That could even be a way to phase in UBI gradually.
cperciva · 2h ago
Meanwhile in more civilized places we have trains with zero staff on board, just remote monitoring (and trains which emergency stop if they lose contact with the control centre).
ghostofdang · 1h ago
BART
jksflkjl3jk3 · 2h ago
Trains are the easiest form of transportation for full automation. There shouldn't need to be any required staff on board.
setgree · 2h ago
On the Ethan Allen Express (Amtrak) I took this week, the boarding steps to the cars had to be manually deployed by train staff, along with a little step stool. When I got on, there were two people doing this, so only two train cars were boardable.
I think non-Americans underestimate our ability to not automate things that can clearly be automated through some combination of of inertia, union power, and sheer incompetence.
shermantanktop · 2h ago
It’s because Amtrak basically doesn’t matter. What’s amazing about this story is the ability of these make-work policies to survive in one of the most demanding urban transport systems. NYC baby.
readthenotes1 · 1h ago
Isn't NYC the same place where the unions demand one person to unplug a monitor and another to move it 1 meter?
dv_dt · 2h ago
Trains are topographically easy but I would suspect hide deep reliability and logistical support challenges.
sothatsit · 2h ago
There are already many autonomous trains operating all over the world. They have centralised control centers to monitor them, and then maintenance crews that can travel to work on any malfunctions or breakdowns.
This is already happening in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Singapore, Tokyo, and many more places. They all still have staff that move around the network to work on things not related to driving the train though.
So, I think you're right in pointing out that they still need many people constantly monitoring and working on the trains. But they don't need a driver per train any more, and they especially don't need two drivers per train.
bhhaskin · 2h ago
Exactly. How can we have self driving cars before we have self driving trains?
tzs · 2h ago
There are quite a few self driving trains in service around the world [1].
Lots of places have self driving trains. Example:
SkyTrain in Vancouver.
bigyabai · 2h ago
Same reason you don't actually have self-driving cars: liability.
senorrib · 2h ago
Self driving cars do exist and operate every single day.
bigyabai · 2h ago
So do self-driving trains, or drone aircraft. The problem stands.
serf · 1h ago
honestly I would have thought it was an artifact of labor unions -- at least here in the states.
Terr_ · 3h ago
The site's headline is ambiguous. At first I wondered if it was some weirdly premature bill against individualized automated travel-pods.
Instead, it's about requiring at least one "conductor" (separate from a driver) to be on every train. I feel the reasonableness of this varies depending on the route and how easily the driver can summon assistance without abandoning their post.
steveBK123 · 1h ago
After 20 years of riding, I can assure you that no conductor on an MTA subway train is coming to save you if anything goes down, whether there are 0, 1, 2 or 10 of them on every train.
Ericson2314 · 2h ago
I editted it to clarify. (I had started with the piece's original subtitle.)
Hope that helps!
benatkin · 1h ago
The "conductor" could be in a compartment completely separate from the passengers right? This doesn't sound anything like a NJ Transit or a Caltrain conductor.
o11c · 3h ago
Important note: this applies to city trains, which operate in a much more predictable environment than trains that cross large areas of the country.
Stevvo · 2h ago
Are you claiming that trains running outside cities are less suitable for one person operation?
There is no evidence of that, plenty of trains around the world run both inside and outside cities with a single operator.
There is also no evidence of a city being a "more predictable environment". Deaths are roughly equivalent; in the city it's people jumping on tracks intentionally, outside its drivers getting stuck on crossings.
yoz-y · 1h ago
There are many other problems.
A subway or city train stops every few minutes. This means that if somebody gets hurt, has a stroke, assaults somebody, starts shooting up… there is almost immediately a way to board more staff and handle the situation.
On a train with hours and tens or hundreds of kilometers between stops this is much less the case.
o11c · 2h ago
I mean things like: beyond city scale, you can't assume all the technology has been tested together, you can't assume you actually know where other trains are, etc.
TylerE · 2h ago
You can't assume those things in a subway, either. GPS doesn't work underground.
LeafItAlone · 2h ago
The trains ride on a track. The tracks have sensors. The sensor positions are known. Now you know where all of the trains are.
GPS satellites could drop out of the sky and you’d still know where the trains are.
TylerE · 21m ago
Yes, and those "sensors" have very limited precision. There's only one every several hundred yards.
TylerE · 2h ago
More predictable maybe, but also way more intensive (only 30-60 seconds between trains, vs rural freight where many lines only see one or two trains per DAY, or even per week.
frosted-flakes · 2h ago
Are there are metro systems that run trains 30 seconds apart? I think the fastest is around 90 seconds.
Rarely used freight lines (aka branch lines) would never be automated, that wouldn't make sense. And some mainlines (I live near one) see as many as 4 100-car freight trains per hour. Those will never be less than one-man operation either, not least because at-grade crossings are everywhere.
o11c · 1h ago
If there's one thing we should know from the computer world, it is that doing something frequently makes it easier to automate.
rmason · 57m ago
It took thirty years for railroads to overcome union opposition and remove the caboose on trains. That's because union rules specified a full time employee in the caboose.
protocolture · 3h ago
If people want one or two people in the loop on board commuter trains its fine by me. Really it should be a local/democratic decision.
Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
Ericson2314 · 2h ago
It seems due to the way NY machine politics works, this was passed as a "freebee" to the union without considering the broader societal impact.
There are plenty of ways to improve productivity without firing train operators — simplest way is running more service in the existing network, and also expanding the network.
This evidently wasn't disgussed — and indeed the bill lies saying there is no fiscal impact. Hopefully Governor Hochul refuses to sign it.
seanmcdirmid · 2h ago
> Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
We will see automated long haul freight trains eventually, as long as their is pressure to up safety requirements (human operators being the weakest link in that).
AnotherGoodName · 2h ago
The article does state it only applies to the mta fwiw.
tzs · 2h ago
> Labor costs are by far the single greatest expense in transit operations. This bill unnecessarily inflates these costs, ultimately shifting the burden onto riders through potential fare hikes or reducing the capacity for much-needed service improvements.
Couldn't they go ahead and put in automation for all the skilled work that the required second person would do if there were no automation, but make it so at each stop someone has to press a button to tell the automation to start?
They could then use minimum wage employees for the second person position. Would that be cheap enough to not be a significant burden?
kkysen · 41m ago
They already do this on lines with upgraded CBTC signaling. The train runs in ATO (Automatic Train Operation) in which the driver just pushes the start button at each station. So they tried to combine the driver and conductor into one position, but the union fought back and stopped it.
Also, they can't use minimum wage employees for the driver who just pushes a button because the union would throw a fit and might go on strike.
WhyNotHugo · 1h ago
I’m surprised to read that this is such a bad practice. Trains here in the Netherlands seem to always have two operators. I got the same impression of German trains.
Trams in Amsterdam even have two staff of board.
AngryData · 2h ago
Compared to the budget of running the trains themselves this seems like a drop in the bucket even if it is unnecessary so not really a big deal and people gotta eat. That said I think the more obvious solution to wanting or needing "busy work" with no actual purpose is instead UBI rather than requiring someone to stand around doing nothing 99.9% of the day to survive.
kkysen · 40m ago
Labor is by far the largest share of transit operating costs.
AnotherGoodName · 2h ago
Only applies to trains with more than 2 carriages though. So it seems to apply to the busier routes. Is it for accessibility? Seems reasonable.
gruez · 2h ago
>Only applies to trains with more than 2 carriages though. So it seems to apply to the busier routes.
Are you thinking of locomotives? When was the last time you saw a train with 2 carriages?
AnotherGoodName · 2h ago
“Now, S4091 will require that
A CONDUCTOR SHALL BE REQUIRED ON ANY SUBWAY OR TRAIN OPERATED BY THE AUTHORITY WHENEVER THE SUBWAY OR TRAIN HAS MORE THAN TWO CARS ATTACHED TO THE ENGINE THEREOF”
Some subway trains have exactly 2 cars.
kkysen · 39m ago
Only the Franklin Shuttle has 2-car trains, and it'll soon be switched to 3 cars since they're replacing the 75 ft cars with 60 ft cars.
jksflkjl3jk3 · 2h ago
Doesn't just about every passenger train have more than 2 carriages? I'd guess the average is closer to 10.
AnotherGoodName · 2h ago
You’re the second person to say this yet the article mentions specifically the 2 car trains the mta runs?
I don’t get why this point is being jumped on.
Yes as the article states there are 2 car trains.
zerocrates · 2h ago
OK but the article also says:
- There's only one 2-car line, the Franklin Ave. Shuttle
- That line is converting to have 3-car trains.
So to begin with, the set of small enough trains is the tiniest portion of everything the subway does, not even covering all the small "shuttle" lines. And then even that tiny exception is set to end. Big difference between "applies to the busier routes" and "applies to essentially all the routes."
SoftTalker · 1h ago
During off hours and overnight trains are much shorter.
kkysen · 37m ago
The article counts all the off peak and overnight trains, including shuttles. Even out of all of that, only the Franklin Shuttle is 2 cars and will soon be switching to 3 cars.
djankauskas · 2h ago
Could you elaborate on accessibility? NYC conductors and operators on the subway don't help passengers get onto and off of the train. (Platforms are roughly level with trains.)
AnotherGoodName · 2h ago
Thinking more in terms of emergencies. Helpful to have someone there in those cases.
djankauskas · 2h ago
For longer trains you could make that case, though it should be the agency that makes that call, not politicians that don't have the information to make technical safety calls. Systems across the world don't seem to have issues here though. In any case, there's no world where one employee is enough for emergencies in two cars, but not enough in three, while two employees are sufficient in a train with ten cars.
mcny · 3h ago
I am ABSOLUTELY sick and tired of upstate folks making decisions for New York.
gruez · 2h ago
How? The state assembly vote was an unanimous "yay". In the senate, only two state senators voted against, but they were actually from "upstate". Blaming "upstate folks making decisions for New York" makes no sense here.
This isn't "upstate being out of touch," this is "the MTA union is corrupt."
shitlord · 2h ago
I don't think the union is corrupt. The union's job is to advocate for its members. The legislators' job is to say "no, you're asking for too much".
gruez · 2h ago
Now try this with corporations:
"I don't think the company[1] is corrupt. The company's job is to advocate for its shareholders. The legislators' job is to say "no, you're asking for too much"."
[1] take your pick of Comcast, Boeing, or United Health
pclmulqdq · 2h ago
You're right. The real problem is that the MTA union is a big voting and donation bloc that selects the people they negotiate against. The real solution is to do away with the MTA union. An organization founded on corruption doing its intended purpose isn't any less corrupt.
mousethatroared · 2h ago
I think NY state concurs wrt to NYC.
So why don't y'all split the state up? NYC in one corner, the rest of NY on the other.
Then upstate folk will get real political representation in Albany, and NYC will send two interesting senators to DC. As much as I disagree with AOC I'd love for her to become a senator.
toast0 · 2h ago
Easier said than done, as it needs consent of the state legislature and the us congress. The last time a state was split off like this was West Virginia exiting Virginia in 1863, while Virginia had seceded.
mousethatroared · 2h ago
Kinda ironic that it took a civil war the last time it happened.
umanwizard · 2h ago
States can’t just decide by themselves to split up. The federation has to consent, which with our permanently deadlocked congress will never happen.
mousethatroared · 2h ago
First step the state has to want to split, though. And I guarantee you that the red capitols (most of them) are game.
That leaves a small hurdle of getting a couple of purple states. Perhaps a great compromise is reached - NY ex-NYC merges with PA ex-Philly and Philly joins NYC.
mcny · 2h ago
More importantly the natural resources in upstate actually belong to New York, not to upstate.
mousethatroared · 2h ago
They belong to the state.
But these things can be negotiated in the divorce
jjice · 2h ago
I completely agree with your sentiment, but the same goes the other way. I grew up in Upstate NY and people were always annoyed by the city making decisions for upstate.
I totally agree with the concept you're talking about though. Especially here - this feels like it should be a municipality's decision.
bhickey · 2h ago
At least Shel Silver's reign of terror is over.
easeout · 2h ago
Two operators? Where I live it's zero
steveBK123 · 1h ago
Yet another NYS/NYC own goal in progress, and one of the many symptoms of being a one party state.
Again & again our elected officials see the public service unions as their primary constituents. Transit policy in favor of transit employees rather than riders, education policy in favor of teachers unions rather than students and public safety policy in favor of police unions than actual safety.
All because these blocks of XX,000 voters in each union can be expected to vote as a block in the low turnout primaries, based on whatever political favor is/isn't being handed out.
Edit: thanks for the replies, I understand the situation a bit better now
gruez · 2h ago
>I'm not sure guaranteed jobs should be rejected in this case.
1. as an actual jobs policy it's terrible. It brings an absolute minuscule amount of jobs, and puts the burden on the part of the economy that can least afford it (ie. underfunded transit system). If you want to legislate some jobs into existence, do something like forcing social media companies to hire local content moderators, or hiring elevator attendants.
2. "universal jobs" policy is terrible in general. For one, it doesn't help the disabled or their caretakers. UBI doesn't do a perfect job here either (eg. a special needs kid probably would need way more money than the standard UBI), but at least the disabled person/caretaker doesn't need to waste time on job. For the able-bodied, a "universal jobs" policy isn't great either. If their labor is actually worth something, then they can probably find gainful employment in the private sector. If they can't (eg. they're mentally disabled), then making them to make-work like digging ditches and filling them back again as a condition of getting financial assistance is humiliating and cruel.
Aurornis · 2h ago
This has nothing to do a with a universal job guarantee like your article.
It only protects one very specific job and the people qualified to do it. Those people are also protective about letting newcomers become trained to have those jobs. They don’t want you or anyone else to be able to go get that job, they want it protected for themselves.
Such is the nature of narrow job protection bills like these.
Ericson2314 · 2h ago
The job guarantee is supposed to be federal macroeconomic policy undertaken with ample fiscal space (by the highest level government also in control in the currency).
Saddling the heavily budget-constrained MTA with unnecessary labor costs, that ain't dynamic with the state of the economy, isn't it. The MTA is supposed to deliver transit, a narrow task, not do that and manage the economy writ large in unrelated ways
Indeed, many job guarantee advocates are careful to distinguish JG jobs from regular government jobs, since they don't want to end up degrading public sector institutional capacity even further.
toast0 · 2h ago
I don't think this is a job guarantee. If running a train requires two people for regulatory reasons only, and the labor cost is significant, I would expect train service to be less frequent.
It’s a make-work bill designed to maximize the number of operators on the payroll. As the article explains, the justifications don’t really add up.
> This is revealed in the last sentence, claiming that OTPO would cause “further loss of jobs to NYC.” This bill is not about safety, but rather an unfunded program designed to protect one single job type from eventual obsolescence.
Single operator has proven to be completely fine around the world. Some are starting to move to zero operator. Bills like this are designed to keep the number of jobs high. Given the expense, it inevitably comes at a cost of reductions in service elsewhere. There is no free money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1l3qcn3/nyc_in_200...
So a classic NYC problem of paying for upgrades to infra to support OPTO, and then not actually being able to use it, for "reasons".
In fact every time the train stops and there's a noticable pause before the door opens, that is caused by the operator having to move from the driving controls to the door controls.
We want trains to operate more reliably, and be computer operated with just one or zero humans on board. OK, let’s do that.
MTA employees don’t want to lose their livelihoods. That’s reasonable. I’m perfectly happy to pay them their existing salary and benefits to sit at home and do nothing. We won’t hire anyone new, and the job will eventually disappear. In the meantime, anyone who already has that job, congrats. Early retirement, paid in full. Enjoy the beach. We were going to spend that money on your salary anyway, so what does it matter? There are worse things to spend taxpayer money on.
(Yes, the leftmost candidate had a lot less union support. Chew on that.)
For example when automatic checkout machines came I thought “great, more people in the aisles that I can ask stuff”. Of course that never happened so now the reality is a queue of people waiting for a machine while three are blocked because nobody is there to help people.
No small business would tolerate being required to pay people to stay home, so why should taxpayers?
Note: I do take the train daily, just I live in Tokyo
I think non-Americans underestimate our ability to not automate things that can clearly be automated through some combination of of inertia, union power, and sheer incompetence.
This is already happening in Paris, London, Copenhagen, Singapore, Tokyo, and many more places. They all still have staff that move around the network to work on things not related to driving the train though.
So, I think you're right in pointing out that they still need many people constantly monitoring and working on the trains. But they don't need a driver per train any more, and they especially don't need two drivers per train.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste...
Instead, it's about requiring at least one "conductor" (separate from a driver) to be on every train. I feel the reasonableness of this varies depending on the route and how easily the driver can summon assistance without abandoning their post.
Hope that helps!
A subway or city train stops every few minutes. This means that if somebody gets hurt, has a stroke, assaults somebody, starts shooting up… there is almost immediately a way to board more staff and handle the situation.
On a train with hours and tens or hundreds of kilometers between stops this is much less the case.
Rarely used freight lines (aka branch lines) would never be automated, that wouldn't make sense. And some mainlines (I live near one) see as many as 4 100-car freight trains per hour. Those will never be less than one-man operation either, not least because at-grade crossings are everywhere.
Long haul freight trains however, should absolutely be exempt.
There are plenty of ways to improve productivity without firing train operators — simplest way is running more service in the existing network, and also expanding the network.
This evidently wasn't disgussed — and indeed the bill lies saying there is no fiscal impact. Hopefully Governor Hochul refuses to sign it.
We will see automated long haul freight trains eventually, as long as their is pressure to up safety requirements (human operators being the weakest link in that).
Couldn't they go ahead and put in automation for all the skilled work that the required second person would do if there were no automation, but make it so at each stop someone has to press a button to tell the automation to start?
They could then use minimum wage employees for the second person position. Would that be cheap enough to not be a significant burden?
Also, they can't use minimum wage employees for the driver who just pushes a button because the union would throw a fit and might go on strike.
Trams in Amsterdam even have two staff of board.
Are you thinking of locomotives? When was the last time you saw a train with 2 carriages?
A CONDUCTOR SHALL BE REQUIRED ON ANY SUBWAY OR TRAIN OPERATED BY THE AUTHORITY WHENEVER THE SUBWAY OR TRAIN HAS MORE THAN TWO CARS ATTACHED TO THE ENGINE THEREOF”
Some subway trains have exactly 2 cars.
I don’t get why this point is being jumped on.
Yes as the article states there are 2 car trains.
- There's only one 2-car line, the Franklin Ave. Shuttle
- That line is converting to have 3-car trains.
So to begin with, the set of small enough trains is the tiniest portion of everything the subway does, not even covering all the small "shuttle" lines. And then even that tiny exception is set to end. Big difference between "applies to the busier routes" and "applies to essentially all the routes."
https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?default_fld=&leg_video=&bn=A0487...
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S4091
"I don't think the company[1] is corrupt. The company's job is to advocate for its shareholders. The legislators' job is to say "no, you're asking for too much"."
[1] take your pick of Comcast, Boeing, or United Health
So why don't y'all split the state up? NYC in one corner, the rest of NY on the other.
Then upstate folk will get real political representation in Albany, and NYC will send two interesting senators to DC. As much as I disagree with AOC I'd love for her to become a senator.
That leaves a small hurdle of getting a couple of purple states. Perhaps a great compromise is reached - NY ex-NYC merges with PA ex-Philly and Philly joins NYC.
But these things can be negotiated in the divorce
I totally agree with the concept you're talking about though. Especially here - this feels like it should be a municipality's decision.
Again & again our elected officials see the public service unions as their primary constituents. Transit policy in favor of transit employees rather than riders, education policy in favor of teachers unions rather than students and public safety policy in favor of police unions than actual safety.
All because these blocks of XX,000 voters in each union can be expected to vote as a block in the low turnout primaries, based on whatever political favor is/isn't being handed out.
Edit: thanks for the replies, I understand the situation a bit better now
1. as an actual jobs policy it's terrible. It brings an absolute minuscule amount of jobs, and puts the burden on the part of the economy that can least afford it (ie. underfunded transit system). If you want to legislate some jobs into existence, do something like forcing social media companies to hire local content moderators, or hiring elevator attendants.
2. "universal jobs" policy is terrible in general. For one, it doesn't help the disabled or their caretakers. UBI doesn't do a perfect job here either (eg. a special needs kid probably would need way more money than the standard UBI), but at least the disabled person/caretaker doesn't need to waste time on job. For the able-bodied, a "universal jobs" policy isn't great either. If their labor is actually worth something, then they can probably find gainful employment in the private sector. If they can't (eg. they're mentally disabled), then making them to make-work like digging ditches and filling them back again as a condition of getting financial assistance is humiliating and cruel.
It only protects one very specific job and the people qualified to do it. Those people are also protective about letting newcomers become trained to have those jobs. They don’t want you or anyone else to be able to go get that job, they want it protected for themselves.
Such is the nature of narrow job protection bills like these.
Saddling the heavily budget-constrained MTA with unnecessary labor costs, that ain't dynamic with the state of the economy, isn't it. The MTA is supposed to deliver transit, a narrow task, not do that and manage the economy writ large in unrelated ways
Indeed, many job guarantee advocates are careful to distinguish JG jobs from regular government jobs, since they don't want to end up degrading public sector institutional capacity even further.