New York, NY – When most people in New York City see a CTA – an MTA cleaner – working to keep the platform free of unwanted detritus and other peoples’ inconsiderate litter, they may be thinking that the work he or she is performing is the full extent of their duties.
But far from it. Guiliane James, a member of TWU Local 100 who was, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, working as a CTA, (before being promoted to RTO – Rapid Transit Operations – as a conductor) explained to LaborPress what was really required in her position, and what it meant to be doing that work, on and before that tragic day.
Working as a CTA and in RTO meant a lot to James. “Those were the best days of my life, because all the workers were like a family. A big happy family. Management wasn’t that good, but we were.” She adds, “Anytime anyone, co-workers or passengers, needed help, we were there. And it was great to meet the people who came up and asked you things – you met people from all over the world. You meet the homeless too, and they become your friends, because you’re in the same station.”
And yet, as LaborPress had learned, “Some people, they see you’re a cleaner, and they look at you like you’re nothing.” The job of a cleaner in fact requires much work beyond garbage pickup on train platforms, including cleaning up public bathrooms, sweeping and cleaning subway steps, putting down salt when it snows, shoveling snow in the entrance to the subway and also on outside train platforms, washing the station down with cleaning supplies and a hose at night, and, if an unhoused person does their business on a bench, cleaning up whatever that may be. That amount of hard work and dedication proves those that look down on these workers are dead wrong.
On 9/11, similar to first responders and others who were employed in their particular capacities during the crisis, James experienced extreme shock, that to this day manifests as PTSD. Her feelings and outlook on life changed, as it did for those others that were on the job and labored in what looked and felt like a war zone, which it in fact was.
On that day, she was working at the Bedford Avenue station on the L train line in Brooklyn, when she saw people walking and running on the tracks. The deadly electrified third rail had been turned off, she realized, the trains had been stopped. White, powdery dust swirled in the tunnel. James had no knowledge of what had happened, when a woman came up to her and told her planes had hit the buildings of the World Trade Center, and that the dust was from the explosion, adding, “Please, go home, and hug your child, because you never know what’s going to happen.” “I was so shaken up,” says James, and so were some passengers, who were “crying, saying they had friends in there and didn’t know what had happened to them.”
James says many passengers who were at the WTC site at the time of the attack ran in a desperate effort to escape the area, and got on any still moving train, in an effort to escape to anywhere else.
On duty the following day, James found out just what was expected of her and her fellow cleaners. Told to report to the West 4th Street station, they were transported by a mobile cleaning supplies van to Park Place, a train station further downtown, closer to the WTC. There she found everything covered with white dust and the eerie, dense white powder – “clouds of dust that looked like smoke.”
Now came time for her role in the cleanup. “We were given paper-thin masks, and ‘gowns’ – white, flimsy jumpsuits – and told to begin cleanup: sweeping with brooms on the stairs, picking up the garbage.” The powder was so thick water had to be added to it in order to make the cleaning possible. Without being given proper PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) “we were breathing in that air” – the toxic white dust. “It was like a nightmare,” she continues, “I was saying to myself it would be years before everything would be cleaned up.”
When she emerged from the station and saw the scene firsthand, “There were police, firemen, transit workers, and so many others, working in the rubble, the same dust was all over the buildings. I saw so many cars that were completely crushed.” James also recalls seeing a woman’s brown shoe laying in the street, and what looked like a finger.. She says it haunts her to this day.
To have the fortitude to do one’s job, even in such a time of unprecedented crisis, makes TWU Local 100 member Guiliane James, a worker and hero extraordinaire.
