[PRengine]

December 13, 2005
The Man in the Middle

By SEWELL CHAN
His is the voice you hear over the loudspeaker, if it is working. His is the blue uniform you look for when the subway pulls into the station if you are confused about which train to take. His is the head that pops out of the conductor's cab, scanning the length of the platform as the train pulls out.
William Bailon, 28, is a conductor on the F, G and R lines and can list all their stations from memory, even while half asleep, but he is more excited when he tells you about his wife, Sandra, a legal secretary a few credits shy of her bachelor's degree; their two children, Adalee, 8, and Willie, 4; and the challenge of paying nearly $4,000 a year in Catholic school tuitions.

To speak to Mr. Bailon is to glimpse through the eyes of one subway conductor the concerns of 33,700 union members at New York City Transit, one of the city's largest civil-service work forces. Those concerns, while varying somewhat from worker to worker, share an essential core of issues like wages, health care and pensions and could determine whether the busiest transit system in the nation is shut down by a strike after the current three-year contract runs out Friday at 12:01 a.m.

The rising cost of living is the dominant concern for Mr. Bailon, who considers himself fortunate because his wife's family owns a six-unit building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, allowing the couple to pay just $600 a month for their cramped two-bedroom apartment. "It's so expensive to live in New York," he said. "Everything is going up: the rent, the gas, the milk."

A Brooklyn native and a high school graduate, Mr. Bailon was hired in 2001 amid changes that have transformed the transit work force in recent decades: the shift from Irish and other European groups to blacks and Latinos, diminished opportunities for advancement in a bureaucracy that once routinely granted promotions chiefly by seniority, and growing anxiety as managers seek to eliminate the jobs of many of the 2,700 conductors and 3,300 station agents.

Mr. Bailon supports but is not active in his union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, and he did not attend the union's strike-authorization vote on Saturday because he was working. A Democrat, he did not bother to vote in the mayoral election. Most of what he knows about the Metropolitan Transportation Authority comes from tabloid newspapers left behind on the trains.

Mr. Bailon's base pay is $22.54 an hour, or about $47,000 a year. With overtime, he expects to make about $54,000 this year before taxes. More than a third of his paycheck goes to taxes, a pension contribution, union dues and a health-care co-payment.

New York City Transit pays for a standard health benefit package. Under a preferred-provider organization, G.H.I., Mr. Bailon pays a $15 co-payment for office visits and diagnostic tests. (Workers who select a health-maintenance organization generally have no co-payment.) He also pays $26.34 every two weeks for coverage for his wife, who is 27, and the two children.

Since 1994, nearly all transit workers with 25 years of experience have been eligible to collect a pension equal to half their pay at age 55. Mr. Bailon, who started at age 23, would be 48 after 25 years' service, and would have to wait 7 years for his pension. Sometimes, he thinks about trying to become a police officer. "It would mean taking a big pay cut," at least at first, he said.

He does not want to go on strike, but said, "If we have to, we will."
He could be affected if the authority expands one-person train operation, a disputed program that began in 1996. On one-person trains there is no conductor, only an operator who opens and shuts the doors and makes announcements. Mr. Bailon works on the G line every Thursday and Friday, 7:48 a.m. to 4:34 p.m. - a line the authority wants to make conductorless at all times.

He also has heard about the authority's proposal to have conductors stay on the train but leave their booths and instead walk through the cars, answering questions from passengers and looking for suspicious activity. He does not like the idea.

Mr. Bailon's mother came to New York from Puerto Rico, his father from Ecuador. After graduating from high school, he worked for two years for a livery car company, then took an $11-an-hour job with an air-conditioning equipment supplier.

In June 1999, he paid a $10 application fee and took a conductor's test, a civil service exam. The requirements included a high school diploma and passing a physical.

He did not get called back until early 2001. By that point, he had also taken the exam to become a police officer. Because he lacked enough college credits, he was offered a job as a school safety officer, which paid less than the starting pay for a conductor, around $14 an hour.

So, on April 16, 2001, he joined the authority and began conductor school, learning how circuit breakers work, what to do if a train door is jammed, and how to make a proper announcement. He learned the codes train crews use to summon assistance: 12-2 for smoke or fire, 12-6 for a derailment, 12-8 for an armed passenger, 12-9 for a body under the train, 12-11 for serious vandalism. He received on-the-job instruction at the Coney Island train yard.

He was assigned to the B Division, which includes all the train lines designated by a letter, except for the 42nd Street shuttle. His first assignment was as an "extra-extra," who floats among train lines and shifts.

Most hourly transit workers select their assignments about every six months, based on seniority. The most desirable assignments include a Saturday or Sunday as one of the two regular, consecutive days off.
Mr. Bailon's current assignment involves "R.D.O. relief," or filling in for colleagues during their regular days off.

Of New York City Transit's 48,000 employees, 70 percent are black, Hispanic, Asian-American or Native American and 17 percent are women. While Local 100 is the largest union, other unions represent employees like bus workers in Queens and Staten Island and engineers.

Asked to assess the job, Mr. Bailon said: "It makes your day go by fast. You don't have a boss right over you, looking every step of the way at what you're doing. You have time to yourself on the train."

The job can also be tedious, so Mr. Bailon has considered taking a test to become a train operator. "It can be boring sometimes," he said. "It's very repetitious: making announcements, turning keys, opening the doors. Every day for 25 years? That gets tiring. Maybe as a train operator it would be a little different."

• Copyright 2005The New York Times Company