New York City Transit Authority Escalates its Attacks on Workers

Read our editorial on the deepening economic crisis here.

The New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is attacking transit workers and riders alike: increasing fares, installing new and expensive fare gates, replacing the Metrocard with OMNY cards that track your movement as you tap through turnstiles, and automating subways.

In January 2026, the base fare for subways and buses increased to $3, the highest in the country.

MTA has begun installing new fare gates, the third change to turnstiles in less than a year. The gates cost around $700,000 to install just in one station and is part of an over $1 billion project to bring them to over 150 stations by 2029.

According to the MTA, the gates will be installed mainly at the stations with the highest fare evasion—in other words, the poorest neighborhoods will have the most hi-tech security systems designed to further restrict movement.

A representative of the Fare Ain’t Fair Coalition, a rider advocacy organization in NYC, told The Worker, “Resources we are told do not exist have been ‘found’ and used to lock out New Yorkers from our own public transportation system. Instead of using the $1Billion+ in funding to reduce the cost of the fare, fixing the broken elevators and crumbling infrastructure, or even increasing worker compensation and benefits, the MTA has decided to invest in steel gates designed to ward off people who cannot afford the fare.”

MTA has purchased these new technologies—the OMNY Cards and the fare gates—from Cubic, a US arms monopoly that creates weaponry and spyware, and whose customers include the genocidal Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

The MTA has also been attacking transit workers. In December, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who oversees the MTA, vetoed a bill that would require two-person crews on MTA trains, pushing forward MTA’s plans toward automation, which means layoffs and delays.

In September, the MTA rejected the demands of Long Island Rail Road workers for better pay to keep up with inflation, with Hochul calling the workers “greedy”.

One MTA subway conductor told The Worker that transit workers face a “seven-year window of death”, with a significant number of transit workers getting cancer within seven years of their retirement age due to all the carcinogens in the stations and tunnels, including “steel dust, rat droppings, bleach, graffiti removal, pesticide, fuel, and mold.”

This is the tired formula of MTA to pit worker and riders against each other: tell workers they don’t have money to pay them living wages to justify increasing fares and the violent repression of riders; tell riders that workers are greedy for going on strike to justify their repression of workers and keeping their pay down.

Against these attacks, transit workers and rider advocacy groups have proposed an alternative: make monopolists pay for public transit, instead of further enriching themselves off its debt.

Roger Toussaint, the former leader of the Transit Workers Union Local 100 representing MTA workers in NYC, said in a speech commemorating the 20^th anniversary of the 2005 MTA strike that businesses should be required to pay for the fare rather than workers having to pay in order to get paid.

“Subways and buses help businesses,” Toussaint added, “They should fund it.”

Toussaint also challenged the notion that increased fares mean higher wages for transit workers—a ruse devised by MTA to pit workers and riders against each other. In fact, it was this alliance between workers and riders that led to the previous successes of MTA workers from the inception of their union through the 2005 strike. On the other hand, fare hikes have taken place hand-in-hand with attrition, layoffs, and sell-out contracts.

Photo: MTA’s new fare gates. Credit: The Worker.

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