The pandemic caused a shortage of train and bus workers. Now transit agencies in New York and around the nation are aggressively recruiting and hiring.
New York subway workers have been lured out of retirement with temporary jobs paying up to $35,000 for three months because of a shortage of operators to run the trains.
Bus drivers have scored signing bonuses of up to $6,000 to work for New Jersey Transit, which is competing with trucking and e-commerce companies for qualified drivers.
And halfway across the country, the transit agency in Houston, which is restoring service that was scaled back during the pandemic, has offered bus drivers and light rail operators incentives up to $4,000 while hard-to-find mechanics have been offered up to $8,000.
There may be no better time in the United States to look for transit work.
“It’s nice to have a position that is sought after and helps everyone else get to their work,” said Rashaad Milligan, 34, a single parent who started as a New York subway conductor in September after having worked two jobs to make ends meet. “It’s a feeling of being important.”
The nation’s transit agencies are rushing to hire train operators, bus drivers, mechanics and other workers as they try to fill critical vacancies and rebuild a work force that has been battered by the pandemic.
The deadly outbreak has killed hundreds of frontline transit workers, led to widespread absences because of Covid-19, prompted many to retire and spurred vaccine mandates in some cities that have forced unvaccinated transit workers to take leaves.
The result is a transit worker shortage that has caused delays and reductions in bus and rail service across the country. “I’ve never seen this type of shortage,” said John Costa, the international president of Amalgamated Transit Union, the largest union of transit workers in North America. “It’s affecting communities — if we’re having shortages, that means it takes longer to get somewhere.”
The staffing shortage has forced thousands of subway trains and buses to be canceled or delayed in New York. It has led to canceled bus trips in Los Angeles and the Seattle area and caused unplanned gaps in transit service in Chicago that have drawn complaints from train and bus riders.
In San Francisco, where a vaccine mandate for all city employees created a shortage of transit workers, a handful of bus routes were temporarily suspended, and riders were warned that they could see more crowding and longer wait times on other bus routes.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs New York’s subway and buses and is the nation’s largest transit agency, has accelerated hiring, but still has vacancies for more than 600 train operators, train conductors and bus drivers. Currently, the M.T. A. employs 3,195 train operators, 2,946 conductors and 11,850 bus drivers.
“It’s a big problem,” said Lisa Daglian, the executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the M.T.A., a watchdog group. “In order for there to be sufficient service, there needs to be sufficient crews.”
So the M.T.A. recently sent nearly 800 letters to train operators and conductors who had retired within the past three years, asking them to come back to work for up to $35,000 for three months. So far, 20 retirees have taken up the offer.
Many transit agencies reduced staff or froze hiring in the early days of the pandemic as people stayed home and their ridership and revenue plummeted. Now, many are eager to fill their ranks and return to full service.
Amtrak, which did not hire workers for more than 16 months after slashing train service nationwide, saw a 10 percent drop in the number of train engineers and conductors from attrition and is in the process of hiring 200 people to fill openings, said a spokesman, Jason Abrams.
King County Metro, which serves the Seattle area, has hired back 200 part-time bus drivers who were laid off last year because of budget cuts. The agency, which has canceled trips in recent weeks because of a driver shortage, is also hiring “for the foreseeable future as public transportation in the Puget Sound region continues to grow in 2022 and beyond,” said Sean Hawks, a spokesman.
In New York, the M.T.A. lifted a hiring freeze for certain workers in February after federal pandemic relief stabilized the agency’s finances and has made tackling crew shortages a priority. Still, the staffing shortages continue to cause thousands of subway and bus trips to be canceled every month, frustrating riders and hobbling the agency’s efforts to lure back the ridership it needs to address its financial woes.
“We have a specific problem with these crew-related delays, and we are attacking that aggressively because we don’t want to lose ground,” said Janno Lieber, the M.T.A.’s acting chairman and chief executive officer.
But hiring transit workers is not easy when there is a national labor shortage.
“Lots of industries are having trouble recruiting workers,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, adding that many people are not looking for jobs because they may have saved money during the pandemic or have to care for children or relatives.
Though transit jobs have traditionally been good jobs that are secure even in economic downturns, the pandemic highlighted the risks of working on a train or bus when other people work safely from home. At least 173 M.T.A. workers have died from Covid, according to the agency.
“If you have a choice — and you do have choices right now because so many employers are having trouble finding people — you might want to pick something safer and less physically strenuous,” Prof. Milkman said.
Many transit jobs also require special licenses or test-based certifications that require experience, which can further limit the pool of qualified applicants, said Nicole Smith, a research professor and chief economist for Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “I think people are interested in these jobs, but they don’t have the skills to get started right away,” she said.
Even when transit agencies find qualified workers, she added, it can take months to train them and even longer to replace all the experience and institutional knowledge lost when veteran workers retire. “As much as everyone wants to get this done in weeks or a couple of months, it’s going to take a couple of years,” she said.
Many transit agencies have stepped up their recruiting and hiring efforts, including the Chicago Transit Authority, which has been hosting virtual and in-person job fairs. Some agencies have resorted to bonuses and incentives that are usually only offered to the most sought-after job candidates.
New Jersey Transit bus drivers, who start at $22.20 per hour, are required to have a commercial driver’s license. But with increased competition, the agency is offering bonuses of $6,000 to those with commercial driver’s licenses and $3,000 to those with a permit for one. The agency is also increasing marketing and outreach efforts, including to military veterans, said Jim Smith, an agency spokesman.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, which serves the Houston area, has also offered generous incentives for new bus drivers, light rail operators and mechanics and is working to increase starting salaries. “We’re definitely getting more applicants because of it,” said Tracy Jackson, an agency spokeswoman.
Still, Mr. Costa, the union leader, said hiring bonuses might bring more workers in the door, but it would not necessarily keep them in their jobs. “These bonuses are a knee-jerk reaction,” Mr. Costa said, adding that agencies needed to make long-term changes, including increasing pay and benefits and creating safer working conditions to ensure a stable work force.
In New York, the M.T.A. has added more instructors and training sites to get new hires on the job faster, said Craig Cipriano, the acting president of New York City Transit, which is part of the M.T.A. The eight-month training period for train operators has been shortened by about two months, in part by reducing practice time in train yards.
Agency officials hope to have enough bus drivers by the end of the year, but said they will not be fully staffed with train conductors and operators until next year.
Salaries start at $37.97 an hour for train operators, $23.67 an hour for train conductors and $25.49 an hour for bus drivers.
Even with the worker shortage, Mr. Lieber said on-time train performance has steadily improved. There were 14,000 canceled or delayed train trips related to crew shortages in October, down from about 17,000 such trips in August, according to the agency.
The authority has also increased efficiency, including revising crew schedules and paying overtime to make shifts longer so that more trains can run in a shift. “We’re taking this sense of urgency that the pandemic created as a broader motivator for problem solving and innovation,” Mr. Lieber said.
Mr. Milligan, who commutes from Beacon, N.Y., to his new job as a train conductor, had worked as a sales representative for Verizon and a night auditor for a hotel. He said the benefits of working for the M.T.A. — including a pension plan and opportunities to move up — outweighed the risk of being exposed to the virus.
“I got lucky that there was such a need,” he said. “It’s rewarding. It’s challenging. I’m looking forward to taking a step up.”
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