Mta bus operator top pay11/13/2023 ![]() ![]() Yates was able to climb the ranks through Transport Workers Union Local 100, where he now works as a vice president representing the agency’s bus workers in Manhattan and the Bronx. “I’m very proud of the diversity and most of all the caliber of the people, I don’t know the stats that you’re talking about and I don’t have any comment on what my predecessors or anybody else may have done,” he added. “I don’t like to talk about our team in demographic terms, but since you’re insisting on it, I will,” Lieber said. When Gothamist asked Janno Lieber, the MTA's current chair and CEO, about the racial disparity between the workforce and management, Lieber cited several hires on his watch. And only 17% of New York City Transit executives are Black, according to agency statistics. There’s never been a Black chair of the MTA. And at New York City Transit, which runs the subways and buses, 47% of the workforce is Black.īut Black transit workers in New York City also hit a ceiling that persists into the present. Yates is one of more than 71,000 MTA workers, roughly 40% of whom are Black. “They know it's a guaranteed payment, so they're gonna loan you the money to buy a home. “You can buy a home with Transit, you can earn the money, you can save the money and creditors will give you the credit to purchase your home because you work for Transit,” Yates said. And he also went on to buy his own home: a two-story house in Woodhaven, Queens, 10 miles away from his dad’s place. When he was 25, he joined the MTA as a bus driver. Yates followed in his father’s footsteps. It was a fixer-upper with a good amount of land that he’d spotted on his route, the Q84. After raising his son in Mitchell Lama housing in Jamaica, Queens, he bought his own home in Cambria Heights in 1990 for $130,000. Like many Black transit workers of that era, Yates' father was never promoted higher than a bus operator. “My father was my most favorite person in the world back then,” Yates, now 54, said. He was one of thousands of Black New Yorkers who in recent decades carved a path to the middle class through the reliable pay and pension benefits offered to transit workers. The elder Yates, also named Donald, was a single dad who raised his son on an MTA salary. While he loved the trips through different neighborhoods, he was most enamored with the bus driver - his father, who gave him snacks and sometimes took him bowling after a shift. Yates’ fondest memories are of riding the bus around Queens in his youth. ![]()
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