Launch of New York bikeshare program is marred by wage-theft allegations

[marmar]

(In These Times) Today, New York City launches the largest bicycle sharing program in the country, CitiBike. It will be run by the company, Alta Bicycle Share, Inc., that is responsible for Washington, D.C.'s flagship program, Capital Bikeshare. Based on a European model used in Paris and London, the program is touted as a greener, healthier form of public transportation.

But Capital's workers have a few problems with that image.

Samuel Swenson says he was excited when he was hired at Capital Bikeshare in the summer of 2011. He and his new colleagues were enthusiastic about bicycles and alternative transportation, he told In These Times. “We helped sell the program as much as we helped make it work.”

Things quickly started to go wrong. According to Swenson, he was hired with the expectation that he would become a full-time bicycle mechanic and that he would receive health benefits, but the benefits didn't materialize. The warehouse where he and the handful of other mechanics worked was housed next to a concrete mill in a Superfund site. The hard work and the silica dust from the concrete made him concerned about when his healthcare would kick in. When he never got a satisfactory answer from the company, he began researching Alta's contract with the city. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15051/alta_bicycle_share_faces_wage_theft_claims/

[datasuspect]

1. the well-intentioned learn how businesses ACTUALLY work

was that the sound of bubbles busting?

[Egalitarian Thug]

5. +1

[In_The_Wind]

2. Great

[Ron Green]

3. A failure of capitalism.

What's needed here is a Workers' Self-Directed Enterprise, controlled by those who are making the program go.

See Democracy at Work by Richard Wolfe.

[Egalitarian Thug]

4. Privatization; Another bad republican idea embraced by the "sensible centrists".

“I'm a 25-year-plus veteran of the bicycle industry, I've been running shops before in Pennsylvania and also in DC, fairly aware of what the OSHA requirements would be,” Smith said. “I'm over 50, I'm an ex-paratrooper, I have lower-back problems and feet problems. After the first month of working there I requested to have better standing mats. It took months and months, [then] there was one standing mat that came in. My immediate supervisor took it and put it under his stand to 'test it out' to see if he wanted to buy any more.”

Swenson says he, too, made a complaint about working conditions that went unheeded. “One day I took photos of these two work benches with 40-pound vises on them, that were nearly collapsing. It's a rather dangerous thing to put a wheel on a 40-pound vise, crank down on it, and then have the whole table kind of kneel over,” he said. “It looked like a matter of time before it fell on one of us. They wouldn't do anything about it, so I took photos and told the general manager that this was an OSHA problem.”

Instead of addressing the problem, he says, the company took away his key and security access code, telling him that he needed “close supervision.” Before, he'd been free to work on his own time as long as the work got done.

So Swenson called the Department of Labor in June of 2012. At first, he recalls, he had trouble getting them to take his complaints seriously, but he kept pushing and eventually got a call back from an investigator in the Wage and Hour Division. The department did not return a call from In These Times requesting comment, but did confirm to the Washington Post earlier this month that they had opened an investigation into his complaints.