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“Thousands” of MTA employees did not complete New York state’s mandatory annual sexual harassment training in 2017 and 2019, the authority’s inspector general said Wednesday — and transit officials don’t expect to have full participation among their 70,000-person workforce until the end of this year.
“It is likely that thousands of MTA employees did not receive training in sexual harassment prevention in 2019 as required by State law,” the report by Acting IG Elizabeth Keating said. “MTAHQ took no action to ensure that represented employees received annual training in compliance with the new law.”
Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the sexual harassment training law in 2018, which required all public employers to provide annual sexual harassment training to their employees.
Cuomo accuser Charlotte Bennett claimed last year that the disgraced ex-governor had someone else take the course for him.
The ex-governor pretended to participate in the course, but much of the MTA never bothered.
Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North and MTA Buses had high rates of completion of mandatory training, but subway workers had compliance rates as low as 33 percent, the report said.
Just 58 percent of subway employees completed the sexual harassment course in 2019, according to the IG; at Metro-North, the compliance rate was just 43 percent.
The MTA has yet to implement the training authority-wide because it is negotiating the training with its various unions, the IG’s report said. In some cases, the authority has agreed to incentivize worker compliance by paying OT for participation in the state sexual harassments course and other training.
“Training for represented employees is a significant cost to the MTA,” the report said. “Agencies try to minimize the use of overtime when providing training, but this is not always possible.”
The MTA plans to require sexual harassment training for all employees by the end of this year, the IG said. Other mandatory training will be “negotiated with bargaining units to determine the terms under which raining will be provided,” according to the MTA’s response.
“As the Inspector General is aware, following an agency-wide reorganization new procedures are already in development to increase training completion rates from the 2019 figures cited in the report,” MTA spokesman Michael Cortez said in a statement. “Those updated procedures are designed to dramatically increase compliance.”
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