New York City may seem to be a place where everyone is a stranger, yet transit workers provide a human presence on a late-night bus or an empty subway platform. Few of us give any thought to these invisible workers-until something goes wrong. Transit Talk takes readers into the world of MTA/New York City Transit workers, as they describe their lives & work, from the most visible subway conductor to the seemingly invisible mechanic. There are nearly 44,000 transit workers like those you will meet in Transit Talk, & every day they enable five million of us to travel to work, to school, to weddings, to funerals, to hospitals, to vacations. These workers labor daily on subway tracks inches from high-voltage powerlines, risking their lives for passengers they'll never know. The City can feel large & fragmented, but the transportation system & its workers create common threads in the lives of all New Yorkers, threads we take for granted. Nearly 100 transit workers were interviewed for Transit Talk. These are the people who keep the country's largest transit system up & running.

Together, their stories create a human tableau of life & labor in the city within a city that is the MTA/New York City Transit. Transit workers find satisfaction in fixing a damaged subway car, gain wisdom from mastering a dangerous workplace, nurse emotional wounds from tending to someone injured in an accident, battle frustration from difficulties with management, & express happiness when reflecting on a productive career. They tell of how years spent in the same shop create bonds between workers. They talk of the agony on laboring in a 24-hour system with night shifts & weekend workdays that take them away from families. You'll hear joyous anecdotes of workers delivering babies in a subway car as well as painful tales of informing next of kin of a death on the tracks. Stories like that of Paul Prinszivalli, a transit worker on his way home from work when he saw a woman jump in front of his subway car. The stories weave together vignettes about race, unions, & the relations between men & women in the transit workforce. The memories recorded here cover the last 50 years of the 20th century, a time when the transit system acquired many of the characteristics of contemporary modern American industry without ever relinquishing its industrial roots.