Marian Swerdlow becomes New York City subway conductor
On July 1, 1981, Marian Swerdlow began training to become a New York City subway conductor. She was one of the first women to hold this position, and her time with the Transit Authority and Local 100 union led her to write Underground Woman: My Four Years as a New York Subway Conductor.
Swerdlow was born in the South Bronx in 1949. Her father was an immigrant from Eastern Europe and her mother was born in New York. Swerdlow became politically active during the movement against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, at which point she realized the extent of her parents’ radical communist politics.
During her graduate program in sociology at Columbia University, Swerdlow became increasingly interested in union politics, particularly in the extent to which union leadership represented its membership during negotiations. In 1981, Swerdlow took the civil service examination for bus operators and conductors in New York, in part to have “the experience of being a union activist. [She] wanted to contribute to the rank-and-file upsurge.”
Swerdlow’s time as a conductor was characterized by her union work. She helped create the newsletter “Hell on Wheels,” which became part of the “New Directions” caucus of the union. Later, in Underground Woman, published in 1998, she wrote about the political state of New York transit in the early 1980s and about the brutal hours, love affairs, friendships, and casual sexism she experienced on the job.
Swerdlow left the Transit Authority after four years as a conductor. She later worked as a unionized high school educator and member of the United Federation of Teachers. As of 2022, she was still writing about unions for a socialist journal.
Sources:
“Marian Swerdlow.” Against the Current, July 17, 2020; https://againstthecurrent.org/marian-swerdlow/.
Swerdlow, Marian. Underground Woman: My Four Years as a New York City Subway Conductor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Swerdlow, Marian. October 11, 2006. Interview with the Bronx African American History Project. BAAHP Digital Archive at Fordham.
