The Death-Based Model of Organizational Learning: Accident,Pandemic,and Workplace Change in New York Public Transit

Abstract

The public transportation workers of New York City lost their lives to COVID-19 at a shocking rate in the spring of 2020, likely abetted by their employer’s resistance to allow workers to wear masks until mere days before a region-wide lockdown was declared. We might see this death toll as a tragic outcome of uncertainty in the face of the unprecedented, yet the stance of the employer (the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA) was consistent with its longstanding reluctance to assimilate or pursue signals that suggest need for safety reforms — that is, until a worker dies. This article terms this pattern a “death-based model of organizational learning,” and situates the virus’ toll on transport workers from three angles: first, from workers’ experience of existential precarity in their workplaces, rooted in dangers workers readily problematize but which are not addressed by management; second, by showing how the MTA may modify rules following an employee fatality, at least when that death cannot be explained by individual failures alone; and third, by exploring the MTA’s longstanding hostility to health and safety research conducted in its physical and institutional bounds. These prior patterns articulated in the MTA’s response to COVID-19, such as in passivity in the face of general public health guidelines, disinterest in obvious founts of expertise to tailor its response to the pandemic, and in the eventual acceptance of a nascent public health role in light of the mounting death toll of its employees.