‘TTC just broke me’: Former employees describe culture of sexual harassment within Toronto’s transit agency

According to Phillips, the worst incident happened around 1990 when she had just four years on the job. (Phillips is her maiden name; she asked her surname not be used because of the stigma associated with harassment). While at a bar with other TTC workers, a drunk supervisor grabbed her outside the bathroom and told her he would get her fired if she didn’t “put out.” Her colleagues witnessed the incident, but Phillips said she didn’t think she could report it because she might lose her job. The supervisor was later promoted to a senior position at the commission.

“The culture was just, ‘let it go,’” Phillips said in an interview this month. The TTC “was like the rodeo back then, the wild west ... They got away with things.”

Phillips retired four years ago. She said that being a woman at Toronto’s male-dominated transit agency got somewhat easier as society in general grew less tolerant of open sexism — when she started in 1986 there weren’t even bathrooms for women operators. But she described harassment as a common feature of the job.

“A lot of women got harassed” and nobody did “much about it,” she said.

The TTC is hoping to convince women the days of the “wild west” at the transit agency are over. On Tuesday, it will hold a first-of-its-kind event titled Women as Transit Operators, an information session that will kick off the TTC’s effort to recruit more women to drive for the organization.

More than 85 per cent of bus, streetcar, and subway operators are currently male, and Marika Fraser, the TTC’s manager of outreach and diversity, said the agency’s push to hire more women is part of a broader strategy to make its workforce more diverse. Its goal is that next year at least four out of every 10 new hires will be women.

“We want women to be aware that these opportunities are there,” and to be confident that if they do come to work for the TTC, the agency is taking steps to create “a comfortable and respectful place to work,” she said.

Fraser acknowledged that women are “horribly under-represented” at the TTC, and the agency has made only incremental progress in addressing the imbalance. In 2007 the agency reported that 13.7 per cent of all workers were women. By 2020, the figure had increased to just 15.9 per cent.

Despite offering well-paying jobs and ample benefits, Fraser said historically the TTC has had difficulty attracting women to the organization, in part because of hiring practices that amounted to “an old boys’ network.” The pool of female applicants has also been limited by the fact many TTC jobs require training in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) or skilled trades, fields in which women have been under-represented.

She said she couldn’t say whether sexual harassment has deterred women from working at the TTC. But she didn’t deny harassment has been an issue, and said the TTC is committed to stamping it out. The agency is dedicated to “learning from the horrible situations that have happened in the past, and making ourselves better,” she said.

Fraser pointed to recent restructuring efforts as evidence of a “culture shift” underway at the organization. Her outreach and diversity position is a newly created role, and the agency is in the midst of hiring its first permanent chief of diversity and culture. The new hire will be a senior executive tasked with creating policies aimed at improving equity at the agency.

Kerri Lattimer is a former operator who says the TTC wasn’t an equitable place when she worked there. Soon after she started as a bus driver around 2004, she literally became a poster girl for TTC employees when the transit workers’ union used her photo in a promotional ad campaign. Although her smiling face was posted across the system, her experience at the TTC wasn’t a happy one.

“The harassment from coworkers was intense,” she said in an interview this month. “They would come to the stations and offer to have sex in the bathroom with me. They would wait at 3 o’clock in the morning until my shift was done and offer me a ride home.” Like Phillips, she recalled that male colleagues would follow her on shifts by riding along in the seat near the driver’s cab.

She never felt safe enough to file a complaint with management. “I was scared that I would be on the road and no one would support me. I was scared of being a tattletale or a rat. There’s a real climate of protecting each other,” she said.

Driving for the TTC is a tough job that requires working long shifts and irregular hours. The harassment made it that much harder and Lattimer said she began to suffer stress-related illnesses. Finally, in the middle of a shift she hit the emergency button and took her bus out service. She quit in 2008.

“TTC just broke me,” she said.

There are indications harassment at the TTC is not a problem relegated to the past. As the Star previously reported, in 2019 the agency received 42 complaints from employees who accused coworkers of sexual harassment. Experts say the number of complaints is far fewer than would be expected at an organization that employs about 16,000 people, more than 2,000 of them women. They said the numbers suggest harassment is occurring on a wider scale but going unreported.

Women who currently work at the TTC told the Star sexual harassment is prevalent but few victims come forward because they fear reprisals from coworkers and lack confidence in management’s ability to address the issue.

Recent cases documented in labour arbitration decisions include a driver who accused an instructor of sexually assaulting her on a bus at the TTC’s Arrow Road division. The alleged incident took place in 2014 when the driver was a 22-year-old trainee, but she didn’t file a complaint until 2016 because she said the TTC’s complaints policies weren’t clear and she was worried the instructor would give her a poor evaluation.

In a separate case, the TTC fired a bus driver who complained in 2013 she was sexually assaulted by a supervisor. An arbitrator determined in 2018 the TTC had been wrong to fire her and she was reinstated.

In a statement to the Star, the TTC said it has zero tolerance for sexual harassment. Gemma Piemontese, who is serving as the TTC’s interim chief of diversity and culture, said the agency takes all reports of such behaviour seriously, investigates them, and takes corrective action.

She said Phillips’ and Lattimer’s accounts of harassment years ago “are deeply concerning and reflect behaviours and a workplace environment we absolutely condemn.”

The organization says it has policies in place to support victims, and last year it launched a successful internal campaign to raise awareness about harassment and encourage victims to come forward. Next month, the agency plans to release a 10-point action plan aimed at making the organization a more diverse and welcoming workplace, and it will include additional sexual harassment training, Piemontese said.

“The TTC, like many other workplaces in the past, was male-dominated and perceived as being unwelcoming to women. While that has improved over the past three decades, we are more committed than ever to systemic changes,” she said.