NYC Transit workers, shut out of 9/11 disability benefits, look for support

Alongside firefighters, police officers and other first responders, Philip Ronnie Shpiller toiled at the World Trade Center site in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, working through still-smoking rubble over the course of six long days and into nights. 

He and his NYCTA co-workers, all of them retired, a few of them ill as a result of their work on the pile, have for years been fighting for access to three-quarter disability pensions. 

Even some private-sector workers who responded to the attacks’ aftermath were legislated additional disability benefits, among them voluntary hospital EMTs and paramedics. 

Despite the abundance of state and federal legislation enacted in the immediate aftermath and in ensuing years granting disability benefits to people who developed any number of health issues attributable to their presence on the site, city transit workers have so far been shut out. 

And although state lawmakers from Staten Island sponsored bills starting in 2018 that would have accorded the three-quarter disability payments to affected city transit workers, the legislation did not make it to floor votes on at least four occasions. 

The bill’s last iteration, introduced by then-Senator Diane Savino in 2021, failed to advance out of committee before the legislative session’s conclusion last year, with the late arrival of a fiscal note — a bill’s cost estimate — cited as the reason.

"All of these bills are expensive. That doesn't mean it should be done,” Savino said last month. 

Her successor in representing portions of Staten Island and Brooklyn, Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, was looking to take up sponsorship of the legislation but was again awaiting a fiscal note, her legislative director said last month. 

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