“Do Your Job.” How the Railroad Industry Intimidates Employees Into Putting Speed Before Safety
“Do Your Job.” How the Railroad Industry Intimidates Employees Into Putting Speed Before Safety
Railroad companies have penalized workers for taking the time to make needed repairs and created a culture in which supervisors threaten and fire the very people hired to keep trains running safely. Regulators say they can’t stop this intimidation.
Jesus Christ, I knew this was going to be bad, but holy shit. There's some real zingers in there.
On the busy rail corridor running through northwest Atlanta, there was a notorious stretch of track known for tripping up engineers. Larry Coston didn’t feel like he could navigate the large number of signal lights safely going the speed limit of 60 mph, so he radioed the dispatcher that he’d be driving at a slower speed, a 6 to 8 mph crawl, in an effort to avoid an accident.
Norfolk Southern fired him for “intentionally” delaying his assignment. The company declined to comment on specific cases. But his boss, and his boss’ boss, testified in his ongoing lawsuit that his judgment didn’t matter; engineers should travel at maximum authorized speeds regardless of their safety concerns. “Run your train,” his direct supervisor, Travis Bailey, a senior road manager of engines, said in a deposition. “Do your job.”
Supervisors have strong incentives to push their workers like this. Court records show that several freight rail companies rate and rank their managers using metrics that reward them for trains staying on schedule and penalize them for disruptions — even when the delays are caused by safety precautions. “Slow order delays,” for example, calculate the amount of time lost from slowing trains because of unsafe track conditions.
That's just one among the most egregious examples. They track downtime due to safety issues and penalize managers for delays due to things being unsafe rather than just fucking fixing it. I've worked for some really shitty employers over the years, and the only ones who ever tried to skirt safety issues due to costs were the places that were being run as vulture capital operations. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the plan is to eventually declare insolvency because the costs to fix their bullshit is going to be too much, and have the government buy them out and remake CONRAIL. Once the government fixes their infrastructure on the taxpayer dime, they're going to start lobbying Congress to re-privatize CONRAIL for pennies on the dollar because of "free market efficiency".
Automated signaling exists and can manage all sections at the maximum safe speed. Trains shouldn't even have anyone inside to drive normally. The job is obsolete today. (drivers might be useful in yards, or little used branches, but not the main line - in both cases the driver should live near their section and work when there is a train then go home)
Of course automatic signaling is programmed to be safe. Thus if that section cannot be driven faster than 10mph (or whatever speed) there is no override to go faster anyway.
They should 100% nationalize it... But I'm not sure that's their plan. It would be an extremely risky plan on their part to let the government take over the company in hopes that they can maybe possibly convince them to give it back after they fix it up.
You're not thinking like a modern CEO. This isn't long term growth capitalism, this is slash and burn capitalism. The only thing that matters is next quarter's profits (and, increasingly, this window is narrowing to single months or smaller). They're going to extract as much wealth out as they can for as long as they can until it's completely impossible to sustain it. If they can't get the government to hand it back in the future, oh well, but that's what lobbyists are for.
What profit-driven industry doesn’t do the same?
This is a capitalism "profits first, last and always" problem, not specifically a railroad problem.
Many industries have discovered the costs of not doing safety first are higher in the long run. You have to pay more workers comp insurance, you have to train replacement workers for those who are injured, you have to scrap/replace parts destroyed, and when someone is injured it affects moral and so your people don't work well.
Railroads are throwing money away by not putting safety first - they just don't realize it.
Railroads are in the advantageous position they can get governments to coverup and pay for their failures.
The government should hold the management who block required work as criminally negligent.
That math doesn't always work out that way. We see it all of the time when corporations ignore regulations, and then just pay the fines as a cost of doing business.
It's fucked up that this is the system we've chosen for ourselves. That human safety comes down to whether or not the math makes sense for the company's bottom line.
Then you have libertarians who think that's just fine, and that the "free market" will "correct itself." I guess the employees that are maimed or die in the process are just collateral damage. Eventually, the consumer will be aware (somehow?) that the process of making the product they want is dangerous and has killed people, and then they'll stop buying the product. Right? Right...?
Lol. I was trying to think of something to say about that last paragraph, but I think the ideology speaks for itself.
Not a single industry actually puts safety first. Some take safety more seriously than others, but that's it.
Everything is prioritized over safety in our capitalistic society
Blood-boiling. Maybe a few of these managers should take a tree to the face and see how concerned with efficiency they are afterwards.
I think workers need to start wearing bodycams.
Office workers (the smart ones) have been doing this for years.
" "please email that?" Exists for us to cover our asses
"as per our conversation on the phone this morning..."
That's just leaving a paper trail though. Camera would be next level lol
The article mentions one guy recorded his manager (audio), but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference and there's hundreds of cases that went to court. One infuriating thing is that one court case, I think it was the one who recorded that audio, got immediately dismissed by OSHA??
East Palestine, Ohio smoulders in the background
Yet at a railroad crossing the damn train only operates at baby crawling speed.
Good thing Biden broke the railroad strike.
Can we please stop with that? He did do the right thing with the railway workers. The strike would likely have had a massive economic impact across the nation and in many different industries. Avoiding the strike while still getting the workers much of what they wanted was a very good result. Not perfect, but we can't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The rail union is quite pleased with how things played out according to IBEW’s Railway Department Director Al Russo.
https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid
“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”
Can we please stop defending Biden every time he hurts us?
Sick days weren't literally the only thing they wanted to strike for - there were numerous safety concerns, concerns about overtime, concerns about scheduling, and more:
The Association of American Railroads, which represents freight railway operators, said its members have been hiring in recent years to address staffing needs and recognize employees' desire for better scheduling. The group said the number of overtime hours worked by BMWE union members increased to 4.7 hours per week in 2022, compared to 4 hours in 2016.
Cory Ludwig, who works as a machine operator repairing railway tracks in Iowa, said he’s been working Saturdays and some Sundays along with 10- to 12-hour shifts since September. Recently, he worked 13 days without a day off. With the mandatory Saturday work, he’s had to rely on friends and relatives to take care of his five-year-old and nine-year-old kids. He said the overtime demands have increased as he’s seen the number of workers assigned to his crew go down.
“You fall asleep and then you wake up in the morning and you go right back to work. It can really break a person down, it gets really wearing on a person after a while,” Ludwig said. “With less people trying to do the same amount of work, working long hours, working multiple weeks in a row without one day off, you get irritated and you get burnt out.”
Recently one of the union’s members had been working 22 hours straight when he fell asleep on the job, an error that could have put his colleagues’ lives at risk but also could have been avoided had the employee had a rest period, said Ballew. Another member was recently disciplined for refusing to work through his scheduled days off on short notice so he could care for a family member having health issues, Ballew said.
“The stress it puts on marriages and parenting and the things you leave behind for your spouse to deal with or the things you miss, that kind of stress builds up,” said Ballew. “In the rail industry, we have noticed recently a spat of suicides and I can’t help but think there is a correlation there.”
Lives are still being ruined.
Stop your strike breaker apologetics.
Isn't that one small segment of one small section of workers, not all rail workers? Weren't their demands only a tiny fraction of what the overall strikers wanted?
Isn't "but the economy" just another tired excuse to not implement any lasting change because it might affect votes, not the wellbeing of the American people?
Change is hard, and especially when you put it off for so long, it can hurt. But in the long run you come out better for it. Putting it off means it's just going to hurt worse later, if we even get a chance to do it. Workers are still over-worked and understaffed. Biden swooping in to "save the day" by telling them "Yeah, sure, we'll help you when it's convenient for us" didn't change that. No matter what an electricians union rep might have to say about it.