More than 2,000 railway workers have filed safety complaints in the past 10 years: Report
It’s not your imagination: Cargo ships are become prone to completely preventable incidentsinclude Derailment. On paper, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration protect workers moving forward with reports of unsafe working conditions. However, reality leaves workers in a state of wobble between Slow bureaucracy and retaliation companies.
Evil behavior delved into OSHA complaints filed by railroad workers over the past decade and discovered a system that consistently frustrates workers at every turn. Of complaints filed over the past six years, only 15 percent have had a “positive” outcome for workers—thoseYes years of struggle, appeal, and lose income, barely even making very sweet victories.
Worse still, the railroad companies were so good at playing the system game that railroad work stalled. full of stories of revenge on worker report. From Evil behavior:
Over the next decade, the industry’s workforce shrank by more than 30%, from 171,000 employees of Class I companies in 2015 to 112,000 in 2022, according to data from the Surface Transportation Commission, due to railway industries pursues a profit-focused management strategy known as the precision-scheduled railway has cut labor and maintenance costs to achieve short-term profit margins that satisfy shareholders at the expense of safety.
While the workforce has shrunk, the rule books have grown, covering hundreds of pages across various internal and regulatory frameworks. The rules became so numerous, complicated, and sometimes contradictory that they were reason enough to punish any employee at any time.
The combination of a shrinking workforce and growing rule of thumb has had the effect of nullifying whistleblower protections. Railroads can, and will, simply state that workers are being punished for any other reason while sending a clear message that makes workers and their colleagues aware of what is happening to these who raised safety concerns. In its legal filing, BNSF inadvertently explained the move. In a euphemism for unequal causality, they call it “temporary severing” between whistleblowing and punishment.
“Denunciation cases are very difficult to win because [companies] Robert Swick, a compliance investigation specialist at OSHA who works on whistleblower cases, says it’s a lot of defense and confuses people. To explain the problem, he offered an allegory: “If a worker walks in the snow, companies say, well, workers must always look down. But if something fell and hit them on the head, they said well, he should have looked up.
Just last week, we reported on a Union Pacific worker claiming that he was fired for using the meager sick leave available to employees. Like we saw in 2022, when freight trains were attacked by organized gangs of looters in Los Angeles, the problem here is Tight greed creates insecurity conditions for both workers and communities around the railway. As usual, it seems the corporations at the center are looking to blame everyone but themselves to help protect bottom line.
