But the vast majority of the complaints are dismissed or thrown out for technical reasons.
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In 2013, Jeff Kurtz, then a union officer for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen as well as an engineer for BNSF, helped a coworker file a whistleblower complaint against the railroad.
The train’s cruise control system, known as Trip Optimizer, was reportedly malfunctioning, which can be a serious safety hazard. So the worker disabled it and took steps to generate a record of the malfunction, as Kurtz described it in a 2016 testimony to the Department of Labor in Washington D.C. and in a recent interview with Motherboard. That way, if it failed again, there would be documentation that the system is the problem, not the worker.
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The following month, the worker was available for 92 percent of his scheduled hours, but the railroad assigned him to a train for only 43 hours that month. He was then punished under a company rule for low performance, which could have resulted in him being fired. In a written response to Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), which was then sent to Kurtz and viewed by Motherboard, the company accused the worker of gaming the scheduling system to work as little as possible. But they simply describe a worker using the scheduling system in the same manner I have heard dozens of other workers say they do in my two years reporting on...
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