It’s not your imagination: Freight trains are becoming more prone to entirely preventable incidents, including derailment. On paper, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration protects workers who come forward with reports of unsafe working conditions. The reality, however, leaves workers in a lurch between slow-moving bureaucracy and retaliatory companies.
Vice took a deep dive into OSHA complaints made by railroad workers over the last decade and found a system that continuously let workers down at every turn. In complaints made over the last six years only 15 percent had “positive” outcomes for the worker—though years of strife, appeals, and loss of income, hardly make even the victories very sweet.
Even worse, rail companies are so good at gaming the system that railroad work is rife with tales of retaliation on reporting workers. From Vice:
Over the following decade, the industry’s workforce shrank by more than 30 percent, from 171,000 employees across the Class I companies in 2015 to 112,000 in 2022, according to data from the Surface Transportation Board, as railroads pursued a profit-focused management strategy called precision scheduled railroading that slashed labor and maintenance costs to achieve short-term profit margins that please shareholders at the expense of safety.
While the workforce shrank, the rule books grew, encompassing hundreds of pages across different regulatory and internal frameworks. The rules became so numerous, complicated, and...
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