To prevail on a Federal Railroad Safety Act retaliation claim, a plaintiff must show knowledge by someone who actually had a hand in the alleged retaliatory act, not just knowledge by the employer itself.
Affirming a lower court’s grant of summary judgment against a whistleblower retaliation claim asserted by a former engineer for New Jersey Transit (NJT), the Third Circuit found the engineer had failed to adduce evidence that anyone who influenced the decision to terminate her employment knew about her protected activity. Each of the three NJT employees who were arguably involved in the engineer’s disciplinary processes testified they had no role in a previous safety meeting with Liberty Mutual attended by the employee and did not know the identity of any NJT employees who had attended the meeting. Further it was not enough that Liberty Mutual shared the information learned at the meeting with someone at NJT, because nothing showed that information reached a decisionmaker (Asay v. New Jersey Transit Rail Operations, Inc., No. 24-2967 (3d Cir. June 18, 2026)).
The plaintiff in this case worked as a locomotive engineer for NJT from November 1999 until December 2017.
Safety concerns. In June 2014, the engineer became concerned that NJT was not scheduling sufficient time between trips and causing employees to cut corners when inspecting the trains—a practice she referred to as “short turns.”
Between June 2014 and October 2016, the engineer reported her concerns to several...
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