Over 2,000 Railroad Workers Filed Safety Complaints Over the Last 10 Years: Report

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.

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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 sometimes contradictory that they provided ample pretext to punish any employee at any time.

The combination of a shrinking workforce and growing rulebook had the effect of neutralizing whistleblower protections. Railroads could, and would, simply claim the worker was being punished for any number of other reasons while sending a clear chilling message to the worker and their colleagues about what happens to people who raise safety concerns. In its legal filing, BNSF inadvertently explained this dynamic. In a euphemism for correlation not equaling causation, they called it “severing the temporal connection” between the whistleblowing and the punishment.

“Whistleblower cases are hard to win because [companies] throw up a lot of defenses and confuse everyone,” said Robert Swick, an investigation compliance specialist at OSHA who works on whistleblower cases. To explain the problem, he offered an allegory: “If a worker trips in the snow, the companies say, well, workers must always look down. But if something falls and hits them in the head, they say well, he should have been looking up.”

Just last week, we reported on a Union Pacific worker who claimed he was fired for using what little sick leave is afford to workers. Much like we saw in 2022, when freight trains were being hit by organized gangs of looters in Los Angeles, the problem here is tight-fisted greed creating unsafe conditions for both workers and communities around railroads. As usual, it seems the corporations at the center are looking to blame everyone but themselves to help protect the bottom line.