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“Do Your Job.” How the Railroad Industry Intimidates Employees Into Putting Speed Before Safety
(www.propublica.org)
Jesus Christ, I knew this was going to be bad, but holy shit. There's some real zingers in there.
On the busy rail corridor running through northwest Atlanta, there was a notorious stretch of track known for tripping up engineers. Larry Coston didn’t feel like he could navigate the large number of signal lights safely going the speed limit of 60 mph, so he radioed the dispatcher that he’d be driving at a slower speed, a 6 to 8 mph crawl, in an effort to avoid an accident.
Norfolk Southern fired him for “intentionally” delaying his assignment. The company declined to comment on specific cases. But his boss, and his boss’ boss, testified in his ongoing lawsuit that his judgment didn’t matter; engineers should travel at maximum authorized speeds regardless of their safety concerns. “Run your train,” his direct supervisor, Travis Bailey, a senior road manager of engines, said in a deposition. “Do your job.”
Supervisors have strong incentives to push their workers like this. Court records show that several freight rail companies rate and rank their managers using metrics that reward them for trains staying on schedule and penalize them for disruptions — even when the delays are caused by safety precautions. “Slow order delays,” for example, calculate the amount of time lost from slowing trains because of unsafe track conditions.
That's just one among the most egregious examples. They track downtime due to safety issues and penalize managers for delays due to things being unsafe rather than just fucking fixing it. I've worked for some really shitty employers over the years, and the only ones who ever tried to skirt safety issues due to costs were the places that were being run as vulture capital operations. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the plan is to eventually declare insolvency because the costs to fix their bullshit is going to be too much, and have the government buy them out and remake CONRAIL. Once the government fixes their infrastructure on the taxpayer dime, they're going to start lobbying Congress to re-privatize CONRAIL for pennies on the dollar because of "free market efficiency".