This only works if execs have the company's best interests at heart, which they don't. They reap the benefits when things go well but jump ship as the company files bankruptcy when things go south.
You need Unions. Blue collar workers care about safety and can pressure execs into doing the safe thing when the incentives aren't there higher up.
> You need Unions. Blue collar workers care about safety and can pressure execs into doing the safe thing when the incentives aren't there higher up.
Yep. This happens all the time in other unionized industries. Manager: "Do [unsafe thing that is against policy / the law, or even that is simply physically impossible]". Worker: "Yeeeeah, I'll be looping my union rep into this conversation". Manager: "On second thought, never mind".
I'd guess the problem's that the railroad workers' union is toothless.
[EDIT] Downvotes why? Disbelief? This comes second-hand from friends in various unionized workplaces, it's damn common. Without strong unions they'd 100% for-sure have been forced to choose between doing something unsafe, and losing their jobs, many times—and that's with managers already knowing unions are a factor, I assume the rate of attempts to get workers to do unsafe things (including setting various metrics or policy such that it's impossible to meet expectations while maintaining proper safety) is higher at non-union workplaces, or those with weak unions.
Also labour protections when reasonable action is taken to stop unsafe acts. If someone got fired for stopping unsafe thing they should get big enough payout. Probably years worth of wages.
I used to work in interstate freight (barge, not train). They make it crystal clear any employee has the right to stop work and are protected. The rail workers could have stopped working under their dangerous conditions, they just negligently kept going. The big bad railroad is to blame, but so are the employees.
The regulation was vague, so now you have a situation where two sides are interpreting things differently:
>She said: “The regulation at the time stated that a wheel bearing was bad when it had ‘visible seepage’. But that was very vague, and the bosses used that vagueness to their advantage. For me, it was whenever oil was visible on the bearing. For my bosses, they wanted actual droplets and proof it would leak on the ground.
That's probably why we have an audio leak story, because the company may have some ground to stand on because of this vagueness.
The railway has unions. They even wanted to strike at the end of last year over working conditions, but Congress and Biden quickly passed a law in December to prevent it.
A lot of people forget or don’t know about how the Railroads have a very different system of laws about several of the things that basically everyone else has to deal with.
Starting with social security, railroad employees have a different social security system and other related law regarding retirement benefits.
Second there’s the labour laws, much of which is older and more Byzantine than “normal” labour laws because of the historical context behind the era when they were introduced, and having been introduced in such a way that they managed to isolate themselves from other kinds of workers. You can really see this in the complex series of steps necessary for a railroad union strike, compared to other workers it’s just crazy, but each step of that complicated process had at least some justification from greed and backhanding to genuine concerns regarding the crucial role the railroad has in the fabric of the nation.
That sort of “crucial role” or justification has been at the heart of how the railroads got to the present state. The railroads were at one point in the 19th century, arguably more powerful than the federal government, to the point where in some places you had to clarify that “The President” didn’t mean the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad if you wanted to refer to the President of the United States. This level of power is obviously long gone, but it represents the level of power they once had, power which has translated into over a century of “special cases” carved out for railways in law at all levels of society across the USA.
The railroad unions can’t just threaten to stop work like others can, because the government has a right of refusal on their ability to strike, which basically acts as a muzzle on widespread union action and allows the railroads to squeeze the shit out of employees… if you haven’t, look at what the unions were trying to strike for last year… and then think about if employees willing to put up with that, will be the sort of people to take a stand and blow the whistle on bad workplace practices… railroad unions just don’t have the same level of power as normal unions, they do have power, just not “tactical” power, the kind you use to fight the small things like individual safety breaches by having everyone in the workplace threaten to walk out.
You need Unions. Blue collar workers care about safety and can pressure execs into doing the safe thing when the incentives aren't there higher up.