(The following article by Paul Beebe was posted on the Salt Lake Tribune website on April 27. Tim Donnigan is the BLET’s General Chairman for the Union Pacific Western Region. Rick Staheli is a member of BLET Division 846 in Salt Lake City.)
Union Pacific Railroad, which employs hundreds of people in Utah, has launched a medical policy that workers say rips up their right to privacy and subjects their personal lives to unreasonable scrutiny by the giant transportation company.
The policy distributed last week in a memo requires employees to submit to physical examinations any time the company wishes. Workers must allow former employers to provide medical records if UP requests them. Doctors and hospitals chosen by UP are required to disclose records covering the care of workers claiming to be injured on the job. Employee-chosen doctors “may freely disclose” private conversations to the company. And employees must waive any privileged-information protections provided under federal or state law.
Violations of the policy are grounds for immediate dismissal.
The memo, written by Richard Castagna, a UP superintendent, went to employees in the railroad’s Utah district, where 1,700 employees work. Similar memos were sent to workers in the company’s Portland and Los Angeles districts. Castagna did not explain why UP established the new policies. But they are drawing complaints from unionized employees who think the company will use safety as a screen to weed out undesirable workers.
“No one has the right to have my complete medical history,” said Rick Staheli, a UP locomotive engineer in Salt Lake City. “No one has that right, other than me, my wife and my doctor.”
Mark Davis, a UP spokesman in Omaha, did not make anyone at the company available for comment.
The danger to privacy and confidentiality is a central issue facing the medical profession. In 1996, Congress enacted the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act to protect personal information that could affect a person’s employability or influence his or her ability to get health insurance.
Staheli does not oppose disclosures of personal medical information pertinent to job safety. But the new policy goes too far, he said. It leaves open the possibility that UP managers could gain access to irrelevant information that might be used against employees, he said, and it undercuts the legal rights of workers and their families.
“They want to say it’s about safety. But, for me, it’s a fishing expedition to mitigate any future lawsuits” that could be brought by workers injured on the job or dismissed because of a medical condition, Staheli said.
The memo has caught the attention of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union, which believes UP is trying to reduce or eliminate the right of employees to safeguard their medical information.
“Not only will you have to submit to [physical] exams, but any time there may be an injury or an alleged injury, they are trying to force the employee to waive and surrender any and all of their rights with regard to the handling of their medical information,” said Tim Donnigan, a Pocatello-based general chairman of the union.
Donnigan will contest the policy because it does not comply with the union’s labor agreement with UP.
“They are trying to implement a new condition of employment that did not exist before,” Donnigan said. “As far as our plan is concerned, I’m not at liberty to discuss it at this time. But we will take whatever steps necessary to protect the interest of those locomotive engineers and members that we represent.”
Some employers are experimenting with ways to keep down health care costs by hiring only employees who won’t be a drain on the system. A memo sent to Wal-Mart’s board of directors last year said the world’s biggest retailer could hold down spending on health care and benefits by discouraging unhealthy people from working at the company.
Nearly 40 million working Americans do not have health insurance, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based private health care foundation.