(The following story by Lindsay Peterson appeared on the Tampa Tribune website on May 2.)
TAMPA, Fla. — Bobby Lightfoot braced himself as the train engineer hit the brakes in the Polk County rail yard, but the hard stop rippled through the railroad cars to where Lightfoot stood, throwing him over a railing and onto the pavement 8 feet below.
On the way to Brandon Regional Hospital later, one of Lightfoot’s bosses at CSX Transportation told him what to do – to keep the company from having to report his injury to the federal government.
“Don’t let them give you a prescription,” Lightfoot says he was told. When a nurse gave him a sling, he gave it back. Not because he didn’t need it but because the sling would also trigger the reporting requirement. “If my supervisors saw me in that, they’d go into orbit,” he said.
Lightfoot’s experience in 2003 mirrors several detailed in a Federal Railroad Administration report released last week.
The report said the actions of certain CSX supervisors sent the “chilling” message throughout the CSX system that workers who reported on-the-job injuries and sought medical treatment would be penalized.
Florida transportation officials are proposing a partnership with CSX as part of a multimillion-dollar deal to buy CSX tracks for an Orlando commuter rail system. The commuter trains would share the tracks with CSX freight trains, and the state would take the liability for accidents on the line, even those caused by CSX.
The liability provision requires the approval of the Florida Legislature and has passed in the House. It was stripped out of the Senate’s transportation bill, but supporters of the deal say it could be restored before the session ends today.
Last week’s federal report repeated the findings of October’s draft report, adding details of 19 cases from Georgia to New York in which federal officials say CSX’s harassment and intimidation of injured workers violated safety rules.
CSX pays bonuses to supervisors who keep injury reports low. The company boasted to shareholders last year that its “reportable injury” rate had dropped 40 percent in three years.
Federal regulators say that stifling injury reporting can disguise serious safety problems, and the rail administration report recommended that the company be fined.
Based in Jacksonville, CSX is a Fortune 500 company that operates in 23 states with about 35,000 employees. It controls about 1,700 miles of tracks across Florida.
In response to the federal report and other harassment allegations, spokesman Gary Sease said the company “does not tolerate intimidation or harassment of injured employees.”
The company has implemented measures to correct the “isolated instances of this behavior” that federal inspectors found, Sease said.
“We will remain vigilant to ensure that all managers and employees continue to adhere to CSX’s rules and ethics, including the proper care for employees who are injured and the correct reporting of that injury consistent with company and federal requirements.”
Charges that railroad companies harass injured workers go back decades, federal officials say. It was so bad in the 1990s that in 1996 the federal government required companies to adopt detailed anti-harassment programs. In 2003, the Federal Railroad Administration addressed renewed problems at CSX.
Its report last week said that it was particularly concerned when it received complaints from two railroad unions in August 2006 that CSX officers were harassing workers, trying to “manage the injury reporting numbers, instead of managing safety.”
After a yearlong investigation, the rail administration’s safety office found that many of the union complaints were valid.
Worker Fired After Making Report
The report describes CSX supervisors telling workers that reporting an injury could end their careers. One worker was fired after making a report.
In case after case, supervisors told injured workers to return prescriptions they’d received and have their doctors remove medication orders from their records. In one case, a man who had injured his leg and foot in a derailment was told he couldn’t have crutches. The railroad is required to report all injuries serious enough for the worker to need prescription drugs or medical equipment, including crutches and slings.
In the 2006 derailment case in Russell, Ky., the injured man was prevented from going home after being treated at the emergency room. Instead, he was driven to CSX offices, where supervisors lifted him into an office chair, rolled him into a room and questioned him for four hours.
In a 2005 case in Atlanta, a man who had damaged his wrist moving a piece of equipment was discouraged from seeing his doctor. He was also told that the way his supervisor “earns his pay is not to have any reportable injuries,” the federal report said.
Several of the injury cases the federal agency investigated involved larger safety problems, such as a derailment, defective equipment and leaking chemicals.
Five CSX workers in Florida interviewed by the Tribune said employee harassment continues. The federal legislative director of the United Transportation Union, which represents (some) railroad workers, agreed.
“We know this is still a continuing problem and hope there’s improvement,” said the union’s James Brunkenhoefer.
Supervisor ‘Chewed Me Up’
Lightfoot, 54, said one of the first things he thought after flying off the train south of Bradley Junction was that he didn’t want the trouble he knew would come with an injury report.
In 1990, he was badly shaken up when the train he was conducting hit a pickup. An emergency room doctor gave him prescription drugs, but his bosses told him to return them, and he did.
Six years later, he complained about a loud ringing in his ears after a hose popped near his head. Instead of taking Lightfoot to a doctor, he said, a supervisor took him to a drugstore for medicine.
Lightfoot already had a reputation for calling the CSX hot line to report safety problems he saw on the tracks. Bosses called him “Hot Line Lightfoot,” he said. After a knee injury in 2001, he said, a supervisor took him into a room and lambasted him as the “most unsafe” employee he knew.
“He chewed me up one side and down the other,” Lightfoot said. “They say they want you to report things, but when you do, they don’t like it.”
In 2003, Lightfoot was in the middle of his shift when he was thrown off the train, landing on his feet. His back began to hurt, but he hoped it would ease up, so he finished his shift. The next morning, he could barely move his shoulder, which was twisted as he lost his grip on the rail car railing. He called a supervisor, who took him to the hospital in Brandon.
By the end of the next weekend, Lightfoot’s back was worse. Soon diagnosed with a sprain, he left his conducting duties for physical therapy. After returning to work five months later, he hurt his back again pulling hard on a rail switch to shift rail traffic from one set of tracks to another.
This time, Lightfoot said, his supervisor in Tampa was so angry at the news that he brought Lightfoot into a room, saying Lightfoot couldn’t leave until he explained in detail what had happened.
The conversation became heated and Lightfoot said he finally left the room. His medical records show that discs in his middle and lower back had ruptured.
He hasn’t been back to work at CSX since that day in November 2003. His doctor told him that if he didn’t leave the railroad, he’d wind up in a wheelchair, said his wife, Sandra.
Lightfoot sued CSX in his 2003 accident when he was flipped off the train. A jury found that CSX’s negligence contributed to the accident, but it held Lightfoot partly responsible, too. A judge ordered CSX to pay $240,600. After attorney fees and court costs, Lightfoot said he got about $115,000.
Despite her husband’s bad experiences, Sandra Lightfoot says he misses the railroad, where he worked for 31 years. “He switches cars in his sleep,” she said. “He’ll say, ‘You watch out, somebody’s going to get hurt on that.'”