About 1,000 engineers and conductors who work for Norfolk Southern will soon be able to report safety concerns anonymously through a federal system without any fear of discipline.
Norfolk Southern is the first of the six major freight railroads to follow through on promises made in the wake of last year’s fiery eastern Ohio derailment to join the Federal Railroad Administration’s program. The one-year pilot agreement is limited to members of just two unions who work in Atlanta, Georgia; Elkhart, Indiana; and Roanoke, Virginia.
But federal officials who urged the railroads to do more to improve safety touted the agreement Monday as a breakthrough coming just days before Saturday’s one-year anniversary of the disastrous Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that prompted temporary evacuations, a $1 billion and counting cleanup and lingering questions about long-term health consequences for residents in the area near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.
While unions support anonymous reporting as important for safety, railroads have resisted by arguing their own internal reporting is sufficient and anonymous reporting could be abused.
Wow. Their ‘breakthrough’ was an anonymous phone number they had to urge them to use… and not mandated to make available? Uh huh.