To understand what it’s like to work on the railroad — the Long Island Rail Road — a good place to start is the Sunken Meadow golf course, a rolling stretch of state-owned land on Long Island Sound.During the workweek, it is not uncommon to find retired L.I.R.R. employees, sometimes dozens of them, golfing there. A few even walk the course. Yet this is not your typical retiree outing.
A Disability Epidemic Among a Railroad’s Retirees
These golfers are considered disabled. At an age when most people still work, they get a pension and tens of thousands of dollars in annual disability payments — a sum roughly equal to the base salary of their old jobs. Even the golf is free, courtesy of New York State taxpayers.
With incentives like these, occupational disabilities at the L.I.R.R. have become a full-blown epidemic.
Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time.
The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation’s most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety.
6 comments:
Those saftey awards are crap. Many employee's get hurt on the job. The LIRR doesn't like when you report an injury. Managers/Supervisors try and talk you out of reporting injuries because of the paperwork. They can get reprimanded and be put on trial by the LIRR if too many employees get hurt. If employees get hurt, the LIRR labels you as accident prone and tries to get you fired. I had to hide a broken hand for six weeks by wearing a removeable cast that would fit under my work glove. When you do get hurt, the first thing the LIRR does is looks for what saftey rule you broke. We even have a saftey rule about paper cuts. Most employees only start revealing there injuries when they are about to retire. The LIRR is dangerous places to work. The LIRR gives you 12 sick days a year, but they make them impossible to use. This is because if you do get hurt, they make you use up all your sick and vacation days first.
over paid jerk offs
This is our money. Add this to the scandal of the lawyers who were put on payroll and collect pensions from school districts in Nassau and Suffolk. It makes me sick. Long Island is corrupt to the core; wait, so is NYC! Shit.Nevertheless, I'll stay in Queens. We still have a sense of community.
Anonymous said...
over paid jerk offs
You would love to be one :P
over paid jerk offs???
Yeah, lets see you work in the situations they have.Nice dialogue.
Meanwhile the riders still pay the price by falling into the gaps like my 75 year old mother did coming from the hospital after visiting her dying son. What a joke of a settlement they tried to offer her!
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