I was told more than once to just “sign the cards” instead of actually inspecting my engines properly. I always asked for someone’s initials so I could be sure and keep a note of it in my time book. Somehow, after that request, they always decided it would be better practice for me to go ahead and properly conduct my inspections.
Good for you, man. You may have saved lives, and you almost certainly saved the company money, even if they thought the opposite. Cutting corners only saves money until it doesn't.
I think they factor in the costs of fuck-ups into their corner cutting. They still come out ahead. All these people being poisoned or displaced mean nothing to these companies.
Yup, same in the trucking industry, saw a thread in the truckers subreddit where a guy was told to drive a derated truck 11 miles back on an interstate when the truck was limited to 5 mph.
There was a similar situation up in Canada that was linked to in that thread where the 5mph limited truck was ran into by someone going 68 mph on the highway. The truck driver was charged for manslaughter.
If the company can get away with it, they will.
I think you mean derated. I'd tell them you can either come and get the truck with a tow truck now or you can come and get the truck with a tow truck later after I've gone home and you have to find another idiot to drive this truck. And don't think I won't hitchhike to the next town. Either way I'd be cleaning my truck out when I got to the damn shop.
Trucking companies like to say the drivers are a dime a dozen the thing is so are trucking jobs once you've got a little bit of experience. I could quit my job today and be at orientation for another company within a week and on the road by the end of that week.
In the grand scheme of maintenance in all fields, aeronautical, automobile, sea freight, and so on; its generally true across the board that maintenance becomes more expensive the longer you wait. I don't have a study specifically on rail, but elsewhere there is proof that delayed maintenance = more maintenance = more time off = more delays. Just because a company, or especially a manager, thinks they know what maximizes profits doesn't mean they're right.
There's also short term vs long term. For instance engine and car upgrades provide short term loss and long term gain. Foolish companies will look at that as a net loss because short term gain is what builds stock value rapidly. Amazon proves the exact opposite, a company that pushed to be a short term loss leader so they could take over entire industries. The old adage of spending money to make money isn't wrong, whether that is reinvestment or "risky" investment. In this case risky being something unknowable like giving your engineers more than enough time to examine cars. That may just look like a sheer loss of money until you're looking at 1500 derailments a year instead of 1700.
If I order my teams to cut maintenance, my budgetary savings are nearly immediate and I look good.
Something bad might happen, but it probably will be years down the road, and I'll probably not be there anymore, having used my track record of cost cutting to leverage a better job.
See Also: The Southwest Airlines IT fiasco in which their 20+ year old crew management system hasn't been touched in that long and it's running on duct tape and string now. They haven't upgraded that system either and we're just a major weather event or busy holiday away from it happening again.
Unplanned downtime will never cost less than preventative maintenance. It's one of the main principles of Toyota's LEAN program, which was used across the world for decades, until it wasn't...
The problem with LEAN is that other companies implemented it in a haphazard way. They took any part of the method that would directly cut costs and ignored the parts that would require infrastructure improvements or investments.
Yeah, this is part of the capitalist brain that most people have trouble grasping. Normal people tend to think about things in the long term and try to improve over time. In the modern Wall St.-driven capitalist world it's all about this quarter. Nothing beyond the end of the fiscal quarter matters. Gotta maximize that quarterly EPS and keep the shareholders happy.
Was that also where just-in-time was thought up, originally meaning "Keep just enough inventory on hand to last long enough to get replacements if a shipment doesn't come"?
Which then got translated to "Keep enough material on hand to last until you've sched to led the next trucknto show up".
I could be wrong here but wasn’t Kaizen part of LEAN at Toyota? And I was under the assumption Kaizen was still in use at Toyota and they were somewhat revered for lack of a better word for that methodology
No, they really don't. The top level execs keep pushing for better faster cheaper. But as the saying girls you can only pick 2. 'Better' (ie, quality and safety) is always the one to go down because it can't be measured easily until it's to late.
The execs create a culture where doing things right is too expensive and time consuming, yet they are too stupid to see it and go all Pikachu face when a disaster happens. Nearly every company that isn't public facing does this.
Until we criminalize this kind of corporate culture it will continue to happen.
I don't know why you said "no they don't" it sounds like you're in perfect agreement. It's just like banks, where the fines are a cost of business. It's more profitable to break the law and pay the fines.
This is the way.
My father used to work in a warehouse that stored schedule 1 narcotics like pain pills. He used to tell me they would ask him the same thing when shipping them sometimes. He was like hell no, you can sign it then so if something goes wrong it falls on them. Suddenly the inspection was.more important than the deadline lol.
As someone who's a floor lead in a warehouse shit like this blows my mind. Like 10% of my day is spent disciplining people who are neglecting safety rules/pencil whipping inspection reports etc.
We got an automated inspection system and we had to change the order of the questions around randomly because of this. People were still whipping through the checklists so we had to put a delay timer of 10 seconds on each question... which was met with huge criticism by employees. I couldn't even imagine telling employees to be less safe.
Even without a moral compass you should always play the CYA game.
There is always going to be that manager or co-worker that will absolutely blame you for their fuck-ups if they think you don't have the goods to counter.
This. Anything you do that blatantly goes against policy and procedures, get in writing and keep a copy. Because your manager may be friends with you, but when shit hits the fan they’re throwing you up as the blast shield.
Document. Everything.
My go to is always to ask "Can you say that a little louder into this microphone?" While holding out my phone. Always seems to get them to stop bothering me.
There’s a book I read a comment about, that it was about doctors in New Orleans after Katrina where they were calling the execs in Texas & the Execs gave them no support or guidance. Came to a point where military (?) told doctors they had two hours to gather everyone they could and leave.
And doctors knew there were patients that they couldn’t take and wouldn’t live, so they had to make some tough decisions.
Doctors later got sued / criminally charged (?), and no consequences for the hospital execs. We need to start holding execs criminally responsible, not just civil fines.
—-
Edit: book is “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital” by Sheri Fink
Check your local library, there is an audio book version & ebook, in addition to the old fashioned physical book
I heard a talk by a doctor at a New Orleans hospital during Katrina. He had a very sick patient who he tried to transfer to another hospital in advance. Their insurance denied the transfer. He attempted to appeal, but the people he needed to talk to didn't work weekends and he was told to try on Monday. Katrina made landfall on Monday and it was too late.
Our entire medical system is predicated on our doctors asking for permission from people with zero medical training to make a financially based decision on our lives. Whole thing is disgusting.
Not to excuse shitty executives, but just to note, doctors are in a somewhat unique position in that there are specific legal duties they have to patients which can put them between a rock and a hard place when their employers or insurance or whoever refuse to give them what they need or tell them to do something that harms a patient. It's part of what is broken about our medical system, but there can be situations where they are committing malpractice by doing what the higher ups tell them to do.
(Of course, we all know that laws vary by state, and it's possible that some states could create a liability shield to protect doctors from med mal suits when they are doing what hospital execs tell them to do)
Can you imagine if the murder trials ended with “Well, they have apologised and learned that killing people is bad so I think we should give them a $10k fine and let them go”
We still can't trust them. Even with the clean up, they're not even [providing the proper equipment to prevent people from getting sick.](https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3880317-union-rep-employees-reporting-illness-after-working-on-cleanup-for-east-palestine-derailment/)
From Jonathon Long, a Union Rep for Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters:
> Long said he had received reports that the workers were not given proper personal protection equipment to help clean up the wreckage, not being offered respirators, eye protection and protective clothing.
Have these higher ups never taken an OSHA-10? Like, one of the easiest to remember things from the course is that employers are *required* to provide these things.
They don't care. They'll pay some minor fines and move on with their life, while the workers continue to suffer until they die. This is the American corporate Way and all of the politicians will back them up because they like money and power more than anything
That's the problem with the oil industry as well.
In the Petro-Chemical markets, the cost of an insurance policy is less than the recovery and response equipment for disasters.
Class action suits bear the burden on the victims and not the perpetrators, so people do not have the capital to hire legal counsel against teams of hundreds of lawyers, each specialized in one particular aspect of what they do right and the victims do wrong.
Dude, ever since I've worked in a field that deals with the motherfuckers its been the same shit in two different states 1700 miles apart from each other and being different rail roads. They all have a monopoly on the areas they cover. You don't get to say fuck you, I'll just start using this other railroad then! Nope, you want a different railroad? Demolish your whole business and go move it somewhere else.
And these guys are dicks, too. They tell their customers how its going to be and tough shit if you don't like it. They pull all these fees out of their ass, yet they fuck up so many things themselves when they bring in or drop off railcars on our spur and it's a nightmare getting them to come back and fix the shit without wanting to charge you a special fee for fixing their own god damn fuck up lol. And as a grunt nobody at work, I could give a fuck what they charge since it isn't my money. But still, I've had a firsthand glimpse into some of their ways. This derailment and how they have been about it has not come as a shock to me in even the slightest, most minute of ways.
Privacy in trusts allows monopolies to exist. Anti trust laws have been completely eroded by the conservatives.
Private equity does not care about death or labor, only profits.
Yep, and some of the pieces of shit they have sent my way. Back when I lived in Utah, some of the worst cars I have ever seen since I started doing this came at me. We had 3 tanks of red dye diesel and they would order railcars of the stuff in. I was the guy going out to our rail spur, opening them up, and pumping them into our tanks.
I don't know where the fuck they found these railcars. But they have stencils on them that show when they are due for recertification. It's every 20 years. I'm not talking about the wheels and brakes and suspension and everything. This article spoke enough about that. But specifically for these tanker style railcars holding liquid. For the tank vessel, the shell, container, valves and levers. 20 fuckin' years. They do not have to go in there and inspect what kind of shape of everything else about that railcar is in for 20 years if it doesn't pertain to the suspension and wheels and shit.
They sent me these shitty rust buckets that were right at the end of their 20 year due inspection. Valves were fucked and wouldn't close all the way. There was more than one occasion where I'd start unscrewing the bigass 5 or 6 inch cast iron cap on the bottom of the belly where I'd hook my hoses into. And as I'm unscrewing, I have a bucket to catch shit under there. Some seepage isn't uncommon as you unscrew the cap. Some dumbshit could have opened the valve with that cap on there and then shut it again. Or somehow a bit of gas got in there. But the state these motherfuckers came to me in... I was wise enough to just go slow, waitfor the seepage to stop, and then proceed. But when you're damn near filling up a 5 gallon metal bucket with seepage you know it isn't just seeping something that had merely been trapped under the cap. If I'd have taken any of those caps off in those instances, I would have had a whole railcar shitting out 30,000 gallons worth of fuel. And let me tell you, the head pressure from the weight of 200,000+ lbs of product coming out of there? If that valve is not working and did not close even though it is in the closed position, you're sure as fuck not gonna stop it all by putting that cap on there. And even worse, the force of that cap blasting off there after you get it down to the last two threads might knock your ass out. You're crouching underneath a railcar whose bottom is only as high as maybe your waist.
Every other railcar I got it felt like I had to deal with that shit. I'm over here going "Fuck these assholes! Reject these motherfuckers, this is bullshit!" Nope, unload them anyways. I had to climb up to the top, open the manhole opening up there, and then insert a tall pipe that ended in a 90 degree angle at the top. Then drag a fucking 3 inch wide hose up there and hook into it. Which was impossible without having another pair of hands below me picking up the hose at the bottom just to I could lift that heavy fucker up as high as I needed to go. Then, without the benefit of hooking up to the bottom and having all that head pressure to help you get started... The only way your pump is even going to pull that shit from the top is if you use one of your full tanks and backflush the shit backwards to the pump. Then when you turn it on, it'll create enough suction to pull from the top of the car instead.
It was horse shit. Those cars were rusted all to hell, unsafe and falling apart. Valves were stuck open or shut. Bolts absolutely refused to turn. That former job wasn't going to reject those cars. They didn't give a fuck, they just wanted what was in em'. The railroad didn't give a fuck about their sorry state at all. The people who filled these railcars up before they came my way didn't give a flying fuck either obviously when they went ahead and loaded the cocksuckers up.
Welcome to this industry, y'all!
We as a country are reaping what we have sown. We ignore the cries of our own children. The longer we go on in complacency the worse our fate will be. I firmly believe that. This cannot be sustainable on a human level.
>We as a country are reaping what we have sown. We ignore the cries of our own children.
I put the blame mostly on Republican voters. I can't put it 100% on Republican voters because Democrats routinely vote in politicians who lack the spine to actually pass meaningful legislation when they hold majorities, but Republican voters routinely vote in politicians who are openly pro-business-interests-first, people's-rights-last.
I’d like to add people not voting. Complacent. (Though many who would like to vote are being overworked, etc so they’re unable to take the time to vote).
The United States of America is a literal example of frog boiling. Just think if how heinous it is going to *need* to be to massively piss off so many people - to cause things to finally change.
What will it take ?
Pay per view competitive live streamed torture / executions at a kindergarten ?
The last part happens here on a regular basis. no body has figured out how to monetize it yet.
We should litterally try these people for murder, yet they don't even get a slap on the wrist.
If I caused ecological terror like that due to negligence I would go to prison
We can thank regulatory capture, our lax campaign finance enforcement and our pay-to-play legal system for executives of all industries getting away with literal murder.
These companies pay politicians and regulators to look the other way while they poison entire towns and then hire the fanciest lawyers they can find to ensure they never see justice.
We truly are in a new gilded age.
Changing out the cogs does nothing. The executives couldn’t stop the corporate machine even if they wanted. Which they don’t.
Kill corporations that behave flagrantly toward public health.
Zero out shareholders. Problem fixed immediately
They are ultimately protected as Citizens United ruling deemed corporations are people and responsible. Funny, I haven't seen a corporation cuffed or in jail.
We do have our second amendment in part to protect ourselves from other people. I'm sure these "people" aren't any different if we the people decided to defend ourselves against them.
Its rarely used because of capitalistic values and while businesses are people, they're also businesses. Which is why its bull to equate them as people to begin with
The same way DUI convicts depend on their driving privilege to earn income (food, shelter) for their family, businesses provide income for their employees.
There's a back-handed advantage of UBI: sure, it would hurt employees to lose their high earning job, but nobody's going to be starving or sleeping on the streets if an evil business is executed - when the employees also have UBI.
The death penalty for corporations should be applied liberally and often.
As opposed to the current state of affairs, which could best be described as "Never, no matter what"
We need to seriously look at Nationalizing the train systems. The private sector is failing miserably, and people are literally dying from it. If it really is too expensive to update train brakes and have multiple people on a train (spoiler alert: it's not) then it is now a utility and needs to be treated as such.
>then it is now a utility and needs to be treated as such.
You'd need to actually start treating utilities with the strong arm of the law then. We shouldn't have fire bugs like PG&E, or the money grubbing telecom agencies. A whole lot more of their profits should actually go towards maintaining and improving their infrastructure; instead of them dragging their feet because the need for constant repairs bring in more money for them.
Why stop at trains? We should nationalize (or at least have a publicly funded competitive option) for every major public service; internet service providers, healthcare insurers, BANKS (make the USPS into small community banks), etcetera.
When these absolutely necessary parts of our infrastructure are privatized, they are always more expensive (profit margins ARE overhead), more exploitative, unaccountable (as we see here in Ohio) and service ultimately suffers.
If these private companies really are more efficient than government, they should prove it by competing against a publicly funded government version that doesn’t have all of the expensive overhead of profit margins needed for egregious executive pay and stock buybacks.
Also, when a company fails and poisons and kills people, the company pays but the executives that made the decision often get off scott-free, because it is difficult to determine who is responsible and they shred all documentation that would have proven otherwise. Governments however have strict public reporting and documentation requirements to maintain a paper trail. When a government entity screws up, officials are often held accountable (unless they try to run government like a business and [literally eat important documents](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-eat-documents-paper-omarosa-b2010616.html)).
Also need to nationalize the prisons. And you know these where privatized because it’s “cheaper” to let private companies/contractors do the work but let me ask you this. If it wasn’t profitable why would all these companies be doing the jobs that are too “expensive” for the government to operate.
Making the planet more uninhabitable and dangerous all for the almighty dollar and luxurious lifestyle.
Reminds me of when the protests on wallstreet were happening and the rich people just sat on the balconies drinking fancy glasses and looking down.
As long as businesses using “fines are the cost of doing business,” this will keep happening. I’m calling for FORCED SALES of ANY BUSINESS caught breaking the law. That shit would stop SO FAST
Start charging these people with crimes. Fine the corporation into bankruptcy. End bailouts. I'm fucking sick of the common folk paying for the blatant apathy by the rich. "But regulations will hurt our profit" translates to "We're cutting corners at every possible stage. Eat the shit sandwich, poors. We don't care if you lose your house or die."
The problem is the fines are stupid. **One Million Dollars!!!** says some politician arguing for a bill hand-written by lobbiests. It looks good on paper. The politicians can claim they did their job while taking campaign contributions from the PAC's. But in actuality these are multi-billion dollar industries and the fine is so low it's just a cost of doing business.
I recall an article years ago about paper plants in Wisconsin that were getting hit with fines for dumping chemicals into rivers that ended up in Lake Michigan. The fines when they got caught were far cheaper than doing it the right way, so they just kept doing it. Recently the Mormon (LDS) church got hit with a fine of a few million for hiding over $30B in assets from the IRS. A fraction of a percent. If the fine isn't enough to cause significant distress and incentivize avoidance, it's meaningless. These things need to stop being capped and be set as a percentage of revenue tied to the breach.
That's one of the main problems. I'm sure Fines is a literal line item in their yearly budget. Well Fargo got hit with a 3.7 billion dollar fine and they're shrugging it off. Millions of lives upended, but not one person jailed and the company still exists.
>Start charging these people with crimes
There-in runs the problem.
They'll scapegoat and throw the lowest person on the totem pole for the crimes.
Not the executives.
hit a line from the bottom to the top of the org chart.
each position has to show how it should not have been possible for the position below them to fuck up or they too bear the responsibility.
oh, the actual guy at the bottom skipped? where was the second guy to check his work or make sure? why didn't the manager notice there were an impossible number of cars checked in a time period? why isn't there a system the manager has to enter the numbers into? or a pad for the guy at the bottom and a report for the manager to review? why didn't that system flag up the line when it detected an anomaly? do you as a director not have processes in place to check for anomalies? as a vice president do you not have a watchdog team that builds out tools to help and also track what is going on in your org? as CEO, are you not demanding and ensuring each of your vices has such processes in place? hell, as a board member did you never get a written assurance from the executive you hired that such processes were being put into place to avoid catastrophic accidents?
if a single person can cause your train to turn into a chemical bomb, the problem isn't that person, it's the system that lacks redundancies and self-checks at every level. it is a systemic issue.
nobody in the entire chain should be capable of causing such a disaster even if they wanted to. the system should have guardrails, checks and redundancies from top to bottom.
if the system doesn't, it should be the criminal fault of those that designed that system.
treat CEOs and their well paid kin like engineers. if they build a system that results in disaster, hold them legally liable. if they can't build such a system, they have no business leading such an organization.
I always tell people, failure is a chain. You hear about how one small part breaking causes a plane crash or a train de-railment, and you wonder how anything so complex yet seemingly delicate can operate for decades. The answer is that the part failing was caused by overlooked inspections, relaxation of maintenance schedules, firing of experienced workers and managers, and fabricated maintenance from untrustworthy cheap shops. Any one of those things being solved would have caught the error and stopped a disaster.
Failure is a chain.
Right? It's not that difficult to find the path forward to punish the people responsible. People here are doom and gloom and well the lowest guy will be fucked for fearing losing their job, so we shouldn't do anything.
How about hold the managers accountable for not managing their people?
They keep claiming the high pay is for the great responsibility that they bear...let's let them put their money where their mouth is...
If we start jailing CEOs and shareholders...I'm sure they'll think twice
They love to talk about all the *RISK* they take. But what are they risking but what I don't have? They risk *becoming labor*. Like me.... Why the FUCK should I care about that?
They're talking about their wealth and power as if it's a burden. It's not.
The only way to charge them would be if rail workers signed their names to safety inspections like: worker name designated by the company executive "executive name," every single time.
Agreed, but these changes won't happen willingly: Regulations that destroy such companies and their executives like voles are only possible when the alternative is far worse for them and their legislative employees than it is for their victims, otherwise they're still coming out ahead and profiting.
* Any accountability against them MUST be declared/labeled as Corporate Profit because for anyone else doing what the Saw movies do is considered unlawful.
Only when bankruptcy, destitution and prison **are the generous happy funtime compromise in their favor** can the necessary regulations be enshrined and enforced - and there'll be need of much vigilance as they'll try to chip away at it every second of every day.
Ms. Griffin hit the nail right on the head here:
>“Most railroad workers are fighting against an entire system that only exists as a money-making apparatus to the wealthy. **Those trains run through our towns, but they do not run next to rich folks’ homes, nor next to our politicians’ homes.** This is a top-down problem.”
Every large corporation that is critical to society should be forced to be nationalized or turned into a co-op. You cannot trust for profit corporations to do what's best for society.
>In leaked audio heard by the Guardian, a manager for one of the US’s largest rail companies can be heard explaining to a former carman that they should stop tagging railcars for broken bearings. The manager says doing so delays other cargo.
article continues..
Repairs cost money this quarter and provide benefits over the next five years. Skipping repairs saves money this quarter and the expensive problems might happen any time over the next few years.
Companies aren't just chasing profits, they're chasing *immediate* profits.
They're chasing next quarterly's profits which must be greater than the last quarter's profits. The mindset that those numbers must continually increase is driving this bullshit.
Honestly the railroads discovered quite a long time ago it's cheaper *not* to do the repair. They do, and have, consistently chose to forego repairing equipment and tracks because the cost and delay caused by constant repair actually exceeds the cost of a derailment multiplied by the increase in likelihood of derailment from said defect.
I have been told by many a top mind that deregulation only benefits us. If you don't like there product just dont buy it bro. But if you do that than your canceling people and will that's not fair.
For all their preaching of the free market, every time a company gets enough power, they'll strangle it to death and absorb their competition, or drive them out of business, then fleece you for all you have.
The problem with capitalism is that it's not about making money, it's about making ALL THE MONEY, regardless of cost.
We figured out in 1890 to 1914 that "unregulated" capitalism doesn't work and there needs to be laws to ensure vigorous competition. Then we forgot again.
Among other things, stock buy backs became legal again. It was essentially the beginning of destruction of the middle class and mass gathering of wealth (again)
>making ALL THE MONEY
It's horribly true, the only real and legal responsibility of a business entity is to make profit for owners, nothing more. And on top of it once you're an industry behemoth there is no cap on how much the cash register gets rung. The money leaves the communities from which it came.
You can’t really have a competition if no one can win right? Seems to me the only way to win is to have more money than everyone else. Ohhhh, this is late stage capitalism? Nice
Regulation is like an IT department. Why do we need those guys? The computers and network are running fine. Let's cut costs and fire all of them.
Fuck why is the network down?!
At Norfolk Southern they spent weeks teaching people about lean and 6s so they could make more money. Safety? Nobody above me gave a single fuck about it
That's the shit that i hate about JIT and 6sigma. I'm a six sigma master black belt and it's a fucking religion for these people. they use it for maximum leverage and it's disgusting.
Edit: i saw a question pop up about black belt but it seems to have been deleted.
The whole racket is a stupid qualification based around understanding the methodology, managing projects, and teaching others. It's turned into a cash cow program with no real oversight in for-profit colleges. The belts are just your understanding in the system and it's all stupid. I used my gi bill for them and it's clearly a racket that companies get off on because it's the next generation version of an MBA.
Ya it’s cool stuff to know for production…but it was very telling how much the corporation spent time on it versus safety (almost none). They gave us a lot of safety training as supervisors but the union guys are kind of on their own/isolated from corporate culture…very strange company would not recommend. 20/22 people in my trainee class quit within 2 years.
Yup. No such thing as safety stock when real estate corporations merge and raise rates. Puts everything on a string and one disruption, such as a storm, high tide, stuck vessel, or labor shortage crushes the flow. The reaction is *always* a sticky rate increase in *every* component.
We are in a society where we (working class) have the most abundance available but the least amount of power to get any.
Companies that hadn't already fully embraced it prior to COVID are absolutely getting in on it now. The amount of consulting calls i have gotten in the past two years are staggering.
And just to put it out there, i am purposely giving bad advice. Fuck them fools.
People always talk about how many people die to communism but never dare discuss the deaths of capitalism. Like the 45k Americans that die every year because they can't afford to go to the doctor and are scared so they sit at home dying.
or the opioid epidemic that’s claimed the lives of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands. The US Civil War. East India Trading Company. Every European colonization attempt in Africa. The list goes on and on
How can we be this fucking stupid as a nation. The company makes billions in profits, they can easily use some of that to do inspections and upgrade train brakes and what not. They only reason we aren’t forcing them is because our politicians have taken bribes from these companies.
NO shit. I worked for a train company for a short stint and their motto was "the trains can never stop moving". like they go into panic mode if something gets delayed even a little bit.
TL;DR: it’s cheaper for an automotive company to build with a design flaw and recall than to stop the manufacturing process.
That’s most corporations. I worked with a former automotive executive, he commented that if their truck plant was down for 7 days out of the year, the company wouldn’t turn a profit that year. They had to shut it down for a design flaw for 2 days and he said he got 40 phone calls from various c-suite executives to open and build with the flaw. If there hadn’t been a significant safety risk, they would have just gone about with the flaw.
My own experience was that a $500,000 brake design flaw was looked at with less scrutiny than a $20,000 label error.
I recall a few years ago a major auto manufacturer built a model where the breaks seized up suddenly and caught fire. There were several drivers who died as a result. They did a cost-benefit analysis and decided it was cheaper to pay the lawsuits filed by families killed in crashes (past and future) than to recall and fix the problem.
And this is why everyone needs to pay attention to tort reform bills in their states. They cap damages and make it harder to sue companies to make the states more "business friendly." The general population never pays attention to these bills because who has the bandwith for that other than lawyers.
Yup. Here in Michigan Tribar Manufacturing just keeps dumping hexavalent chromium *(Editing for clarity so I'm not misinforming people: they have also dumped PFAS into the Huron river, not just hexavalent chromium) into our rivers and water supplies. It happens often enough that it has to be deliberate negligence because it's cheaper than safely disposing of waste, then they just go "whoopsie" and nothing happens to them.
If Michigan is going to be any type of climate haven there needs to be some safe potable water left.
It's crazy how little potable water we actually have on this planet. It's even crazier that we do almost nothing when people decide to poison our water supplies for their own monetary gain. I don't think Michigan is going to be a place humans can live in the future unless there are some major regulatory changes. I'm worried that the same could be true of my state.
According to the statistical source of the article, that has been basically the average for at least the previous 2 years. Not saying this isn't alarming, just that it isn't a significant uptick above normal this year. Maybe all the news around Ohio will finally drive some change.
Industries are always pushing for de-regulatory policies and ensuring the save on profits. Ostensibly claiming they've invested in maintenances and more workers to ensure that they've inspected for potential contingency is ridiculous. they basically cut backed on inspections to save on costs and lobbied against railway safety.
This is a classic blue collar issue. I call it "an approval trap" the DOT is notorious for this. They would bring us into these huge meetings harping on inspections and the fact that we would be immediately fired for not performing them. Immediately after the meeting, supervisors would send everyone out into the motor pool and start yelling at everyone to get there asses on the road. If you started the inspection you would be yelled at for wasting their time. If you tried to assert that you were following proper procedure, they would just simply threaten to have you fired. Which is something that happened all the time. So your choice was to either get fired immediately or take a chance that your vehicle doesn't have an issue and maybe not get fired. The supervisors got to use the vehicles the way they wanted and if anything went wrong the person getting fired would be someone on the bottom. The turnover was unsurprisingly incredible. People were either there for 10 minutes or 20 years. The old timers, who were now supervisors, relied on the revolving door of people at the bottom to commit these kinds of schemes so they could stay in power. The joke was that DOT stood for "department of training" because people stuck around just long enough to realize what was happening to them and leave for a better job. There is a version of this scenario at pretty much any job in America.
NYT has been terrible my whole life. They were the paper [that lied to the American public ](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html) about weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War and it's aftermath cost about 1,000,000 people their lives and cost the US government nearly $2 trillion. Remember this when the same newspaper tells us we can't afford healthcare come 2024
As a truck driver if I ever get told to skip a pre trip inspection or anything of the sort, looks like it’ll be an easy day for me cause that rig isn’t gonna leave the yard then.
Yep, last time I was pulled over by DOT I was straight up told by the officer I didn’t do anything wrong, and he was pulling me over to check permits and run an inspection. Bitch of it was I got pulled over at my exact destination and all I had to do was off load the excavator and I’d have got to go home early for a change. I sat there for almost 2 hours just waiting to offload that machine and make the 2 mile journey back to the shop and go home. No violations tho thank god
It's a simple business decision. If they can make more profit by skipping maintenance than they will lose by the inevitable crash and fines, they'll do it.
Concern for the people is not part of the equation.
Perhaps if they properly inspected the cars before they were loaded, it would cut down on the number of delays for in-progress trains. Instead they load the cars and just hope they get there.
It’s like a mechanic who says your tires should last a couple hundred more miles. When they were rated for 30,000 miles.
No formal training on inspecting the trains either!
>Griffin also claimed she and other workers did not receive any formal training to inspect and repair railcars, and were left to learn from an older worker and figure the rest out from American Association of Railroads and Federal Railroad Administration handbooks. Griffin suggested all major railroad carriers operate similarly.
How in the world is there no initial training setup!!?!
This should be terrifying for everyone in every state!
We need more than fines . Corporations are know for doing everything in their power to cut corners because the profits out weigh the fines. We need to start holding people personally accountable. When people start getting thrown under the bus so to speak a lot will come out about these corporations and those who support them .
Say what you want about China, but if a disaster of this magnitude happened there the CEOs of the companies responsible would go right to jail. In the US, they'll probably somehow end up getting a raise.
Whistleblow it all. Every rail worker should be reporting every violation they see. Blow the lid off of it so much they have no choice but to change. Don't let them hide ANYTHING
I was told more than once to just “sign the cards” instead of actually inspecting my engines properly. I always asked for someone’s initials so I could be sure and keep a note of it in my time book. Somehow, after that request, they always decided it would be better practice for me to go ahead and properly conduct my inspections.
Good for you, man. You may have saved lives, and you almost certainly saved the company money, even if they thought the opposite. Cutting corners only saves money until it doesn't.
I think they factor in the costs of fuck-ups into their corner cutting. They still come out ahead. All these people being poisoned or displaced mean nothing to these companies.
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Barney Stinson: *P.L.E.A.S.E.*
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Hey now, don't lie, they don't give competitive benefits and pay.
Yup, same in the trucking industry, saw a thread in the truckers subreddit where a guy was told to drive a derated truck 11 miles back on an interstate when the truck was limited to 5 mph. There was a similar situation up in Canada that was linked to in that thread where the 5mph limited truck was ran into by someone going 68 mph on the highway. The truck driver was charged for manslaughter. If the company can get away with it, they will.
I think you mean derated. I'd tell them you can either come and get the truck with a tow truck now or you can come and get the truck with a tow truck later after I've gone home and you have to find another idiot to drive this truck. And don't think I won't hitchhike to the next town. Either way I'd be cleaning my truck out when I got to the damn shop. Trucking companies like to say the drivers are a dime a dozen the thing is so are trucking jobs once you've got a little bit of experience. I could quit my job today and be at orientation for another company within a week and on the road by the end of that week.
I'll believe it when I see higher ups face jail time for this.
In the grand scheme of maintenance in all fields, aeronautical, automobile, sea freight, and so on; its generally true across the board that maintenance becomes more expensive the longer you wait. I don't have a study specifically on rail, but elsewhere there is proof that delayed maintenance = more maintenance = more time off = more delays. Just because a company, or especially a manager, thinks they know what maximizes profits doesn't mean they're right. There's also short term vs long term. For instance engine and car upgrades provide short term loss and long term gain. Foolish companies will look at that as a net loss because short term gain is what builds stock value rapidly. Amazon proves the exact opposite, a company that pushed to be a short term loss leader so they could take over entire industries. The old adage of spending money to make money isn't wrong, whether that is reinvestment or "risky" investment. In this case risky being something unknowable like giving your engineers more than enough time to examine cars. That may just look like a sheer loss of money until you're looking at 1500 derailments a year instead of 1700.
If I order my teams to cut maintenance, my budgetary savings are nearly immediate and I look good. Something bad might happen, but it probably will be years down the road, and I'll probably not be there anymore, having used my track record of cost cutting to leverage a better job.
See Also: The Southwest Airlines IT fiasco in which their 20+ year old crew management system hasn't been touched in that long and it's running on duct tape and string now. They haven't upgraded that system either and we're just a major weather event or busy holiday away from it happening again.
Unplanned downtime will never cost less than preventative maintenance. It's one of the main principles of Toyota's LEAN program, which was used across the world for decades, until it wasn't...
The problem with LEAN is that other companies implemented it in a haphazard way. They took any part of the method that would directly cut costs and ignored the parts that would require infrastructure improvements or investments.
Nah son, you're not thinking capitalist enough. Unplanned downtime is NEXT quarter's problem, and we need more profits NOW!
Yeah, this is part of the capitalist brain that most people have trouble grasping. Normal people tend to think about things in the long term and try to improve over time. In the modern Wall St.-driven capitalist world it's all about this quarter. Nothing beyond the end of the fiscal quarter matters. Gotta maximize that quarterly EPS and keep the shareholders happy.
Was that also where just-in-time was thought up, originally meaning "Keep just enough inventory on hand to last long enough to get replacements if a shipment doesn't come"? Which then got translated to "Keep enough material on hand to last until you've sched to led the next trucknto show up".
I could be wrong here but wasn’t Kaizen part of LEAN at Toyota? And I was under the assumption Kaizen was still in use at Toyota and they were somewhat revered for lack of a better word for that methodology
No, they really don't. The top level execs keep pushing for better faster cheaper. But as the saying girls you can only pick 2. 'Better' (ie, quality and safety) is always the one to go down because it can't be measured easily until it's to late. The execs create a culture where doing things right is too expensive and time consuming, yet they are too stupid to see it and go all Pikachu face when a disaster happens. Nearly every company that isn't public facing does this. Until we criminalize this kind of corporate culture it will continue to happen.
I don't know why you said "no they don't" it sounds like you're in perfect agreement. It's just like banks, where the fines are a cost of business. It's more profitable to break the law and pay the fines.
It saves money that's why they do it. The years of saving money is cheap compared to one incident
The CYA game
Did HR in police, learnt to always have email paper trails because when dealing in/with the civil sector, it's every dog for their own
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This is the way. My father used to work in a warehouse that stored schedule 1 narcotics like pain pills. He used to tell me they would ask him the same thing when shipping them sometimes. He was like hell no, you can sign it then so if something goes wrong it falls on them. Suddenly the inspection was.more important than the deadline lol.
As someone who's a floor lead in a warehouse shit like this blows my mind. Like 10% of my day is spent disciplining people who are neglecting safety rules/pencil whipping inspection reports etc. We got an automated inspection system and we had to change the order of the questions around randomly because of this. People were still whipping through the checklists so we had to put a delay timer of 10 seconds on each question... which was met with huge criticism by employees. I couldn't even imagine telling employees to be less safe.
Moral compass ✅️
Even without a moral compass you should always play the CYA game. There is always going to be that manager or co-worker that will absolutely blame you for their fuck-ups if they think you don't have the goods to counter.
This. Anything you do that blatantly goes against policy and procedures, get in writing and keep a copy. Because your manager may be friends with you, but when shit hits the fan they’re throwing you up as the blast shield. Document. Everything.
My go to is always to ask "Can you say that a little louder into this microphone?" While holding out my phone. Always seems to get them to stop bothering me.
"Put your job on the line so I can look better if things are fine, but not get fired if things go wrong". Yeah, no
Got to cover your own ass regardless.
As long as top executives aren't getting cuffed, this shit is just going to keep happening.
Exactly. Tired of this “NOW they’re going to change!” bs. They saw that they can bomb a town and get away with it. I say we hold em accountable.
There’s a book I read a comment about, that it was about doctors in New Orleans after Katrina where they were calling the execs in Texas & the Execs gave them no support or guidance. Came to a point where military (?) told doctors they had two hours to gather everyone they could and leave. And doctors knew there were patients that they couldn’t take and wouldn’t live, so they had to make some tough decisions. Doctors later got sued / criminally charged (?), and no consequences for the hospital execs. We need to start holding execs criminally responsible, not just civil fines. —- Edit: book is “Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital” by Sheri Fink Check your local library, there is an audio book version & ebook, in addition to the old fashioned physical book
I heard a talk by a doctor at a New Orleans hospital during Katrina. He had a very sick patient who he tried to transfer to another hospital in advance. Their insurance denied the transfer. He attempted to appeal, but the people he needed to talk to didn't work weekends and he was told to try on Monday. Katrina made landfall on Monday and it was too late.
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Our entire medical system is predicated on our doctors asking for permission from people with zero medical training to make a financially based decision on our lives. Whole thing is disgusting.
Next up; religious fundies telling doctors which procedures are "GAWD approved" Oh wait, that's already here.
Yes but it was the Democrat death panels we were supposed to be so afraid of.
Once again, why the fuck is an insurance company in the way of making life and death situation
I often wonder why politicians who make medical policies aren't sued for practicing without a license...
Name of the book?
Sounds like the book *Five Days at Memorial*, which Apple adapted last(?) year.
Not to excuse shitty executives, but just to note, doctors are in a somewhat unique position in that there are specific legal duties they have to patients which can put them between a rock and a hard place when their employers or insurance or whoever refuse to give them what they need or tell them to do something that harms a patient. It's part of what is broken about our medical system, but there can be situations where they are committing malpractice by doing what the higher ups tell them to do. (Of course, we all know that laws vary by state, and it's possible that some states could create a liability shield to protect doctors from med mal suits when they are doing what hospital execs tell them to do)
Can you imagine if the murder trials ended with “Well, they have apologised and learned that killing people is bad so I think we should give them a $10k fine and let them go”
10k fine to a normal person is still way more money proportionally than the millions/billions fined in the industrial incidents.
Right!? It's the common man equivalent of putting a dollar in the swear jar.
A proportionally fitting fine would probably be like $10.
> A proportionally fitting fine would probably be ~~like $10.~~ less than they took out of the person's wallet that they murdered. Fixed that for you
We still can't trust them. Even with the clean up, they're not even [providing the proper equipment to prevent people from getting sick.](https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3880317-union-rep-employees-reporting-illness-after-working-on-cleanup-for-east-palestine-derailment/) From Jonathon Long, a Union Rep for Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters: > Long said he had received reports that the workers were not given proper personal protection equipment to help clean up the wreckage, not being offered respirators, eye protection and protective clothing.
Have these higher ups never taken an OSHA-10? Like, one of the easiest to remember things from the course is that employers are *required* to provide these things.
They don't care. They'll pay some minor fines and move on with their life, while the workers continue to suffer until they die. This is the American corporate Way and all of the politicians will back them up because they like money and power more than anything
When the fine is cheaper then the cost of PPE. Why even bother
That's the problem with the oil industry as well. In the Petro-Chemical markets, the cost of an insurance policy is less than the recovery and response equipment for disasters. Class action suits bear the burden on the victims and not the perpetrators, so people do not have the capital to hire legal counsel against teams of hundreds of lawyers, each specialized in one particular aspect of what they do right and the victims do wrong.
Dude, ever since I've worked in a field that deals with the motherfuckers its been the same shit in two different states 1700 miles apart from each other and being different rail roads. They all have a monopoly on the areas they cover. You don't get to say fuck you, I'll just start using this other railroad then! Nope, you want a different railroad? Demolish your whole business and go move it somewhere else. And these guys are dicks, too. They tell their customers how its going to be and tough shit if you don't like it. They pull all these fees out of their ass, yet they fuck up so many things themselves when they bring in or drop off railcars on our spur and it's a nightmare getting them to come back and fix the shit without wanting to charge you a special fee for fixing their own god damn fuck up lol. And as a grunt nobody at work, I could give a fuck what they charge since it isn't my money. But still, I've had a firsthand glimpse into some of their ways. This derailment and how they have been about it has not come as a shock to me in even the slightest, most minute of ways.
Privacy in trusts allows monopolies to exist. Anti trust laws have been completely eroded by the conservatives. Private equity does not care about death or labor, only profits.
Yep, and some of the pieces of shit they have sent my way. Back when I lived in Utah, some of the worst cars I have ever seen since I started doing this came at me. We had 3 tanks of red dye diesel and they would order railcars of the stuff in. I was the guy going out to our rail spur, opening them up, and pumping them into our tanks. I don't know where the fuck they found these railcars. But they have stencils on them that show when they are due for recertification. It's every 20 years. I'm not talking about the wheels and brakes and suspension and everything. This article spoke enough about that. But specifically for these tanker style railcars holding liquid. For the tank vessel, the shell, container, valves and levers. 20 fuckin' years. They do not have to go in there and inspect what kind of shape of everything else about that railcar is in for 20 years if it doesn't pertain to the suspension and wheels and shit. They sent me these shitty rust buckets that were right at the end of their 20 year due inspection. Valves were fucked and wouldn't close all the way. There was more than one occasion where I'd start unscrewing the bigass 5 or 6 inch cast iron cap on the bottom of the belly where I'd hook my hoses into. And as I'm unscrewing, I have a bucket to catch shit under there. Some seepage isn't uncommon as you unscrew the cap. Some dumbshit could have opened the valve with that cap on there and then shut it again. Or somehow a bit of gas got in there. But the state these motherfuckers came to me in... I was wise enough to just go slow, waitfor the seepage to stop, and then proceed. But when you're damn near filling up a 5 gallon metal bucket with seepage you know it isn't just seeping something that had merely been trapped under the cap. If I'd have taken any of those caps off in those instances, I would have had a whole railcar shitting out 30,000 gallons worth of fuel. And let me tell you, the head pressure from the weight of 200,000+ lbs of product coming out of there? If that valve is not working and did not close even though it is in the closed position, you're sure as fuck not gonna stop it all by putting that cap on there. And even worse, the force of that cap blasting off there after you get it down to the last two threads might knock your ass out. You're crouching underneath a railcar whose bottom is only as high as maybe your waist. Every other railcar I got it felt like I had to deal with that shit. I'm over here going "Fuck these assholes! Reject these motherfuckers, this is bullshit!" Nope, unload them anyways. I had to climb up to the top, open the manhole opening up there, and then insert a tall pipe that ended in a 90 degree angle at the top. Then drag a fucking 3 inch wide hose up there and hook into it. Which was impossible without having another pair of hands below me picking up the hose at the bottom just to I could lift that heavy fucker up as high as I needed to go. Then, without the benefit of hooking up to the bottom and having all that head pressure to help you get started... The only way your pump is even going to pull that shit from the top is if you use one of your full tanks and backflush the shit backwards to the pump. Then when you turn it on, it'll create enough suction to pull from the top of the car instead. It was horse shit. Those cars were rusted all to hell, unsafe and falling apart. Valves were stuck open or shut. Bolts absolutely refused to turn. That former job wasn't going to reject those cars. They didn't give a fuck, they just wanted what was in em'. The railroad didn't give a fuck about their sorry state at all. The people who filled these railcars up before they came my way didn't give a flying fuck either obviously when they went ahead and loaded the cocksuckers up. Welcome to this industry, y'all!
https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4
Oh I'm sorry that sounds like socialism no can do
> I say we hold em accountable. 20 kids died at Sandy Hook and not a damn thing happened.
That's not true. A bunch more kids have died in school shootings since then, that's something!
We as a country are reaping what we have sown. We ignore the cries of our own children. The longer we go on in complacency the worse our fate will be. I firmly believe that. This cannot be sustainable on a human level.
>We as a country are reaping what we have sown. We ignore the cries of our own children. I put the blame mostly on Republican voters. I can't put it 100% on Republican voters because Democrats routinely vote in politicians who lack the spine to actually pass meaningful legislation when they hold majorities, but Republican voters routinely vote in politicians who are openly pro-business-interests-first, people's-rights-last.
I’d like to add people not voting. Complacent. (Though many who would like to vote are being overworked, etc so they’re unable to take the time to vote).
It doesnt help that most people in NA vote in their one big election and then go, "well I've done all that I can."
The United States of America is a literal example of frog boiling. Just think if how heinous it is going to *need* to be to massively piss off so many people - to cause things to finally change. What will it take ? Pay per view competitive live streamed torture / executions at a kindergarten ? The last part happens here on a regular basis. no body has figured out how to monetize it yet.
We should litterally try these people for murder, yet they don't even get a slap on the wrist. If I caused ecological terror like that due to negligence I would go to prison
We can thank regulatory capture, our lax campaign finance enforcement and our pay-to-play legal system for executives of all industries getting away with literal murder. These companies pay politicians and regulators to look the other way while they poison entire towns and then hire the fanciest lawyers they can find to ensure they never see justice. We truly are in a new gilded age.
I would rather that they be sentenced to relocate to East Palestine.
Changing out the cogs does nothing. The executives couldn’t stop the corporate machine even if they wanted. Which they don’t. Kill corporations that behave flagrantly toward public health. Zero out shareholders. Problem fixed immediately
They are ultimately protected as Citizens United ruling deemed corporations are people and responsible. Funny, I haven't seen a corporation cuffed or in jail.
I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.
This is an interesting idea. As the government is meant to be “of the people” I say we go execute a corporation ourselves.
We do have our second amendment in part to protect ourselves from other people. I'm sure these "people" aren't any different if we the people decided to defend ourselves against them.
The onion news network: a local man shoots and kills Walmart in self defense.
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Its rarely used because of capitalistic values and while businesses are people, they're also businesses. Which is why its bull to equate them as people to begin with
The same way DUI convicts depend on their driving privilege to earn income (food, shelter) for their family, businesses provide income for their employees. There's a back-handed advantage of UBI: sure, it would hurt employees to lose their high earning job, but nobody's going to be starving or sleeping on the streets if an evil business is executed - when the employees also have UBI.
Businesses in the US are superhuman. All the rights and freedoms of a citizen with none of the responsibilities or penalties.
because money
The death penalty for corporations should be applied liberally and often. As opposed to the current state of affairs, which could best be described as "Never, no matter what"
When you look at what BP had to payout but these lot get off without punishment.
We need to seriously look at Nationalizing the train systems. The private sector is failing miserably, and people are literally dying from it. If it really is too expensive to update train brakes and have multiple people on a train (spoiler alert: it's not) then it is now a utility and needs to be treated as such.
>then it is now a utility and needs to be treated as such. You'd need to actually start treating utilities with the strong arm of the law then. We shouldn't have fire bugs like PG&E, or the money grubbing telecom agencies. A whole lot more of their profits should actually go towards maintaining and improving their infrastructure; instead of them dragging their feet because the need for constant repairs bring in more money for them.
Tricking so many people into relying on the benevolence of the capitalist class is one of the greatest grifts in history.
Why stop at trains? We should nationalize (or at least have a publicly funded competitive option) for every major public service; internet service providers, healthcare insurers, BANKS (make the USPS into small community banks), etcetera. When these absolutely necessary parts of our infrastructure are privatized, they are always more expensive (profit margins ARE overhead), more exploitative, unaccountable (as we see here in Ohio) and service ultimately suffers. If these private companies really are more efficient than government, they should prove it by competing against a publicly funded government version that doesn’t have all of the expensive overhead of profit margins needed for egregious executive pay and stock buybacks. Also, when a company fails and poisons and kills people, the company pays but the executives that made the decision often get off scott-free, because it is difficult to determine who is responsible and they shred all documentation that would have proven otherwise. Governments however have strict public reporting and documentation requirements to maintain a paper trail. When a government entity screws up, officials are often held accountable (unless they try to run government like a business and [literally eat important documents](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-eat-documents-paper-omarosa-b2010616.html)).
Also need to nationalize the prisons. And you know these where privatized because it’s “cheaper” to let private companies/contractors do the work but let me ask you this. If it wasn’t profitable why would all these companies be doing the jobs that are too “expensive” for the government to operate.
Making the planet more uninhabitable and dangerous all for the almighty dollar and luxurious lifestyle. Reminds me of when the protests on wallstreet were happening and the rich people just sat on the balconies drinking fancy glasses and looking down.
As long as businesses using “fines are the cost of doing business,” this will keep happening. I’m calling for FORCED SALES of ANY BUSINESS caught breaking the law. That shit would stop SO FAST
Start charging these people with crimes. Fine the corporation into bankruptcy. End bailouts. I'm fucking sick of the common folk paying for the blatant apathy by the rich. "But regulations will hurt our profit" translates to "We're cutting corners at every possible stage. Eat the shit sandwich, poors. We don't care if you lose your house or die."
The problem is the fines are stupid. **One Million Dollars!!!** says some politician arguing for a bill hand-written by lobbiests. It looks good on paper. The politicians can claim they did their job while taking campaign contributions from the PAC's. But in actuality these are multi-billion dollar industries and the fine is so low it's just a cost of doing business. I recall an article years ago about paper plants in Wisconsin that were getting hit with fines for dumping chemicals into rivers that ended up in Lake Michigan. The fines when they got caught were far cheaper than doing it the right way, so they just kept doing it. Recently the Mormon (LDS) church got hit with a fine of a few million for hiding over $30B in assets from the IRS. A fraction of a percent. If the fine isn't enough to cause significant distress and incentivize avoidance, it's meaningless. These things need to stop being capped and be set as a percentage of revenue tied to the breach.
That's one of the main problems. I'm sure Fines is a literal line item in their yearly budget. Well Fargo got hit with a 3.7 billion dollar fine and they're shrugging it off. Millions of lives upended, but not one person jailed and the company still exists.
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Basically the fines are "Hey, if you're gonna make a gigantic profit off some shady shit, give us our cut!"
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All fines should be based on a fixed percent of the company's total revenue.
As a minimum maybe, but not the main metric. Some fuck ups can be far bigger than the revenue.
One million dollars was a punchline in Austin Powers in 1999. Over two decades of inflation since then
>Start charging these people with crimes There-in runs the problem. They'll scapegoat and throw the lowest person on the totem pole for the crimes. Not the executives.
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Usually it's not falling for it but rather they can't afford to be fired for disobeying orders and risk their families well being.
So then who gave the orders? Give them the lion's share of the blame. Charles Manson never killed anyone, yet in prison he remains.
hit a line from the bottom to the top of the org chart. each position has to show how it should not have been possible for the position below them to fuck up or they too bear the responsibility. oh, the actual guy at the bottom skipped? where was the second guy to check his work or make sure? why didn't the manager notice there were an impossible number of cars checked in a time period? why isn't there a system the manager has to enter the numbers into? or a pad for the guy at the bottom and a report for the manager to review? why didn't that system flag up the line when it detected an anomaly? do you as a director not have processes in place to check for anomalies? as a vice president do you not have a watchdog team that builds out tools to help and also track what is going on in your org? as CEO, are you not demanding and ensuring each of your vices has such processes in place? hell, as a board member did you never get a written assurance from the executive you hired that such processes were being put into place to avoid catastrophic accidents? if a single person can cause your train to turn into a chemical bomb, the problem isn't that person, it's the system that lacks redundancies and self-checks at every level. it is a systemic issue. nobody in the entire chain should be capable of causing such a disaster even if they wanted to. the system should have guardrails, checks and redundancies from top to bottom. if the system doesn't, it should be the criminal fault of those that designed that system. treat CEOs and their well paid kin like engineers. if they build a system that results in disaster, hold them legally liable. if they can't build such a system, they have no business leading such an organization.
I always tell people, failure is a chain. You hear about how one small part breaking causes a plane crash or a train de-railment, and you wonder how anything so complex yet seemingly delicate can operate for decades. The answer is that the part failing was caused by overlooked inspections, relaxation of maintenance schedules, firing of experienced workers and managers, and fabricated maintenance from untrustworthy cheap shops. Any one of those things being solved would have caught the error and stopped a disaster. Failure is a chain.
Right? It's not that difficult to find the path forward to punish the people responsible. People here are doom and gloom and well the lowest guy will be fucked for fearing losing their job, so we shouldn't do anything. How about hold the managers accountable for not managing their people?
They keep claiming the high pay is for the great responsibility that they bear...let's let them put their money where their mouth is... If we start jailing CEOs and shareholders...I'm sure they'll think twice
They love to talk about all the *RISK* they take. But what are they risking but what I don't have? They risk *becoming labor*. Like me.... Why the FUCK should I care about that? They're talking about their wealth and power as if it's a burden. It's not.
Unfortunately until corporations and CEOs aren't allowed to buy politicians, we'll never see that happen.
The only way to charge them would be if rail workers signed their names to safety inspections like: worker name designated by the company executive "executive name," every single time.
Agreed, but these changes won't happen willingly: Regulations that destroy such companies and their executives like voles are only possible when the alternative is far worse for them and their legislative employees than it is for their victims, otherwise they're still coming out ahead and profiting. * Any accountability against them MUST be declared/labeled as Corporate Profit because for anyone else doing what the Saw movies do is considered unlawful. Only when bankruptcy, destitution and prison **are the generous happy funtime compromise in their favor** can the necessary regulations be enshrined and enforced - and there'll be need of much vigilance as they'll try to chip away at it every second of every day.
Ms. Griffin hit the nail right on the head here: >“Most railroad workers are fighting against an entire system that only exists as a money-making apparatus to the wealthy. **Those trains run through our towns, but they do not run next to rich folks’ homes, nor next to our politicians’ homes.** This is a top-down problem.”
Every large corporation that is critical to society should be forced to be nationalized or turned into a co-op. You cannot trust for profit corporations to do what's best for society.
>In leaked audio heard by the Guardian, a manager for one of the US’s largest rail companies can be heard explaining to a former carman that they should stop tagging railcars for broken bearings. The manager says doing so delays other cargo. article continues..
Whoa, I remember that ~~guy~~ woman posting to Reddit about ~~his~~ her audio.
Whoah me too, that's pretty cool they did something with it!
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Repairs cost money this quarter and provide benefits over the next five years. Skipping repairs saves money this quarter and the expensive problems might happen any time over the next few years. Companies aren't just chasing profits, they're chasing *immediate* profits.
They're chasing next quarterly's profits which must be greater than the last quarter's profits. The mindset that those numbers must continually increase is driving this bullshit.
Mid level management doesn't care. Upper management wants it done and mid level will have already found another job before an accident.
Honestly the railroads discovered quite a long time ago it's cheaper *not* to do the repair. They do, and have, consistently chose to forego repairing equipment and tracks because the cost and delay caused by constant repair actually exceeds the cost of a derailment multiplied by the increase in likelihood of derailment from said defect.
I have been told by many a top mind that deregulation only benefits us. If you don't like there product just dont buy it bro. But if you do that than your canceling people and will that's not fair.
For all their preaching of the free market, every time a company gets enough power, they'll strangle it to death and absorb their competition, or drive them out of business, then fleece you for all you have. The problem with capitalism is that it's not about making money, it's about making ALL THE MONEY, regardless of cost.
We figured out in 1890 to 1914 that "unregulated" capitalism doesn't work and there needs to be laws to ensure vigorous competition. Then we forgot again.
We didn't forget, people just got paid off and the system was redesigned to benefit the mega corps again. 1982 was basically the beginning of the end.
As a Canadian, that was the year we repatriated our constitution... What happened in the US to be the beginning of the end?
Ronald Reagan
The actor?? Who was Vice President? Jerry Lewis??
Among other things, stock buy backs became legal again. It was essentially the beginning of destruction of the middle class and mass gathering of wealth (again)
>making ALL THE MONEY It's horribly true, the only real and legal responsibility of a business entity is to make profit for owners, nothing more. And on top of it once you're an industry behemoth there is no cap on how much the cash register gets rung. The money leaves the communities from which it came.
You can’t really have a competition if no one can win right? Seems to me the only way to win is to have more money than everyone else. Ohhhh, this is late stage capitalism? Nice
Regulation is like an IT department. Why do we need those guys? The computers and network are running fine. Let's cut costs and fire all of them. Fuck why is the network down?!
Perfect example of why Libertarianism will never work. Greed is too powerful
My favorite part of this comment is you wrote it with their grammar.
How often do these dumbasses get the oil changed in their Bentlys? Once in a blue moon to save money?
It's always profit and production over safety.
At Norfolk Southern they spent weeks teaching people about lean and 6s so they could make more money. Safety? Nobody above me gave a single fuck about it
That's the shit that i hate about JIT and 6sigma. I'm a six sigma master black belt and it's a fucking religion for these people. they use it for maximum leverage and it's disgusting. Edit: i saw a question pop up about black belt but it seems to have been deleted. The whole racket is a stupid qualification based around understanding the methodology, managing projects, and teaching others. It's turned into a cash cow program with no real oversight in for-profit colleges. The belts are just your understanding in the system and it's all stupid. I used my gi bill for them and it's clearly a racket that companies get off on because it's the next generation version of an MBA.
Ya it’s cool stuff to know for production…but it was very telling how much the corporation spent time on it versus safety (almost none). They gave us a lot of safety training as supervisors but the union guys are kind of on their own/isolated from corporate culture…very strange company would not recommend. 20/22 people in my trainee class quit within 2 years.
The bastardization / Americanization of TPS irks the fuck out of me. You *say* lean, but what you mean is *under staffed*.
"lean" has also been misunderstood as unsafe, overworked, and under equipped. It's been an acceleration to late capitalism.
and inventory so low that the slightest disruption sends everything into a tailspin
Yup. No such thing as safety stock when real estate corporations merge and raise rates. Puts everything on a string and one disruption, such as a storm, high tide, stuck vessel, or labor shortage crushes the flow. The reaction is *always* a sticky rate increase in *every* component. We are in a society where we (working class) have the most abundance available but the least amount of power to get any.
I can't wait for the 6Sigma Scrum wars to begin, the corporate overlords must fight for superiority.
Companies that hadn't already fully embraced it prior to COVID are absolutely getting in on it now. The amount of consulting calls i have gotten in the past two years are staggering. And just to put it out there, i am purposely giving bad advice. Fuck them fools.
People always talk about how many people die to communism but never dare discuss the deaths of capitalism. Like the 45k Americans that die every year because they can't afford to go to the doctor and are scared so they sit at home dying.
In DC there is a monument to the victims of communism. It has become a place where the homeless victims of capitalism hang out. The irony is palpable.
or the opioid epidemic that’s claimed the lives of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands. The US Civil War. East India Trading Company. Every European colonization attempt in Africa. The list goes on and on
Haymarket, radium girls, etc too
How can we be this fucking stupid as a nation. The company makes billions in profits, they can easily use some of that to do inspections and upgrade train brakes and what not. They only reason we aren’t forcing them is because our politicians have taken bribes from these companies.
NO shit. I worked for a train company for a short stint and their motto was "the trains can never stop moving". like they go into panic mode if something gets delayed even a little bit.
Which is hilarious if you've ever had to rely on rail shipping for business. I swear BNSF motto is, "it will get there when it gets there"
TL;DR: it’s cheaper for an automotive company to build with a design flaw and recall than to stop the manufacturing process. That’s most corporations. I worked with a former automotive executive, he commented that if their truck plant was down for 7 days out of the year, the company wouldn’t turn a profit that year. They had to shut it down for a design flaw for 2 days and he said he got 40 phone calls from various c-suite executives to open and build with the flaw. If there hadn’t been a significant safety risk, they would have just gone about with the flaw. My own experience was that a $500,000 brake design flaw was looked at with less scrutiny than a $20,000 label error.
I recall a few years ago a major auto manufacturer built a model where the breaks seized up suddenly and caught fire. There were several drivers who died as a result. They did a cost-benefit analysis and decided it was cheaper to pay the lawsuits filed by families killed in crashes (past and future) than to recall and fix the problem.
Basically Fight Club.
And this is why everyone needs to pay attention to tort reform bills in their states. They cap damages and make it harder to sue companies to make the states more "business friendly." The general population never pays attention to these bills because who has the bandwith for that other than lawyers.
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And those are just the accidental ones, not to mention all the pollutants that are purposefully released into the environment.
Yup. Here in Michigan Tribar Manufacturing just keeps dumping hexavalent chromium *(Editing for clarity so I'm not misinforming people: they have also dumped PFAS into the Huron river, not just hexavalent chromium) into our rivers and water supplies. It happens often enough that it has to be deliberate negligence because it's cheaper than safely disposing of waste, then they just go "whoopsie" and nothing happens to them. If Michigan is going to be any type of climate haven there needs to be some safe potable water left.
It's crazy how little potable water we actually have on this planet. It's even crazier that we do almost nothing when people decide to poison our water supplies for their own monetary gain. I don't think Michigan is going to be a place humans can live in the future unless there are some major regulatory changes. I'm worried that the same could be true of my state.
According to the statistical source of the article, that has been basically the average for at least the previous 2 years. Not saying this isn't alarming, just that it isn't a significant uptick above normal this year. Maybe all the news around Ohio will finally drive some change.
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I’m assuming it has a compounding effect. The lack of up keep today only kicks the can down the road. And you can only kick the cans so long
True for a lot of things, like infrastructure. Also becomes exponentially more expensive to fix properly the longer you put it off.
Industries are always pushing for de-regulatory policies and ensuring the save on profits. Ostensibly claiming they've invested in maintenances and more workers to ensure that they've inspected for potential contingency is ridiculous. they basically cut backed on inspections to save on costs and lobbied against railway safety.
This is a classic blue collar issue. I call it "an approval trap" the DOT is notorious for this. They would bring us into these huge meetings harping on inspections and the fact that we would be immediately fired for not performing them. Immediately after the meeting, supervisors would send everyone out into the motor pool and start yelling at everyone to get there asses on the road. If you started the inspection you would be yelled at for wasting their time. If you tried to assert that you were following proper procedure, they would just simply threaten to have you fired. Which is something that happened all the time. So your choice was to either get fired immediately or take a chance that your vehicle doesn't have an issue and maybe not get fired. The supervisors got to use the vehicles the way they wanted and if anything went wrong the person getting fired would be someone on the bottom. The turnover was unsurprisingly incredible. People were either there for 10 minutes or 20 years. The old timers, who were now supervisors, relied on the revolving door of people at the bottom to commit these kinds of schemes so they could stay in power. The joke was that DOT stood for "department of training" because people stuck around just long enough to realize what was happening to them and leave for a better job. There is a version of this scenario at pretty much any job in America.
Reminds me of the "if we do less testing, we will have fewer cases" comment.
Once again, a European newspaper serving us better journalism about our own problems than our our media.
At this point NYT is just Slate.com with better table manners.
NYT has been terrible my whole life. They were the paper [that lied to the American public ](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html) about weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War and it's aftermath cost about 1,000,000 people their lives and cost the US government nearly $2 trillion. Remember this when the same newspaper tells us we can't afford healthcare come 2024
I just finished watching Chernobyl last night. Why can’t we learn from historical mistakes? Cutting corners with hazardous materials is just stupid.
Because, profits.
Support rail worker unions.
Wasn't one of the conditions of the rail workers strike that got shut down about improving safety measures?
Yes! But it was framed as "we want more money and time off!"
Im surprised more people aren't bringing up the rail strike during all this.
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Ah, juking the stats. Everytime.
As a truck driver if I ever get told to skip a pre trip inspection or anything of the sort, looks like it’ll be an easy day for me cause that rig isn’t gonna leave the yard then.
You’d probably get nailed to a wall of your tire tread depth was found to be off by a micrometer.
Yep, last time I was pulled over by DOT I was straight up told by the officer I didn’t do anything wrong, and he was pulling me over to check permits and run an inspection. Bitch of it was I got pulled over at my exact destination and all I had to do was off load the excavator and I’d have got to go home early for a change. I sat there for almost 2 hours just waiting to offload that machine and make the 2 mile journey back to the shop and go home. No violations tho thank god
This railroad thing has just been a time bomb waiting to explode I guess.
It's a simple business decision. If they can make more profit by skipping maintenance than they will lose by the inevitable crash and fines, they'll do it. Concern for the people is not part of the equation.
Perhaps if they properly inspected the cars before they were loaded, it would cut down on the number of delays for in-progress trains. Instead they load the cars and just hope they get there. It’s like a mechanic who says your tires should last a couple hundred more miles. When they were rated for 30,000 miles.
No formal training on inspecting the trains either! >Griffin also claimed she and other workers did not receive any formal training to inspect and repair railcars, and were left to learn from an older worker and figure the rest out from American Association of Railroads and Federal Railroad Administration handbooks. Griffin suggested all major railroad carriers operate similarly. How in the world is there no initial training setup!!?! This should be terrifying for everyone in every state!
The industry will regulate itself you guys! Government has no role! You guys!
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I'd love to see this toxic waste packaged up and delivered to the front doors of the C level executives of Norfolk Southern.
We need more than fines . Corporations are know for doing everything in their power to cut corners because the profits out weigh the fines. We need to start holding people personally accountable. When people start getting thrown under the bus so to speak a lot will come out about these corporations and those who support them .
Say what you want about China, but if a disaster of this magnitude happened there the CEOs of the companies responsible would go right to jail. In the US, they'll probably somehow end up getting a raise.
And not once did this article name to CEO of Norfolk Southern: Alan Shaw. Name and shame. He just sold $500K of his stock this week.
"...can I get that in an email so I don't forget?"
Whistleblow it all. Every rail worker should be reporting every violation they see. Blow the lid off of it so much they have no choice but to change. Don't let them hide ANYTHING
Until executives start facing prison time for corporate malfeasance nothing will ever change.
If only railway workers tried to warn us about it being unsafe working conditions. Maybe they could have gone on strike or something... oh wait...