'course not...
this is the dem voter base and they're looking for a new 'new deal', um can we get these bums off of the taxpayer back FIRST before we start carrying the WS bankers in their place?
:
nytimes.com
A Disability Epidemic Among a Railroad’s Retirees
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
THE RAILROAD A commuter rail line since it began in 1834, the L.I.R.R. is unlike other railroads in its work rules, early retirement policy and disability rate.
By WALT BOGDANICH
Published: September 20, 2008
Joseph Rutigliano playing golf this summer. Like nearly all other longtime Long Island Rail Road employees, he was classified as occupationally disabled, but only after retiring.
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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.
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.
“Short of the gulag, I can’t imagine any work force that would have a so-to-speak 90 percent disability attrition rate,” said Glenn Scammel, long one of Capitol Hill’s top experts on railroads. “That defies both logic and experience.”
Said Dr. J. Mark Melhorn, co-editor of a book on occupational disability published by the American Medical Association: “No one has a rate that high — that just doesn’t happen.”
And it is not just engineers, conductors or track workers seeking disability payments. Dozens of retired white-collar managers are doing it as well, including the former deputy general counsel, employment manager, claims manager and director of government and community affairs.
In fact, two formerly influential figures at the L.I.R.R. — a married couple, one from management and one from labor — are retired and drawing about $280,000 annually in combined disability and pension payments, according to estimates based on public records.
Railroad officials say that as far as they know, most of the disabled workers were able-bodied until their early retirement, and only then filed papers seeking occupational disability payments.
“How is it that somebody is occupationally disabled the day after he retires when he wasn’t occupationally disabled the day before he retired?” asked Gary Dellaverson, chief financial officer for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the railroad’s parent.
The answer, according to government records and dozens of interviews, stems from a combination of factors, including highly unusual L.I.R.R. contracts that allow longtime workers to retire with a pension as early as age 50, federal rules that let railroad retirees claim disability for jobs they no longer hold, and an obscure federal agency called the Railroad Retirement Board that almost never says no to a disability claim.
The federal agency pays the disability claims, but losing so many workers to early retirement costs the L.I.R.R. money — in overtime, training of replacements and early pension payments. At the same time, passengers could soon face another fare increase and the transportation authority is seeking more taxpayer support, already half a billion dollars a year, to close a huge budget gap.
Union contracts also inflate operating costs through arcane work rules, some dating back to the 1920s, which pad employee paychecks, boosting pension and disability payments in turn.
“There are maybe nine different ways to show up at work and get two days’ pay without doing anything extra,” Michael J. Quinn, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen at the L.I.R.R., said in an interview.
These work rules made it possible for eight senior train engineers to earn from $215,000 to $277,000 in 2006. Younger workers earn much less, and income in the top tier was lower in 2007.
Since medical records are private, individual cases could not be examined, and there is little doubt that some of the retirees receiving disability payments actually have debilitating conditions.
Still, the L.I.R.R.’s disability rate in recent years has been three to four times that of the average railroad, and is particularly striking when compared with the number of disabilities at Metro-North, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority subsidiary that serves commuters north of New York City.
THE ENGINEER Edward J. Koerber, on a wage of about $30 an hour, earned $211,586 in 2004 and $276,456 in 2005, in part by using penalty payments.
Their work forces are of similar size and composition. Employees perform roughly the same tasks: operating trains, punching tickets and maintaining tracks.
And yet in one area — debilitating illness and injury — the difference is so vast as to almost defy medical explanation.
One example: disabilities resulting from arthritis and rheumatism. From 2001 through 2007, Metro-North had 32 cases, compared with 753 at the L.I.R.R. In one year, Metro-North had just 2 cases. The L.I.R.R. had 118.
For certain diseases of the musculoskeletal system, like a herniated disc, Metro-North had 49 cases. The L.I.R.R. had 850.
No one at the two railroads, at the transportation authority or at the Railroad Retirement Board could explain these gaping differences, nor were they even aware of them.
“I’ve not seen that until you just showed it to me,” Michael S. Schwartz, the retirement board’s chairman, said in an interview this summer. The board focuses on individual claims, not specific railroads, Mr. Schwartz, said, but added, “We want to make sure that anything we do here is done correctly.”
The L.I.R.R. president, Helena E. Williams, called the data compiled by The Times “alarming” and has asked the inspectors general of the retirement board and the transportation authority to investigate.
Dr. Melhorn, who has studied disabilities, said the numbers alone were a cause for concern, “in particular if there seems to be a limited number of physicians who are providing this disability impairment.”
Work-related injuries and illnesses do not explain the high disability rate. From 2005 through 2007, the L.I.R.R. had 2.91 per 200,000 working hours, compared with 2.98 for New Jersey Transit, 3.13 for Metro-North, 9.42 for PATH and 12.91 for Philadelphia’s transit system, according to an analysis of federal records.
The L.I.R.R.’s record also raises questions about why the Railroad Retirement Board approves nearly 100 percent of disability requests from all the nation’s railroads. The board is funded through taxes on railroads and their workers, but Social Security had to contribute $3.6 billion last year to cover expenses.
“Everyone in America is going to contribute to that,” said Rick Lifto, assistant vice president of general claims for B.N.S.F., a large freight railroad. B.N.S.F.’s disability rate is lower than the L.I.R.R.’s, but even so, Mr. Lifto said, disabilities still cost his company millions of dollars.
John Britt Jr., a former engineer, is an example of someone who benefited not only from the work rules, but also from disability payments. In his last year on the job, during which he earned more than any other engineer, Mr. Britt’s paycheck swelled with $58,853 for tasks that had violated the normal work rules of his union contract, including $2,309 for running diesel and electric trains on the same shift and $3,354 for working through his regular meal period, government records show. He also got $40,553 for overtime, $41,594 for a vacation buyout and $47,337 for a sick leave buyout.
For the year, Mr. Britt received $277,075 — five times his base salary and $100,000 more than the highest-paid engineer at Metro-North. Then, after retiring at age 56 in 2006, he was classified as disabled by the Railroad Retirement Board.
In fact, the 12 highest paid L.I.R.R. engineers in 2006 — most earning over $200,000 — are now retired and receiving disability payments, records show. And so are the top-earning conductors, three of whom had incomes over $190,000.
Mr. Britt could not be reached for comment, but a woman responding to a note left at his listed residence said, “Our family has no comment.”
The L.I.R.R. president, Ms. Williams, who has been on the job a little more than a year, says she recognizes the need to fix the railroad’s problems. The transportation authority’s inspector general has praised her willingness to quickly address deficiencies once they are identified. She has taken steps to help curb overtime, and the railroad’s on-time record has never been better.
But many problems are beyond her control. Without the political support needed to weather a strike, management has been unwilling to press for the removal of costly work rules, according to former management and union officials. The railroad also has no authority to intervene in federal disability cases.
Changes in the railroad’s contract have made it more difficult for many employees to retire early, although it is still possible for them to receive a regular pension at age 55, and 1,100 long-term employees were still working under the old provisions at the end of 2007.
If the transportation authority needed any expertise on disabilities, it could have turned to a former board member and union official, Joseph Rutigliano, who became occupationally disabled after retiring in late 1999 at age 52.
Mr. Rutigliano said in an interview that he “crushed” his back in a fall at home and eventually could no longer work as a conductor, where his duties included walking through trains taking tickets and repeatedly climbing in and out of railroad cars. “I needed to use my legs and my back every day,” he said. “It meets the criteria for what the railroad retirement system says prevents you from performing your railroad occupation.”
If Mr. Rutigliano’s condition kept him from working, it did not stop him from golfing. He was a regular this summer at Sunken Meadow, often walking the course twice a week. As a disabled worker, he played free.
A Puzzling Discrepancy
About five years ago, L.I.R.R. officials say, they wanted to know more about why some employees were retiring and then filing for occupational disability. Because the L.I.R.R. had made progress in reducing workplace accidents, railroad managers wondered if something was amiss, so they contacted the Railroad Retirement Board.
But L.I.R.R. officials said the retirement board assured them that the number of disabilities among former L.I.R.R. workers “was typical of railroads industrywide.” Nothing more happened, officials said, until several months ago, when they were contacted by The Times and shown numbers far exceeding the industry average.
“We have been asked by newspaper reporters to explain why the L.I.R.R. has a high number of retirees who receive a disability annuity,” Ms. Williams said on July 15 in a letter to Mr. Schwartz of the retirement board.
In a letter late last month to the retirement board’s inspector general, Ms. Williams expressed specific concerns about why so many retirees were citing the same two disease categories.
“I find the high rate of R.R.B. disability awards in these categories alarming,” she wrote, asking the inspectors general from the retirement board and the transportation authority to look into the matter.
Barry L. Kluger, inspector general for the authority, said, “The numbers and the cost I think do merit the kind of review that’s going on at this time.”
Ms. Williams said the railroad also examined its own disability program, which, unlike the retirement board’s, handles disability claims from current employees.
The figures looked nothing alike. The number last year, she said: zero.
“So, the question I have is, ‘What is the medical criteria used?’ ” Ms. Williams said in an interview, referring to the retirement board. “How are they evaluating the standards for an occupational disability?”
Outside the insular world of railroads, little is known about the Railroad Retirement Board. With headquarters not in Washington, but in an old insurance building in Chicago, the board is overseen by three presidential appointees: one from labor, one from management and one representing consumers.
The board, created in the 1930s, performs many of the same functions as Social Security, but for rail workers only. Both offer disability programs, but the similarities end there.
A worker must be incapable of any gainful employment to be classified as disabled by Social Security. But rail workers can get disability payments even if they can perform other jobs — just not their regular railroad jobs. This provision, enacted in 1946, was based on the view that rail workers had especially hazardous jobs involving skills not easily transferred to other occupations.
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