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NS Crew Fired After Graniteville Crash
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Can we stop with the union-bashing already? Is it some sort of PC thing these days to hate unions, and if you don't you're not a patriot or something? The company freely entered into a contract. No one held a gun to the company's head. If they didn't like it, they could have sold the property to someone else and gotten into a more gentle line of work, like pizza making. The union is doing its job grieving the firing. The railroad is doing its job enforcing the operating rules. Let's let the contract govern. <br /> <br />On a railroad, you can make an error that can kill someone every day -- every minute. Your average dispatcher is making 100-500 decisions every night that if made wrong can easily result in someone's death. An engineer, conductor, switch foreman? Them too. Signal maintainers, roadmasters, car men? All of them as well. Every one of them making decisions governed by a rule that if made wrong can result in death. Sooner or later almost everyone at a railroad is going to make a rules violation. It's a matter of odds catching up with you. You can't be perfect 100% of the time. That's why most people in the running trades carry job insurance. <br /> <br />If you were to permanently fire everyone at a railroad every time they made any rules violation whatsoever, by now you would have fired the entire population of Planet Earth. It's a dangerous and tough business. It isn't for everyone. No one wants to see anyone get hurt, and railroaders work their butts off to be safe and make sure it never happens. But occasionally it does happen. Let the legal system file a manslaughter charge, and if they can make it stick, then that's one thing. If you fire one person permanently for a rules violation, you'll have to fire everyone permanently. To do otherwise is flatly illegal. You can't ask the railroad to do something illegal, and you can't ask them to do something impractical, either. <br /> <br />The railroad has many safeguards built in so that most rules violations result in no harm. Every once in awhile, a terrible thing happens and people get killed. But you can't punish unequally. The punishment the company metes out for a rules violation can't be excessive just because of a exceptionally bad result or because you're mad at him (the law works the same way, too -- it doesn't have a clause that says you get extra punishment for killing a nice person vs. killing a jerk). <br /> <br />Brad, are people in banking perfect? And make perfect decisions 100% of the time? Probably not. Humans are the same everywhere. But in some jobs, like railroads, mistakes can result in someone's death. If you want to hold railroaders -- and truckers, pilots, paramedics, cops, military officers, doctors, etc., to a standard of 100% perfection, or get fired, I'm afraid you won't have any railroads, trucks, airlines, health care, law enforcement, or national defense. Because no one is going to do those jobs, and undertake that kind of risk, at the kind of pay that's being offered. <br /> <br />OS
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