Amtrak employees claimed to work 40 hours per day

Fox News ^ | 06.23.2015 | Elizabeth Harrington

[dware]

Timesheets for employees of Amtrak are riddled with abuse, according to a recent audit report, with cases of workers claiming over 40 hours of work in a single day.

The audit released by Amtrak’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) Thursday found examples of abuse in the overtime system, which totaled nearly $200 million in overtime pay last year.

[Rodamala]

You should see all the Union Rules and how train crews, by contract can put in claims for a variety of instances that happen in every day of railroading. No awning on the side of the cab? Ca-ching! Have to make a shove move without a caboose? Ca-ching!

Here is a typical handy-dandy Claim Guide on how YOU TOO can F*** THE COMPANY, compliments BLET Local 375:

"$how me the money"

(How to make Norfolk Southern Railway pay you every cent that is rightfully yours)

[Rodamala]

because they are not allowed to work more than 12 hours per shift.

No wonder Amtrak hasn’t made a profit in 40 years.

That is federal law under the Hours of Service Act. All railroads have to comply.

[vette6387]

“A simple computer notice should be an easy insert such that mutliple higher ups have to approve certain levels of daily overtime. Or it would seem so to me.”

Simpler than that. Any timecard with more than 12hours ( or you pick the number but in any case it has to be less than 24) would be rejected completely and sent to an auditor who has to log it in and investigate. Amtrak should have to stand or fall on it’s own. NO MORE SUBSIDIES!

[mass55th]

Don’t they have supervisors who are required to approve the time sheets before they’re turned in to whoever processes them? We did.

[Covenantor]

Don’t those RR supervisors have enough to do already.There’re only 120 hours a day, where are they going to find the time?

;-)

[Pecos]

I once caught a company claiming to have used a piece of heavy excavation equipment 2000 hours each week.

[mass55th]

NY State Department of Corrections uses a computer program to account for every 1/4 hour of work, for every Correction Officer on each shift. The Chart Sergeant for each shift had to correctly grid each and every job on the chart sheets, then enter the numbers into the correct sections on the computer. If you didn’t fill out the chart grid correctly, which included overtime, time off, etc., your numbers wouldn’t balance out to the number of bodies you had on duty. Then you’d have to go back through everything, and try to find where you’d made your mistake. It had to come out right before you could go home. The Chart Sergeant on the midnight shift had to combine all three shift charts, and print out the final chart report for the previous 24 hours. Heaven help you if that didn’t come out right. I hated that job. It was a pain in the ass. Besides trying to balance your chart hours with the number of bodies on duty, you had to prepare the next day’s charts for your shift, as well as filling in empty posts for the next shift coming on duty when officers called in sick. If you had an extra officer or two, you could just use them, but most times you ended up having to hire overtime. If there wasn’t anybody on the volunteer list, or they turned down the overtime, you ended up having to use the “stick list”, and order someone to stay for an additional 8 hours.

[McGruff]

Mistakes were made.

[mass55th]

"Don’t those RR supervisors have enough to do already.There’re only 120 hours a day, where are they going to find the time?"

LOL! My Dad was a Track Foreman for New York Central. I can still remember him sitting at the kitchen table each night filling out time sheets, and track repair reports. As a kid, I thought it was cool that my Dad used special forms, and carbon paper for triplicate copies. I have no idea if he ever got paid for having to do that. I was too young to even think of asking him, and of course, he's been gone since 1978. But I do know one thing about those carbon copies. Sometime before he retired in 1971, the railroad, now PennCentral, had tried to blame a rail problem on my father and his crew. But by keeping all his track reports, he was able to clear himself, and his men of any responsibility. 50+ years of service, and that's what you get...somebody trying to make you a scapegoat for their inefficiency. My oldest son has his railroad watch. I only wish he'd have lived to enjoy his retirement a bit longer.

[Raymann]

Alright, ill bite.

First of all, is article is about mechanical employees, the ones in the yard not the people on the train. They get double time if they work a certain number of hours and double time and a half if they do that on a holiday. Now that’s on their timesheet so it can show more then 24 hours in a day although I’ve never heard of 40

Now I work onboard, I only get time and a half if I work more then 180 hours per month! And I often do because we have regularly scheduled duties up to 18 hours a day. And that can be for 6 days straight on a long haul train (that schedule is basically a week on, week off.

Now I’m not defending mechanical. My timesheet is immediately reviewed by a supervisor when I get in and confirmed by someone I don’t know in Delaware soon after, and overtime is only calculated when we get paid.

[vette6387]

“Now I’m not defending mechanical. “

No, but what you are describing is the old railway union work rules. When I was a pre-teen ( I’m now 74) I had a friend whose dad was a “fireman” for Southern Pacific. Since the steam locomotives had been phased out, he just sat on his ass in the diesel “making sure” the engineer didn’t die. He was a “road crewman.” If, for some reason, his “crew” was needed to do some switching in a yard somewhere ( which was taking work from a “yard crew”), he got an extra day’s pay ( I guess it was the union’s way to discourage the practice). I guess those featherbedding work rules still prevail today.
More recently, I took Amtrak from Oakland to Los Angeles (The Coast Starlight, to see the sights and to avoid the drive by myself). Welcome to the 1950’s! It takes 11.5 Effing hours to get between those points when you can drive it in 5 or 6. “Food Service” isn’t close to what I remember when my mother and I took the Santa Fe from the Bay Area to Bakersfield to visit relatives. Back then, the trains ran 100 mph, now I think 80 is tops and that almost never happens going to Los Angeles. Most of the right-of-way is single track, so the Amtrak train has to side track to let the more important freight trains pass. I’ve traveled extensively in Japan and Europe where train travel is wonderful, modern, and fast. But in those places, cities are far closer together making trains an acceptable mode of transport. But here, trains make little sense outside of a couple of high-traffic corridors (and California isn’t one of them, not withstanding Jerry Brown and the RATs wet dream of a bullet train here). Like air travel before deregulation, the government is subsidizing an outmoded means of transportation for the sake of the few who don’t have the means to drive or fly.

[Raymann]

I’ve only been here a few years and I’ve never seen a fireman. I work on the northeast corridor and the trains here are very important to the transportation needs of the northeast and mid Atlantic.