Much like how the Jones Act and Jones Act attorneys protect American seamen and shipworkers from being exploited by their employers, injured railroad workers have legal protections in place to keep them protected in the event of injury or disability. One of these protections recently came under fire in the First Circuit Court of Massachusetts, and was upheld by the courts in favor of the pre-existing federal statutes.
Massachusetts, in recent years, had passed what was colloquially referred to as the “earned sick time law”, a state law governing the amount of sick time available to full-time workers in the state. In late 2016 two major railroads, commercial freight carrier CSX and passenger travel specialists Amtrak, brought a lawsuit against the state’s Attorney General claiming that the state law attempts to circumvent the sick time and disability provisions already in place by a federal law protecting railroad workers.
This law, the 1938 Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act, was originally passed to protect injured railroad workers from lost wages arising from unemployment, sickness, injury, and even maternity. The Act works on a system of payments being made to any employee who had sufficient earnings in the previous year, and provides for all qualified employees (who have been employed longer than 5 months).
This new Massachusetts state law, however, would have altered how this system of disability pay and sick time was handled. Specifically, the law was seeking to force the new “earned sick time” process on any employee being considered “temporarily out” as opposed to “nonworking and nonpaid”. CSX and Amtrak argued that the distinction is insufficient to provide for a distinction between the two, and that the federal law was sufficient to protect injured railroad workers regardless of their status under state law.
Furthermore, it was cited that the Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act is one of the most generous sickness benefit plans in the U.S., and was specifically designed to prevent inter-state rail companies should not have to comply with a “patchwork of different state laws regulating employment” in order to ensure all employees receive the same protections regardless of where in the US they are working during the time of their disability.
While the rights of railroad workers have been protected for now, there will always be a need for railroad injury lawyers to fight for the rights of injured and disabled workers, especially in cases like this where their previous rights might be superseded. Time will only tell how many more challenges to railroad workers’ rights may arise, but for now, at least, they’re still safe and protected from financial difficulty when injured.
