Despite a slew of overtime scandals, the Long Island Rail Road still allows its track maintenance employees to book shifts that are up to 84 hours long — stretching for more than three days — with no breaks for sleep due to extraordinary work rules negotiated long ago by its union, a damning new audit shows.
The report released by the MTA’s Office of Inspector General on Thursday determined the work rules, combined with LIRR management’s failure to utilize the few scheduling powers it does control and an overall staffing shortage to create an environment where the railroad is handing out dangerously long work assignments.
“Fatigued workers put the safety of employees, the public, and railroad assets at risk, and we should not continue to normalize the situation,” said the acting MTA Inspector General, Elizabeth Keating, in a statement.
Overall, the IG found that the track crews earned $23 million in overtime in 2022 — 39% of all the overtime clocked by employees of the LIRR’s Engineering department while accounting for just 27% of its staffing.
The watchdog’s review was based on data collected from the LIRR’s time cards, which have been the subject of past abuse.
Infamously, federal prosecutors caught overtime king Thomas Caputo bowling while on the clock.
It bolsters the findings of a Post investigation into the MTA’s commuter railroads, which found that onerous work rules and inefficiencies at the LIRR cost the agency at least $200 million annually.
The LIRR contracts with its biggest union, SMART, require that “overtime must be offered to the most senior Track employees first, even if it would result in many hours worked consecutively,” the 21-page report states.
Each employee is “trusted not to take on more than they are capable of,” Keating’s report continued. Management is barred from stopping employees from taking additional work, even if they think “it may be too many consecutive hours for one person to work.”
That system allowed one track worker to pick up consecutive shifts that called for 84 hours of non-stop work as LIRR rules ban sleeping while on the job. It was the longest shift spotted by probers in the data.
The second longest shift had a work equipment engineer pulling 72 hours without sleep, while a machine operator and track worker tied for the third longest with shifts of 70.5 hours.
All told, the IG found that members of the roughly 350-strong LIRR track maintenance workforce filed time cards that reported work weeks that were at least 90 hours long more than 1,000 times over the eighteen months between January 2021 and June 2022.
Just 20 of those employees — 4 percent — accounted for more than a quarter of those 90-hour weeks.
Keating’s review also found that LIRR management had failed to implement a key reform the IG recommended back in 2009 to move some track work shifts to the weekends as one way to reduce excessive overtime.
SMART’s top boss, Anthony Simon, blamed LIRR short-staffing and management’s failure to properly oversee its contractors. The IG report did not examine Simon’s latter claim but did find that LIRR’s track maintenance staff had shrunk by about 40 from a total 390 in 2018.
“Around-the-clock work requires around-the-clock hours,” Simon said in a statement. “Fatigue is always a concern, but our membership knows what they can handle and accept as does management.”
MTA management told the IG in its formal response that it plans to press SMART for work rule changes that include “modifying or eliminating existing contractual work rules that contribute to excessive consecutive hours and worker fatigue” when the contracts come up this month.
“The LIRR will never compromise on employee safety and has increased its efforts to reduce excessive hours by filling open positions and starting the process of establishing a centralized manpower office to better plan and coordinate work shifts,” said MTA spokesman David Steckel.