Federal Rail Safety Act

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Here are two recent federal court decisions affirming the amount of punitive damages awarded by the Administrative Review Board and by a district court jury.
In Jason Raye v. Pan Am Railways, the Administrative Law Judge awarded the statutory maximum of $250,000 in punitive damages despite the fact Jason Raye was not actually disciplined and

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The 8th Circuit has issued a spate of FRSA decisions falling outside the main stream of other Circuits. It is important to put them in perspective.
Araujo v. Kuduk: a distinction without a difference
Citing the Congressional Record and the leading whistleblower decision in Marano v. Dep’t of Justice, 2 F.3d 1137, 1140 (Fed.

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In a major decision with national implications, the Administrative Review Board confirms that Federal Rail Safety Act subsection (c)(2) does indeed protect treatments for non-work related medical conditions. Williams v. Grand Trunk Western Railroad. In so doing, the ARB explicitly rejects the 3rd Circuit’s holding in Bala v. PATH, which imposed a work

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Recognizing it’s hard to blow the whistle once you’ve been gagged, OSHA has issued new guidelines prohibiting the use of gag and confidentiality clauses in settlement agreements. See Policy Guidelines for Approving Settlement Agreements in Whistleblower Cases.
OSHA reviews settlement agreements between whistleblowers and their employers “to ensure they are fair, adequate, reasonable, and in

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Another Circuit Court has clarified the standard for awarding punitive damages to rail whistleblowers, this time in the context of jury instructions.
 After Springfield Terminal Railway Company fired Jason Worcester for raising safety concerns, he filed a Federal Rail Safety Act whistleblower complaint in federal court.  The district judge instructed the jury that:
 you can

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You can tell a lot about a workplace culture by how managers react to employee safety complaints. Enlightened managers welcome safety complaints, benighted managers suppress them. Enlightened managers view such complaints as a valuable opportunity for improvement, and underscore the first importance of safety by publicly thanking those employees. Benighted managers view such complaints as…