Railroading Taxpayers
I'm from Long Island. I've had a few beers with Long Island Rail Road workers, and I know that some take advantage of generous work rules. But nothing prepared me for "A Disability Epidemic Among a Railroad’s Retirees" by Walt Bogdanich in The New York Times.
Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time….
And it is not just engineers, conductors or track workers seeking disability payments. Dozens of retired white-collar managers are doing it as well, including the former deputy general counsel, employment manager, claims manager and director of government and community affairs.
In fact, two formerly influential figures at the L.I.R.R. — a married couple, one from management and one from labor — are retired and drawing about $280,000 annually in combined disability and pension payments, according to estimates based on public records.
Railroad officials say that as far as they know, most of the disabled workers were able-bodied until their early retirement, and only then filed papers seeking occupational disability payments.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/nyregion/21lirr.html