Agency to Review Why Railroad Posted No Cases of Carpal Tunnel

The Federal Railroad Administration said Tuesday that it will launch an investigation into why the nation’s second-largest railroad reported no cases of carpal tunnel syndrome among workers last year, only to later disclose that 125 employees had claimed that their jobs gave them the neuromuscular condition.

The carpal tunnel cases came to light when Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. was sued earlier this month for secretly conducting genetic tests on workers who claimed they were injured on the job.

Federal regulations require railroads to report workplace injuries, including carpal tunnel syndrome, or face fines of as much as $5,000 per day per case for deliberately underreporting injuries.

The railroad, which employs 40,000 people, has not reported a case of carpal tunnel syndrome in five years.

“We’re going to look at the BNSF first, and we’ll probably take a look at the others. If we find that everything is fine--I’m skeptical--then there wouldn’t be any need” to examine other railroads’ injury reports, said George Gavalla, the FRA’s associate administrator for safety. “But if we find some significant underreporting, then we would look at all of them.”

BNSF spokesman Richard Russack said the railroad did not report any of the 125 claimed carpal tunnel cases last year because the company determined none of them was work-related.

“The rules state that you only need to file work-related carpal tunnel syndrome injuries. So if we didn’t file any, it’s because they weren’t work-related,” he said.

However, an attorney for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees said in 11 cases the union has looked into, a doctor diagnosed carpal tunnel and deemed it work-related. And in one case, the railroad approved and paid for surgery to relieve the condition, said Harry W. Zanville, the attorney.

Gavalla said railroads are required to report any carpal tunnel syndrome case that a qualified medical professional diagnoses and finds to be work-related.

The U.S. railroad industry, which employs 265,000 people, reported 11 carpal tunnel cases in the first 11 months of 2000, down from 117 in 1993, Gavalla said.

“Generally, we have a pretty good pulse on any kind of safety problems, and carpal tunnel is not something that’s come up,” Gavalla said. “So we’re a little surprised.”

Gavalla said he ordered the review Tuesday after he heard Russack’s statement last week that 125 workers had filed claims of job-related carpal tunnel syndrome since last March. Russack’s disclosure was part of the railroad’s explanation for obtaining genetic tests on 20 workers--a program that the Fort Worth-based company halted in the wake of a lawsuit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

None of the workers was found to have the genetic marker in question, Russack said. Several experts said the test is of no value in determining whether the condition is job-related.

Zanville, the union lawyer, said the discrepancy in BNSF’s carpal tunnel syndrome reporting might reflect a pattern among railroads of minimizing the number of on-the-job injuries.

“They are just not reporting any occupational injuries. It’s way beyond carpal tunnel,” Zanville said.

Occupational safety experts have been concerned for some time that incentive programs tying bonuses and other awards to work groups that stay injury free might be contributing to artificially improved safety records in many industries.

“There have been multiple studies that say it is this kind of disorder that gets significantly underreported by industry,” said Linda Rosenstock, dean of the UCLA School of Public Health and former director of the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.

“We like incentives [for people] to work safer and smarter,” she said. “But a real concern has been raised in the occupational safety and health community that the incentives are not changing the actual work pattern or the risk for injury but merely just increasing incentives not to report the injury that actually occurred.”

The drop in carpal tunnel reports by the railroads corresponds with the reported trend in the overall rate of worker injuries and fatalities. In 1993, the railroads reported 5.93 job-related worker injuries and fatalities per 200,000 hours worked. By 1999, that rate had dropped nearly 43% to 3.39.

The FRA routinely conducts audits of workplace injury reports and finds railroads out of compliance almost every year, Gavalla said. Most of the reporting failures have been blamed on confusion about the reporting requirements.

“We make sure that when we do these audits, we revisit with [the railroads] what’s reportable or not, so we’re looking at this,” he said. “There can be carpal tunnel cases that don’t meet the criteria for reportability. I really want to see what the facts are.”

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Railroad Worker Injuries Under Scrutiny

This chart shows the number of work-related cases of carpal tunnel syndrome reported by railroad employees. A federal agency is investigating the discrepancy between the 125 worker claims of carpal tunnel syndrome that the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad said it received last year and the number the company reported to the government.

Source: Federal Rail Administration