Employees at the Long Island Rail Road applied for disability benefits at 12 times the rate of workers for other commuter railroads. According to a recent investigation:
• in 2008 LIRR workers received twice as many benefits as workers from seven other commuter railroads combined
• in one year as many as 97 percent of workers applied for and received disability payments shortly after retiring.
Since the railroad has recently won awards for worker safety, it obviously isn’t that LIRR is a dangerous place to work. What it boils down to is a billion-dollar scam to defraud the union disability fund. Former union president Joseph Rutigliano and Marie Baran worked as consultants to help workers “game” the system. They were among eleven people indicted for the scam, which included several doctors who colluded with the union members and officers to steal from the LIRR employees.
