The federal government has joined 21 former rail workers in suing the Union Pacific over the way it used a vision test to disqualify workers it believed were color blind and might have trouble reading signals telling them to stop a train.
The lawsuit announced Monday by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the first by the government in what could eventually be hundreds, if not thousands, of lawsuits over the way Union Pacific disqualified people with a variety of health issues.
These 21 workers were once going to be part of a class-action lawsuit that the railroad estimated might include as many as 7,700 people who had to undergo what is called a “fitness-for-duty” review between 2014 and 2018.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs estimate nearly 2,000 of those workers faced restrictions that kept them off the job for at least two years if not indefinitely.
The U-P often made its decisions after reviewing medical records and disqualified many workers even if their own doctors recommended they be allowed to return to work.
The Union Pacific has vigorously defended itself in court and refused to enter into settlement talks with the EEOC.
This lawsuit focuses on a vision test the Union Pacific developed called the “light cannon” test that asked workers to identify the color of a light on a mobile device placed a quarter of a mile away from the test taker.
The EEOC says in its lawsuit that the test doesn’t replicate real world conditions or show whether workers can accurately identify railroad signals.
Typical and expected. Exploiting tragedy of N.S.F train derailment. The cause of that derailment was turning off “rolling defect detector” not in any way shape or form of color blind crew members. I lost my 30 year full retirement benefit after 28 years!