LIRR employee awarded $130,000 in whistleblower lawsuit

A federal administrative judge has awarded a Long Island Rail Road signal foreman more than $130,000 after ruling that the LIRR retaliated against him for raising concerns about wage theft and unsafe practices, including a failure to conduct safety tests over the past six years on an emergency signal system. , according to court documents.

The Oct. 31 ruling by U.S. Administrative Law Judge Scott Morris found that Anthony Inganamorte’s whistleblower complaints to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration led to the railroad creating a “hostile work environment” for the 29-year LIRR employee, including by monitoring his whereabouts and by denying him overtime.

David Steckel, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, LIRR’s parent organization, said: “The MTA is reviewing this decision and its options for appeal.”

Inganamorte, who still works for the LIRR, declined to comment. His attorney in White Plains, Lee Seham, said “anyone who rides the LIRR should be concerned” about the issues raised in the case.

“If an employee brings rail safety issues to the attention of an employer, he deserves a compliment and not a slap in the face,” Seham said Tuesday. “The LIRR owes Mr. Inganamorte and his riders an apology.”

The case dates back to 2015, when Inganamorte, while working as a foreman, said he refused to participate in a wage theft scheme that involved signing off timesheets that showed some employees were working when they were not.

Inganamorte, from Islip, raised his concerns – including about a colleague who claimed to have carried out a railway safety test on a day he was ill – to management., but “management chose not to investigate these events further,” the court ruling said.

Angry that Inganamorte’s refusal to agree to the plan resulted in them not being paid for missing hours, Inganamorte’s colleagues filed harassment claims against him that led to his demotion in 2016, according to the court.

After years of court battles over federal whistleblower complaints filed by Inganamorte, the LIRR agreed to reinstate him in 2020. But when he did so, the railroad took several “adverse actions” against Inganamorte, according to the ruling. Among other things, they refused to approve the overtime required for Inganamorte and his group of signal workers to conduct tests every two years on mechanical backup signaling systems that could be relied on to keep track switches and signals functioning if the railroad’s computer-based signaling system ever did would fail. As a result, “(the LIRR) has not had anyone test the emergency control system since 2018,” according to the court ruling.

LIRR officials declined requests from Newsday to comment on that claim.

LIRR management also conducted a rare “GPS audit” of Inganamorte’s group, which tracked their locations and resulted in them having to “work in very confined environments” during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to court documents.

‘They forced him and his gang to leave the headquarters, even during the winter, so that they had to stay in small huts and in moving trucks during… . . COVID, while they had to distance themselves,” Seham said in an interview Tuesday.

Although the LIRR argued that the actions Inganamorte characterized as retaliatory were nothing more than “inconveniences to which almost every LIRR (employee) is subject,” the court said it was “difficult” to find that Inganamorte’s whistleblower complaints were not “a were a contributing factor”. factor” for the railroad’s actions.

The court awarded Inganamorte $125,000 in damages, approximately $8,600 in back pay for the overtime he was denied, and ordered the railroad to reinstate his seniority, which Inganamorte lost in his demotion. It also ordered the railroad to cover Inganamorte’s legal costs.

The LIRR has handled other employee wage theft claims, including four workers convicted of fraud following investigations into unusually high overtime spending at the railroad in 2018.