My son explained that trains in Japan run on time, all the time, and if a train is late the engineer gets punished. he has to work extra time, on menial tasks, as a form of punishment. So,as every student of organizational behavior knows, workers avoid punishment, and if that means going too fast (passengers reported that the train tipped to one side around the curve before it flew off the track) then that's risk the engineer will take. In this case the engineer was 25 yrs old, and 90 seconds late (which I understand is very very late in Japan). Remember Casey Jones from Jackson Tennessee, who crashed somewhere in Mississippi? "Casey Jones, hand upon the throttle, Casey Jones he's comin' 'round the bend, Casey Jones he didn't see the warning, and he's on his final journey to the promised land." to make sure I got the words of the song correct, I looked up Casey Jones on the internet, and I came up with a link to the TV series Casey Jones, featuring Alan Hale (Gilligan's Island) in 1958 - this show is so bad is good. It employes every racial and gender stereotype from the '50's!
2 comments:
From the news:
The driver, who had 11 months' experience, had overshot the previous station by about 40 metres (130 feet), putting the train more than a minute behind schedule.
Media have said the pressure put on train drivers by operator West Japan Railway Co. (JR West) may have contributed to the accident, which also injured 458 people, many seriously.
Kenji Ito, an official at the Japan Confederation of Railway Workers Unions, said JR West was particularly harsh on employees responsible for train delays, giving them reprimands, cutting salaries and subjecting them to a re-education process that in some cases was tantamount to being pilloried.
The driver had also overshot a station by 100 metres (328 feet) last June and may have been worried that he would be punished again, union leaders said, noting that two sessions of re-education often meant demotion.
"We can definitely think that the driver may have put on too much speed to make up the delay," Osamu Yomono, vice president of the confederation, told a news conference.
"He'd already been through re-education once and I'm sure that he absolutely didn't want to do so again," Yomono said.
"In other words, the fear in his mind probably prevented him from making a rational decision."
More information:
Click Here
Post a Comment