Railroad & Maritime Injury Claims: FELA and the Jones Act

Almost every guide about being hurt at work starts from the same premise: workers’ compensation is your remedy against your employer, it pays regardless of fault, and it caps what you can recover. For railroad workers, seamen, and a large class of maritime workers, that premise is simply wrong. Congress placed them under separate federal statutes — in the railroads’ case, in 1908, well before most states had a comp system at all — and those statutes work very differently.

Quick answer: Railroad workers fall under FELA (45 U.S.C. §§ 51-60), seamen under the Jones Act (46 U.S.C. § 30104), and other maritime workers under the Longshore Act (33 U.S.C. §§ 901-950). FELA and the Jones Act are negligence-based, not no-fault — you must prove fault, but you get full tort damages and a jury, not a benefits schedule. The Longshore Act is a no-fault system, but a federal one. Which statute applies is a threshold question that changes the burden of proof, the damages, and the deadline all at once.

Railroad Workers: FELA

The Federal Employers’ Liability Act, 45 U.S.C. §§ 51-60, governs injury claims by railroad employees against railroads engaged in interstate commerce. Its structure is the opposite trade-off from workers’ compensation:

• You must prove negligence. Under § 51 the railroad is liable for injury or death “resulting in whole or in part from” its negligence, or that of its officers, agents or employees. There is no recovery for an injury nobody was at fault for.
• But the causation standard is relaxed. That “in whole or in part” language does real work. In CSX Transportation, Inc. v. McBride, 564 U.S. 685 (2011), the Supreme Court confirmed FELA does not import the ordinary common-law proximate cause requirement — a lower causal threshold than a standard negligence case.
• Damages are full tort damages. Pain and suffering, full lost earnings and earning capacity, not a statutory impairment schedule.
• You get a jury. And under 28 U.S.C. § 1445(a), a FELA case filed in state court cannot be removed to federal court by the railroad — a genuine strategic feature, not a technicality.

The defenses FELA takes away

• Contributory negligence does not bar the claim. Under § 53 it reduces damages proportionally instead. And critically: where the railroad violated a federal statute enacted for employee safety, there is no reduction for the worker’s own negligence at all.
• Assumption of risk is abolished entirely by § 54 — the railroad cannot argue the worker accepted a known danger by taking the job.
• § 55 voids any contract or device designed to exempt a carrier from FELA liability.

That safety-statute provision in § 53 is why violations of federal rail safety requirements — the Safety Appliance Acts and the Locomotive Inspection Act among them — are often the most valuable evidence in the case, in much the same way OSHA findings function as evidence in a construction accident claim without themselves being a cause of action.

The FELA deadline is three years, under § 56, which also gives state and federal courts concurrent jurisdiction.

Seamen: The Jones Act, Plus Two More Remedies

46 U.S.C. § 30104 gives a seaman injured in the course of employment a negligence action against the employer, adopting FELA’s framework by reference — so the relaxed causation standard, the comparative rather than barring treatment of the worker’s own fault, and the availability of full tort damages and a jury all carry over.

The threshold fight: who is a seaman

The statute does not define the term. Under Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis, 515 U.S. 347 (1995), seaman status requires an employment-related connection to a vessel in navigation that is substantial in both duration and nature, with roughly 30 percent of work time aboard commonly used as a guideline rather than a fixed rule. Expect this to be contested, because it determines which statute governs everything else.

Two remedies that run alongside a Jones Act claim

Maintenance and cure is a no-fault duty owed by the vessel owner to a seaman who is injured or falls ill in the service of the vessel: maintenance for basic daily living expenses, cure for medical treatment, until maximum cure is reached. It does not depend on proving anyone was negligent, which means a seaman may be owed maintenance and cure even where a Jones Act negligence claim fails.

Unseaworthiness is a separate general maritime law claim against the vessel owner where the vessel or its appurtenances were not reasonably fit for their intended purpose. It is a non-delegable duty and does not turn on ordinary negligence — see Mitchell v. Trawler Racer, Inc., 362 U.S. 539 (1960). It commonly runs alongside a Jones Act claim rather than replacing it.

Death offshore

For a death occurring beyond three nautical miles from shore, the Death on the High Seas Act, 46 U.S.C. §§ 30301-30308, applies and limits recovery to pecuniary losses — a materially narrower measure than many state wrongful death statutes allow, and a significant limitation for surviving families to understand early. Our guide to wrongful death at work covers the comp-exclusivity framework that this displaces for maritime deaths.

The Jones Act deadline is three years, under 46 U.S.C. § 30106.

Maritime Workers Who Aren’t Seamen: The Longshore Act

The Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, 33 U.S.C. §§ 901-950, is a genuine no-fault compensation system — but a federal one, administered through the Department of Labor rather than a state comp board. It covers longshore and harbor workers, ship repairers and shipbuilders working on navigable waters or on adjoining piers, terminals and loading areas.

Seaman status and Longshore coverage are mutually exclusive. The Act’s definition of a covered employee at § 902(3) excludes a master or member of a crew of any vessel — that is, precisely the people the Jones Act covers. Establishing that a worker is not a seaman is frequently what routes a claim here.

Two features matter most in practice:

• § 905(a) makes Longshore benefits the exclusive remedy against the employer, mirroring state comp exclusivity.
• § 905(b) preserves a negligence action against the vessel — the “905(b)” claim — which is the Act’s principal third-party route, structurally similar to the third-party suits discussed in our guide to workers’ comp settlement amounts and suing outside the comp system. Employer liens and subrogation against a third-party recovery are handled at § 933.

Two important extensions

• The Defense Base Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1651-1654, extends Longshore Act coverage to civilian contractors working on overseas U.S. military bases and under certain government contracts abroad — a category of worker with no obvious home in any state comp system.
• The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, 43 U.S.C. § 1333(b), extends it to workers on fixed platforms engaged in resource operations on the outer continental shelf.

Which System Applies

Worker	Statute	Fault required?	Damages	Jury
Railroad employee	FELA, 45 U.S.C. §§ 51-60	Yes — negligence, relaxed causation	Full tort damages	Yes
Seaman (crew member)	Jones Act, 46 U.S.C. § 30104	Yes, for the negligence claim	Full tort damages	Yes
Seaman — maintenance and cure	General maritime law	No	Living expenses and medical care	—
Longshore / harbor worker	LHWCA, 33 U.S.C. §§ 901-950	No	Statutory benefit schedule	No (administrative)
Overseas government contractor	Defense Base Act	No	LHWCA benefit schedule	No (administrative)
Most other employees	State workers’ comp	No	State benefit schedule	No (administrative)

The pattern worth noticing: the two systems that make you prove fault are also the two that let you recover everything, in front of a jury. The no-fault systems pay more reliably and cap the result. Neither is uniformly better — but which one you are in is not a choice, and it is decided by your job, your vessel connection, and where you were working.

None of this table applies at all to a land-based worker harmed by someone else’s vessel — a genuinely different scenario from anything above, since the injured person isn’t a maritime worker in any of these categories at all. The claim instead runs as an ordinary wrongful death or personal injury action against the vessel’s owner under general maritime tort law, and the owner’s own defense is likely to be the Limitation of Liability Act rather than any dispute over your employment status. See our guide to the Key Bridge collapse for exactly this fact pattern, where the deceased were bridge maintenance workers, not seamen or railroad employees.

Practical Steps

1. Establish which system governs before anything else — railroad employment, seaman status, or covered maritime employment — since deadline and burden of proof both follow from it.
2. Document your vessel connection specifically if seaman status is in play: which vessels, what proportion of your time, and in what capacity.
3. Report the injury through your employer’s required process, and separately preserve your own record of what you reported and when.
4. Identify any federal safety-statute violation in a railroad case — under § 53 it can eliminate any reduction for your own contributory negligence.
5. Claim maintenance and cure immediately if you are a seaman, independently of any negligence claim, since it is owed regardless of fault.
6. Calendar the correct deadline — three years for FELA and Jones Act claims, and the Longshore Act’s separate and considerably shorter administrative notice requirements — rather than assuming the state limitations period in our state-by-state filing deadline reference applies.
7. Get counsel experienced in these statutes specifically. These are specialised practice areas, and the procedural differences from ordinary comp and personal injury work are substantial.

Sources & Further Reading

• 45 U.S.C. §§ 51-60 — the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, including § 53 (comparative fault and the safety-statute exception), § 54 (assumption of risk abolished), § 55 (exempting contracts void) and § 56 (three-year period, concurrent jurisdiction)
• 28 U.S.C. § 1445(a) — FELA actions filed in state court are not removable
• CSX Transportation, Inc. v. McBride, 564 U.S. 685 (2011) — FELA’s relaxed causation standard
• 46 U.S.C. § 30104 — the Jones Act; 46 U.S.C. § 30106 — three-year maritime limitation period
• Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis, 515 U.S. 347 (1995) — the test for seaman status
• Mitchell v. Trawler Racer, Inc., 362 U.S. 539 (1960) — unseaworthiness as a non-delegable duty
• 46 U.S.C. §§ 30301-30308 — the Death on the High Seas Act and its pecuniary-loss limitation
• 33 U.S.C. §§ 901-950 — the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, including § 902(3) (covered employee, excluding crew members), § 905(a) (exclusive remedy), § 905(b) (vessel negligence) and § 933 (third-party claims and liens)
• 42 U.S.C. §§ 1651-1654 — the Defense Base Act; 43 U.S.C. § 1333(b) — Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act extension
• See our guides to construction accident claims for how comp exclusivity and third-party suits interact in the ordinary case, workers’ comp settlement amounts by injury type for what the scheduled-benefit systems actually pay, and wrongful death at work for the fatal-case framework these statutes displace
• If the injured person was boating recreationally rather than working on the water, none of the statutes above apply — see our guide to boating accident claims for the maritime jurisdiction question and the Limitation of Liability Act