As Americans today conduct their annual celebration of working men and women there is restlessness in the railroad labor force.
Over the past several months railroaders have flooded the U.S. Surface Transportation Board with letters describing how difficult their jobs have become. They’ve taken to social media and given interviews to news media reporters to say how angry they are about what they describe as draconian attendance policies, having gone more than two years without an increase in wages, and increasingly harsh working conditions.
For a taste of how angry some railroaders are, read the open letter written by 17-year Union Pacific locomotive engineer Michael Paul Lindsey II that he addressed to the National Carriers Conference Committee, which negotiates on behalf of major railroads, and the Association of American Railroads, which represents the interests of U.S. Class 1 railroads.
It can be found at https://www.railwayage.com/freight/class-i/dear-national-carriers-conference-committee-and-aar/
Lindsey’s letter is a rant but also provides some insight into how some railroaders feel about their job and their employer.
A more measured analysis of how railroaders view their work was written by Trains magazine correspondent Bill Stephens and can be found at https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/railroads-ignore-train-crew-complaints-at-their-own-peril-analysis/
This is not to say that railroaders don’t have some legitimate grievances.
The discontent of railroaders is playing out as railroad management and labor unions struggle to agree on a new contract covering wages, benefits, and work rules.
As early as Sept. 16, railroad unions will be free under federal law to strike, and management will be free to lock out workers.
Although a strike or lockout seems unlikely to occur that soon, it still could occur sometime this fall.
Five railroad labor unions have reached a tentative contract agreement and the other seven unions will be in Washington on Wednesday for National Mediation Board supervised negotiations.
If there is a strike and/or lockout, many expect Congress to step in and impose a settlement because the economy could not bear to sustain the disruption of a railroad stoppage.
Congress “settled” strikes and lockouts in 1991 and 1992 but labor wasn’t happy with those outcomes.
Much of the back and forth over working conditions and a new contract is posturing, political theater and brinksmanship.
There are firebrands who want to strike, believing that doing so would bring the railroad industry to its knees.
Railroad labor union leaders and their members have complained bitterly about such things as railroad company profits, stock buybacks, executive compensation, and the precision scheduled railroading operating model.
But those are outside the scope of contract negotiations. A strike is not going to result in Class 1 railroad management dispensing with PSR or undoing the operational changes carriers have made in the past five years, including running fewer and longer trains.
When the current contract dispute is “resolved,” railroaders will see an increase in wages and, perhaps, some incremental improvement in working conditions.
But railroading will continue to be pretty much the same as it is now.
Railroading has always been and always will be a tough job. Freight and passengers move 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and on every day of the year.
There will always be railroaders working in the middle of the night, on weekends and on holidays, even those devoted to celebrating labor.
The railroading lifestyle can be hard on marriages, hard on family life, hard on social life, and hard on mental and physical health. That is not going to change.
The railroad can be a dangerous place to work, and every railroader knows that his or her next run could be their last through no fault of their own. That is not going to change, either.
Nor will railroad managers abandon the use of technology to closely monitor the behavior of their workers and to cut costs.
Railroad management is not going to back down on its desire to take most conductors out locomotive cabs and transform the job into a ground-based position responsible for multiple trains operating in a fixed geographic territory.
Labor accounts for 20 percent of railroad operating costs and management will always be seeking ways to trim that.
It is just a matter of time before management “wins” the crew size battle. Remember when trains used to have as many as five workers onboard? Those days are gone.
I am skeptical about some of the Sabre rattling going on about mass resignations if union workers don’t get a fantastic pay increase, additional paid days off, and more predictable and flexible work schedules.
It may have its downsides, but railroad work at the Class 1 level still pays better than many other jobs. Walking away from railroad work makes a good talking point and rallying cry but it remains to be seen just how many railroaders actually will do it if they don’t get the contract they desire.
In some places where railroaders are based there are few, if any, jobs offering comparable wages to railroad work. It might seem these days as though it’s a worker’s market, but all it would take to change that is an economic downturn in which jobs of any kind could be hard to come by.
Many of the issues surrounding railroad work that railroaders are grumbling about are not unique to the railroad industry. Every workplace has seen technology changes that have enabled managers to keep a closer eye on worker productivity.
It is common in virtually every industry for management to try to squeeze ever more productivity out of workers and to try to do more with less.
It may be, as Stephens wrote in Trains that railroad managers who ignore the discontent of their workers do so their own peril. It is equally true, though, that railroaders who underestimate the legal muscle and political power that railroad management can bring to bear in a labor dispute do so at their own peril, too.
Yes, railroad work can be tough, but so are many other jobs. That will never change, either. When it comes to setting the terms of the workplace, the advantage will almost always go to management and ownership.
Changing Rail Culture Won’t be Quick or Easy
November 26, 2022Much has been written in the past several months about the lives of railroad locomotive engineers and conductors.
Much of that has come from railroaders themselves and is part of a larger strategy by their unions to gain leverage in the negotiations to amend the contract that governs wages, benefits and work rules of unionized railroad workers.
A common theme has been improving the work-life balance of railroad workers.
One of the most thoughtful commentaries I’ve read was published on the website of Railway Age by Doug Riddel, a retired Amtrak locomotive engineer.
Riddel comes from a railroad family and his essay places the current railroad labor dispute in a historical context. You can read the essay at https://www.railwayage.com/news/not-my-grandfathers-railroad/
I highly recommend this piece because it generally avoids inflammatory rhetoric that brings more heat than light to a contentious matter.
Yet it is significant for what Riddel doesn’t say. First, let’s hear from Doug himself.
“Today’s railroad is not [emphasize in original] my grandfather’s railroad, nor is it the one I once worked for. Today’s railroaders are not the old heads. Quality of life is now front and center in contract negotiations. Like it or not, it is [emphasis in original] the driving issue, and will continue to be. It must be dealt with.”
The work-life balance conundrum has been written about at length by Trains magazine correspondent Bill Stephens and Railway Age Washington correspondent Frank Wilner.
Speakers at transportation conferences have called for changes in the relationship between railroads and their operating employees. Retired CSX CEO James Foote said as much earlier this year.
But one key component is missing from those writings and speeches.
No one has laid out a realistic blueprint for how to create that change nor have they defined what its scope should be or could be.
Instead, they have intimated that workplace changes could be or should be addressed in the current round of negotiations between unions and railroad management over amending their contract.
Maybe it will be addressed in the contract “settlement” but that probably won’t be the case.
It remains to be seen how committed everyone is toward changing what they see as undesirable yet is all they know and have experienced.
Saying that something needs to change is not the same thing as making change.
Maybe those speakers and writers haven’t laid out a blueprint because they don’t have one. I can’t criticize them for that because I don’t have one either.
What I do have is the knowledge that organizational change never comes easy or quickly.
Organizational culture and behavior don’t just happen. They are a response to years of experience, the environment in which the organization operates, and what an organization does for its livelihood.
Railroading by nature is a 24/7/365 endeavor. Freight and passengers move 24 hours a day, seven days a week every day of the year.
If you work as a locomotive engineer or conductor you are guaranteed to being called into work on weekends, holidays and nights with few exceptions.
You are guaranteed that your workplace is largely outdoors and subject to extreme cold, heat, moisture and whatever else Mother Nature has in store on any given day.
You are guaranteed to miss milestone events in the lives of your children, to be away from home a lot, and to spend long hours on the job amid some uncertainty about when or even where your shift will end.
You are not even guaranteed to make it home without having suffered a major injury at work or even to make it home alive.
I’ve heard enough stories from railroaders to also know railroaders are guaranteed to have to contend with prickly middle managers who want you to do something that might cost you your job if things go haywire.
Most if not all organizations like to talk about culture changes, but more often than not those efforts are little more than talk.
Foote talked about achieving a situation in which those who want to earn more money by working would come to work during times when those who would rather be home would be able to do that.
On the surface this sounds like a win-win outcome. But is it realistic?
I won’t say that change in railroad working culture is impossible. I will say it is unlikely to play out on the scale that some are hinting needs to happen.
There is a value to essays and speeches that hammer home the message that there needs to be a better work-life balance for railroaders. The more railroad management hears that message the less it is a foreign idea and, perhaps, the less management will resist change because “this is the way we’ve always done things around here.”
Nonetheless, some of these speeches and essays are raising unrealistic expectations of what might be accomplished whether through negotiations, Congressional action, or management fiat.
Railroaders may win the coveted sick pay they are seeking, but that will only improve their work-life balance so much.
I don’t doubt railroaders have legitimate grievances or that management is exploiting workers to please Wall Street investors which in turn boosts the compensation that CEOs and top railroad executives earn.
Yeah, working on the railroad can be a tough way to make a living. Always has been, always will be. There is only so much that can be changed even if the will or desire to do so is there.
Much of what complicates the lives of railroaders is inherent in the work they do.
Tags:commentaries on transportation, On Transportation, posts on transportation, railroad culture, Railroad workers
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