The dispute between railroad labor and management is about to culminate in a nationwide strike. The strike action should be supported by everyone. It is not only a matter of pay and quality of life as generally depicted in media, it is about safety.
Background
The railway Labor Act of 1926 governs only the railroad and airline industries. The goal is to substitute arbitration and mediation for strikes, assuming these two to be essential to the economy and national security. The Act provides a very long procedure for the solution of labor-management disputes.
The next to last step is the appointment of a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to assess the two sides and suggest a solution that will satisfy both sides.
In the recently appointed PEB, labor submitted wage grievances, but more importantly, quality of life grievances. Among the compensation grievances was away from home expenses. Railroad workers, particularly track maintenance and train crew personnel are away from home for long periods of time. The railroad pays for the lodging. The workers are expected to pay for food. They get a token amount for expenses, generally not enough for a single McDonalds meal per day. The balance is paid from their wages. When there is no expense increase allowed in addition to a wage increase, employees must pay from taxable earnings for work expenses.
The wage increase being offered by management is less than the rate of inflation since the last increase.
The railroad industry submitted to the PEB: The Carriers maintain that capital investment and risk are the reasons for their profits, not any contributions by labor.
They say management assumes all the risk, but I can’t remember a single instance of a CEO, President, Vice President or any other senior management or staff being killed or injured in a railroad accident. Two guys who were not assuming any of the risk and were not contributing to profits were killed a few days ago in a collision in California, involving failed procedures and apparently a failed signal system. No executives were harmed in this collision, but the damage to engines and cars was a substantial amount, perhaps injuring the stockholders.
The railroad industry claims that half of railroad workers work less than 40 hours a week. That is blatantly untrue. Occupations that work a defined shift, train dispatchers, locomotive and car maintenance workers, track and signal maintenance workers, have a 40 hour workweek. Train and engine crews may sometimes work less than 40 hours a week, but in making that statement, the industry is not counting the time they sit around in the away from home terminal waiting for their return trip, many hours or even many days.
Good ol’ Amtrak Joe, friend of Labor, appointed a PEB that issued a solution almost entirely in favor of railroad management.
For the second time during this arduous process, the “quality of life” issue was considered unimportant, a minor dispute not worthy of labor action.
Quality of Life is much more than a minor dispute. I am surprised that the PEB considers it minor. Well, actually not. Corporations own and operate the government and have for decades. Neither political party is a friend of labor, but they want you to think so.
QUALITY OF LIFE AND SAFETY – THEIRS AND YOURS
The railroad employee quality of life issue, the inability to take time off and missing family responsibilities, has been publicized and discussed with relation the coming strike and. Yes, that is a tremendous mental strain for people who need to be 100 percent into their dangerous daily work activity. Worrying about home life can be distracting when split-second observation and judgement is needed.
The conductors and engineers who move trains between cities generally work in what is known as a pool arrangement. They are assigned to run between two places, the home and the away terminal. The home terminal is, as the name implies, the place the workers live. They may live many miles from the place at which they report for duty, but it is a commute for them. At the away terminal, the railroad provides lodging, generally a motel. The railroad also provides a few dollars a day for meals, the employee being expected to pay the balance. Each crew goes to the bottom of the available crews list (board) when they arrive in the terminal. Each train leaving the terminal uses the crew on the top of the board.
Several times a day, management issues a schedule (lineup) of trains expected to operate from each terminal. However, US railroads do not adhere to schedules. (The industry term Precision Scheduled Railroading has no relationship to precision or schedule. It is a propaganda term to impress Wall Street managers.) In the words of some railroad managers, adhering to a schedule is too much work. US railroads prefer to improvise, running trains as is convenient for local management and considered least cost. The goal of US railroads is to operate the fewest possible number of trains, a metric called “train starts.” Efforts on the fly to combine trains and reduce train starts contribute to the unpredictability. This unpredictability is also related to Amtrak’s unpredictable performance.
Crew members estimate their on duty time from the lineup. How many crews are ahead of them on the board awaiting assignment? On the lineup, that number of trains will go to the crews ahead of them on the board. They will get the next train. If the lineup shows trains at 9am, 2pm, 330pm, 5pm and 8pm, the crew arriving at 8am with three crews ahead of them should expect the 5pm train.
Federal law limits the conductor and engineer of a train to 12 hours on duty during any 24 hour period. At 12 hours on duty, the train must be stopped wherever it is, inconvenient or not. Another crew must be sent, generally by highway vehicle, to relieve the crew whose hours of service limitation expired. Crews may wait on the train for many hours, not on duty but not off duty, for transportation to take them to the next terminal. They must have eight hours off duty except ten hours if they work for 12 or more hours. (It’s more complicated, but that is the fundamental principle.)
The regulation specifies the number of hours that an employee must be off duty to be considered rested and ready for duty. It does not consider what happens during those hours.
Improvised operation has no predictability. Trains are randomly inserted into the limited (by the nature of rail infrastructure) system. Train Dispatchers (like Air Traffic Controllers for railroads) are expected to continue to alter plans and attempt to keep the ever-changing situation in motion.
As a result, the lineup published for the train crews is revised frequently.
There are many scenarios that accompany the effect of improvised operation on crews and their ability to be ready for duty. The following is a transcription of one actual case.
A train arrives at 5 am. It’s been a long day, but a check of the board and the lineup tells them it will be quite a while until they go on duty. They’re tired after a trip of close to 12 hours, but if they go to bed, they’ll be awake too long in advance of the return trip of almost 12 hours. They go to the restaurant and check after they eat. At 10:45am the train crew sees that their train is due to leave at 9:30pm. It’s about time to sleep, giving enough time to wake up, eat, and get ready for work.
They get a 90 minute notice of time to come to work. They haven’t heard anything at 8:30 pm, so they check the latest lineup. Their train is now due to leave at 12:30 am. Revised lineups are issued, one after another. At 10:45pm, they check again. The train is due to leave at 1:30 am. At 1 am, the train is due to leave at 3:30am. At 3 am, the train is due to leave at 4:30am. At 5 am, the crew is called to come on duty at 6:30 am.
They woke up at 7 pm, 10 hours ago, anticipating a 12 hour trip beginning at 9:30 pm. At 6:30 am, the crew arrives at the yard and their train is not ready. It leaves at 9 am for a trip that will get them home around 9 pm, 26 hours after they got up to go to work. They were in the hotel away from home for 24 hours. When they get home, the scenario will repeat, the only difference being that they are at home instead of a hotel.
In conjunction, there are many stories crew members tell that sound like this:
No matter how hard they try. No matter how much coffee and pop they bring for the trip, it is going to be hard to stay alert for the entire trip. When they manage to stay awake, their reactions to situations they encounter will be slow, if they manage to react at all. They will remember things from the last trip (when they were in a fog of sleep deprivation) and confusing them with what they saw this trip. (Was that last signal we passed yellow or green? It’s ok, I’m sure it was green. No…was that last trip. Did I even see that signal? I’m pretty sure I did, yeah, it was green.) Then, at 35 mph, the next signal comes into view. It is red, and there is a stopped train just beyond it. Can I get this thing stopped in time?
If he doesn’t get it stopped, there will be an investigation. If the damage is below a certain threshold, the railroad will hold the “fair and impartial investigation” required by the union contract and fire them for violating specific rules, such as passing a signal displaying stop indication. More damage than that threshold and Federal Railroad Administration will look into it. The report will state that the crew had been off duty for at least the required number of hours and were “fully rested.” If the crew is unfortunate enough to be killed in the process, National Transportation Safety Board will issue a similar statement in their report. Nobody will look at the history of the off duty time. It is the crew members’ responsibility to be ready for work.
The railroad industry insists that there is no need for two people in the cab, one is sufficient given the safety devices they have employed to allow one of them to be eliminated. There are many reasons that two crew members are necessary, but in the instant case, the important reason is mutual support between two sleep-deprived people. The chance that one of the two will catch something the other missed is important. The industry claims that Positive Train Control (PTC) is the solution to all the safety problems. PTC will allow a train to collide with another at 20 mph. That doesn’t sound like much, but when a locomotive pulling 15,000 tons collides with a stopped train, the 15,000 tons does not stop instantly. The locomotive can be crushed. People can die. It has happened more than once.
Until relatively recently, crew members were able to mitigate this by being able to take time off after they arrive at home if they are too tired to work. That is now forbidden, one of the grievances that judges and the PEB have called minor disputes. The issue has been described as quality of life, but it is far more serious than that. That railroad employment often leads to divorce is already serious enough to be addressed. The safety aspect of the situation is seldom brought forward. Just quality of life? That’s minor.
The railroad industry has zero tolerance for drugs, including medicines that affect work performance. However, a completely exhausted and demoralized workforce has the same manifestation, and they don’t care.
This is in no way a minor dispute. Support railroad workers in any way you can. They cannot endure yet another management-favorable solution forced upon them.
The next step in the process is Congress enacting legislation that will impose working conditions on the employees. Contact your Congressional delegation and insist that Congress not impose the recommendations of the PEB and insist that Congress address the working conditions.