Vol. 79/No. 3      February 2, 2015

As union contracts expire, freight rail workers in U.S. and Canada face bosses’ demands for speedup, cuts in crew size. Above, July 31 protest in Seattle against one-man crew.

Already making record profits, railroad bosses want more and are looking for far-reaching changes. They want to link pay to “productivity and performance,” impose more of the cost of health care on rail workers, and revise work rules they say “impede the productive utilization of employees.”

The largest of the 12 rail unions in the negotiations are SMART — the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers — representing 44,000 trainmen, engineers and yardmasters; the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, with some 27,000 track workers; and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen with another 27,000.

The key work rule the bosses want to change is crew size, but they plan to take this on railroad by railroad rather than in industry-wide negotiations. They reduced crews to five in the 1970s and to two in 1991. Now they want to run trains with one person.

“The one-man crew is dangerous,” Dave Larson, an engineer on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway with 10 years experience, told the Militant at a Chicago motel where workers stay between runs. Train crews work long hours and often get called in for a trip on little rest. “It takes at least four eyes and four ears to be alert. It’s a dangerous idea that affects the train, its crew and the general public,” Larson said.

With the enormous expansion of oil production in the shale and tar sand regions of the U.S. and Canada, trains full of highly volatile crude are crossing through cities and small towns on a daily basis.

The result? A series of derailments and explosions, the most deadly of which killed 47 people and destroyed most of the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013. Government officials had granted the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway a special dispensation to run with a one-man crew to save costs.

These developments are generating intense and widespread discussion — and resistance — among rail workers and more broadly. Last September rail workers in the western two-thirds of the U.S. organized protests and meetings from Galesburg, Illinois, to Seattle against demands by Burlington Northern to run trains with a “crew” of one. They overwhelmingly voted the contract down.

“Last month Canadian Pacific workers from Chicago to North Dakota voted 300 to 13 against a proposed contract,” Mark Burrows, a Canadian Pacific engineer with 40 years’ experience, told the Militant. Burrows, who works in the Bensenville terminal near Chicago, is a delegate for SMART and a member of the steering committee of Railroad Workers United, a group active in the fight against the one-person crew.

“CP Rail tried to bribe us by offering to increase pay from $27.28 to $42.50 per hour with a minimum 10-hour day if we agreed to work rule changes,” Burrows said. “But the membership rejected it.”

“After BNSF pushed the one-man crew, Canadian Pacific tried to end system-wide seniority and any distinction between yard and road jobs in the 2014 contract,” Burrows said.

“In the yards where train cars are coupled and decoupled, most jobs have only one ground man,” Burrows said. “You have an engineer in the front and one conductor on the back of the train in all kinds of weather conditions. And a standard train is now two miles long.

“With only the conductor and the engineer on the crew, many times only one side gets inspected. What’s going to happen when there is only one person?” he said.

Lamont Pitts and David Steidel, an engineer and conductor who work for CSX, talked with Militant reporters at the motel here.

“The one-person crew? It’s definitely an unsafe idea,” Pitts said. “What if the one-man ‘crew’ had a heart attack or got injured?”

“Management says they’ll have maintenance people posted all along the route,” said Steidel, “so that they can respond rapidly to any mechanical needs. But we all know they can’t and won’t do it.”

Over the next few years railroads will be implementing federally-mandated “positive train control” systems that automatically monitor train speed and have the power to slow or stop them. Both Pitts and Steidel said such systems are of limited value.

“The way an engine alert system is set up now,” said Pitts, “if you have a problem the system takes 30 to 60 seconds to go off.” Humans react faster and better.

“In one case I know of the crew was approaching a place on the track where the speed limit was 10 miles per hour,” Steidel said. “The trip optimizer was on but the speed limit for that part of the trip had not been programmed into it. So the train exceeded the speed limit.

“The company blamed the engineer, and gave him six months off. Luckily he had another crew member to stand up for him,” Steidel said. “With a one-person crew you won’t have a chance. It’s going to be the engineer’s fault every time.”

Positive train control technology has its place, Larson told the Militant, but it can’t substitute for human judgment.

“I was at the controls on one trip and saw a car on the tracks. I didn’t put the train into emergency, because that would probably have resulted in broken wheels and a derailment,” Larson said. “It was a 100-car coal train. One car full of coal going through the depot would have killed 100 people — easy.” Larson chose to hit the car.

“Luckily, no one was in it. No one was hurt. We rely on our experience to make a split-second decision like that,” he said. “Could a computer make that decision?”

Laura Anderson and Ilona Gersh contributed to this article.
 
 
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