Off the Rails: A Mega-Merger Between Rail Giants Would Be a Disaster for Workers and Communities

Maximillian Alvarez: What’s going on with this merger? Why should people care about it? And from a worker perspective, what is this going to mean for you guys and for all of us?

Ron Kaminkow: Having lived through what they call a ​“meltdown,” a massive service failure in 1999 that actually continued into the year 2000. I think they didn’t get this mess cleaned up for probably about 18 months. Our main line looked like a parking lot and the Norfolk Southern takeover of our portion of Conrail was an unmitigated disaster.

This is not good for railroad workers. We worked endlessly, largely 12 hours every time we went to work. It’s a complete chaotic environment. This is not a safe environment. Workers are demoralized. It’s a state of confusion, and we are all constantly fatigued. And we’re pretty upset that we’ve seen our railroad turned upside down and largely destroyed by a corporate takeover. So I would postulate that this kind of meltdown is certainly not in our interest, and there’s very good reason to believe that a UP and NS merger would result in this.

Mergers take place in industries, and the rail industry is no exception, because they want to gain economies and eliminate what they call redundancies. So these two railroads meet at least five major terminals, and these terminals are already congested and complicated. The fact that we will be paired down to four Class 1s at this rate in North America gives these carriers inordinate power like they’ve never had, and the more powerful they are, the weaker we are. And the more powerful they are, the more likely they will be successful in lobbying for the eradication of longstanding safety rules, of labor legislation that guarantees us the right to collectively bargain and choose a union to represent us and so forth and so on.

Derek Masters: The phrase ​“too big to fail” comes to mind with these companies. They’re huge. When there’s four Class 1 railroads in the United States, who’s really in charge? Is the federal government regulating the railroads or does the railroad dictate what happens on the railroad to the federal government? As far as our work situation on the ground, the only thing that keeps conductors like me working is the federal regulations. If the federal government didn’t say you have to be off the train and not working anymore after 12 hours, they would keep me there as long as they possibly could. You have contracts going on with UP where they want 11 days straight for four days off. 

Matt Weaver: There will be no one in rail labor that will be served well by this merger. You cannot have anyone tell me that any other merger has shown that rail labor has benefited from a merger of two railroads. The only benefitters of this will be the shareholders and the investor class.

And that means less jobs, more cuts, more layoffs, more furloughs. And I’ll stop there, but I’ll just mention that passenger associations are also speaking out about how bad this is. All the passenger service runs over freight owned tracks, how much worse is it going to get for them? So yeah, that’s it.

Maximillian Alvarez: What is it like working on the freight rail system today? What are workers going through in this era of mega mergers and corporate consolidation? 

Jeff Kurtz: I would like to talk about my time in 1996 when the BN and Santa Fe merged. I very rarely would go 12 hours. Then the merger hit, and it was an every trip event. And what people don’t realize, you may not be able to perform service after 12 hours, but you’re still stuck on that damn train. I was on there for 38 hours one time.

Derek Masters: The motto seems to be, in all crafts, ​“just do more with less.” All the time, do more with less. And the trains get bigger, and the hours get longer, and everything is made by a decision in an office somewhere without any context or any looking at crew sizes. I tell people that I train that 50% of the time you have an average day out here, but that other 50% of the time, anything can happen. Ron talked earlier about removing redundancies, and there’s nothing left at this point to remove. 

Matt Parker: This is the thing about all this cost cutting that they’ve been doing under this, what they call precision scheduled railroading, it has nothing to do with either precision or scheduling.

Show me one example of where service has improved and or freight rates have gone down as a result of this cost cutting. I’ve made this challenge repeated times. Nobody’s ever been able to show me one, because it’s not out there. It’s all going back to the shareholders. And again, it’s the public, the shippers who are paying the price for this. And it’s the result of this consolidation. It’s only going to get worse if we allow further consolidation. This is what people really need to be aware of.

The railroads were among the first of the land grant institutions in this country and got huge amounts of land as a gift to help them finance the construction and operation of the railroads. And in some cases, they’re still holding onto a lot of that. That belonged to the American people and was given to them. So do we have a right to demand better from them? I think so.

Maximillian Alvarez: Is there anything folks listening can do to push against this? Is there anything you guys want to say about why regular people should care about this and get involved?

Ron Kaminkow: I think railroad workers got to take the lead on this one, and that is exactly where Railroad Workers United is. We decided we would go full bore against the merger. We have issued a press release. We’re doing interviews. We got a media outreach committee, and we’re talking to media outlets all over the country. We are attempting to inspire others, particularly rank and file railroaders and unions, to get on board. At this point, about half of rail labor has issued some sort of statement or another.

We need to build a coalition where we are saying, ​“No, this is not bargainable. This isn’t something we want a handful of crumbs from and a bunch of promises. We are opposed to this.” And if we build that coalition, we do have the potential to stop the merger.

Jeff Kurtz: I’d like to talk about what the general public could do, because believe me, they’ve been called on a lot to get ahold of their representatives, their senators, whatnot, over a variety of issues. They need to, every time they see a train block crossing or they see a derailment, call up your representative, tell them that these trains are too long. Tell them these railroads have too much power. We don’t need consolidation. This is killing us.

Matt Parker: We had a bill in the Nevada legislature this year that, among other things, would limit the length of trains, which of course was opposed by the railroads. And as a presenter of that bill, I made a challenge to the opponents to demonstrate how longer trains are safer. I knew they couldn’t do it. It simply can’t be done. In an attempt to get out of the corner I painted him into, the railroad’s PR mouthpiece made the statement of, ​“Well, longer trains means fewer trains on the network and therefore fewer accidents.” I knew I was going to be able to blow that one out of the water and nothing flat. And I did.

How was I able to know right away that I could refute that statement? Because the trends in the field tell us. Why is it that an office rep will make such a misguided statement? Because they don’t know what the trends in the field are saying. If you want to know what’s good, bad, right, and wrong in the railroad industry, you need to listen to the people who know what the trends in the field are saying. And that is the people who are in the field, us, the railroad workers of this country.

This episode of the Working People Podcast was originally published on August 25.