https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/
My only addition would be to remark on what a comfort it has been to know that our devoted and tireless Secretary of Transportation has obviously had this situation well in hand from the beginning. And then he lets the Sec. of Labor take all the credit! What an extraordinary gentleman.
Management isn’t the only determining factor in railroad employment. The ‘boards’ at any given railroad office are controlled by the union local. While management decides how many people to train and hire for a specific location, the union decides how many jobs there are at that location. And of course, the jobs are bid by seniority.
[Back when I worked in the railroad industry] BNSF hired me and about 20 other guys to work; we spent six weeks in training and another two months in on-the-job-training before we could ‘mark up’ at the yard office.
Sounds simple, right?
Well, the local union decided there was only enough work for about 15 of us. That left the bottom five guys left to go elsewhere in the district to find a job. If you couldn’t find a job, you were unemployed until a spot opened up.
I was the fourteenth guy in that group, so every time the board got cut, I had to go to another town where I outranked someone, and I could bump that person off that board. Let me tell you, doing that makes you really popular in a town you don’t live in.
Add to this the fact that the railroad job is 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You go to work on about two hours’ notice, and you could be gone for three days or longer. You could go to work at two in the afternoon or two in the morning- and you could work a 12-hour shift. Yes, you earn vacation time. But if you want to take it, there must be enough people available to do your job while you’re out.
Not exactly a model workplace.
So, while the unions may complain about the number of people leaving railroad service all together, the unions are a big part of the problem they’re complaining about.
For the past two decades, the unions have been making it very hard for new guys and gals to hire on and stay on. I endured two years in northeastern Montana before I found myself standing in a field during a blizzard waiting for a train and wondering exactly what the hell I was doing there.
Railroading is a hard job. But it’s a good solid job and one this nation relies on.
Back to my point: Yes, management probably needs to make more than a few concessions to labor. But someone in the labor camp needs to realize they can’t spend decades making it nearly impossible to bring in new blood, and then blame management for the fact there’s nobody around to give them time off. The laws of supply and demand are vicious mistresses, and they don’t like being broken
A decade ago I was looking to leave the park service and applied for numerous railroad jobs as I was an ideal candidate being single and no kids to be a conductor or a fireman (basically an oiler) I probably applied for a hundred jobs in locomotive crewing, yards, and track gangs with UP, BNSF, CSX, and NS. I got interviews for two of them…a BNSF fireman for Montana and conductor for NS. I decided not to go to the Montana one due to distance to get there. I went to the conductor one.
I expected that since I was being invited to an actual interview that it meant I was at least a good chance if I interviewed well to get a job offer.
No such chance. It was an interview day for a hundred men competing for one job. One. They had us for four hours filling out paperwork detailing backgrounds, all the same info you sent on your resume so the aholes already had THAT plus info for extensive background checks.
Then they made us wait for two hours while they were behind closed doors, then one came out and taped a list of five names to the door. These were the guys getting the actual interviews.
I talked with a bunch of other candidates, most had been trying for years to get on the job. The interview crew knew the five they were going to talk to before the event, they just wanted to waste the time of 95 other people who were hoping so bad to get a chance for a lucrative paying job in the middle of a recession.