There’s a lot about my job that is miserable. I’ve made the decision to stick with it and retire at the first opportunity. Apparently most railroaders have made the same or similar decision. If it’s that terrible, leave. If the pay makes the misery bearable, stay and quit whining. Too many people are like a dog whining because he’s lying on a sharp rock; he keeps whining because he’s too lazy to get up.
If the dispatchers want to strike to get management’s attention, that’s fine with me - AS LONG AS THEIR ACTION DOESN’T ADD MISERY TO MY LIFE. Ever heard the old saying, “Your rights stop at the end of my nose”?
Obviously we have let loose some real emotions here folks, but that is not suprising when some people are involved who are frustrated with their professional situaiton and can not / will not do anything about it but to lash out at the company they are employed by and wi***hey were not, and of course lash out as well at the customers of that comapny who do not control their personal situations but are impacted in a negative way by the frustrations of the company employees.[banghead]
What a simple black and white lifestyle you live in. Would it be that life on the railroads were so simple. Work less for more pay. The Dispatchers are not asking for more pay though the railroads have beed dumping more and more work on them for decades now. Management wants it all their way and will violate the spirit of the labor agreement as well as the specific language of the contract to get it. Due to court decisions and government edict railroad labor organizations can only walk off the job for “major disputes” which translates to contract negotiation issues. Not for safety, not for personal welfare, not on a whim. You see how quickly BNSF was able to force the dispatchers back to work in this instance.
I have two suggestions for you. Check your anti union bias at the forum door. To get a better appreciation of the issues involved make your next move to a career in railroad dispatching. Almost all of the major railroads are short and training is available. It might even pay more than what you are making now.
Having worked at a transit company for 15 years I could easily picture the types of abuses that can occur on a railroad. For several years I thought unions were obsolete until my fellow co-workers were regularly threatened and intimidated, by new aggressive managers, to violate written contract agreements and work to the point of fatigue. Of course, if an accident occured as a result, it was just the worker’s negligence and he or she was hung-to-dry.
I’ve spoken to professional railroaders and one of the common themes I keep hearing is that the top brass are too far removed from the lower ranks to really know or care what’s actually going on. People in the lower ranks often don’t even know what the company Vice President or Board members look like. This has always been my point that mega-mergers have this major flaw.
Even back in the 70s there were strikes sometimes, but it seemed that communication between the ranks was much better with smaller Class One roads, like the Rio Grande, Southern or SCL. Railroad presidents like Graham Claytor or Prime Osborn were known for touring their systems and making contact with employees. Simple actions like this helped the work envrionment.
With the inevitable changes, America has really slid down since then. The public will be angry with those dispatchers, but we can’t dismiss a hard-charging management team’s tactics either.
I don’t deny for a minute that railroads treat their employees like crap. And believe me, I’m in the same boat as those railroad people - if I could find a better situation I would, in a heartbeat. That isn’t feasible, so I’m going to wait it out and retire ASAP, even though I’ll have to work at something else afterwards.
That said, NOTHING GIVES THE DISPATCHERS THE RIGHT TO SCREW UP THE LIVES OF INNOCENT THIRD PARTIES. If you have a dispute with the railroads, fight it out amongst yourselves and LEAVE ME OUT OF IT. There’s more than enough aggravation in my life already.
So why is it the union that srewed up the lives of innocent parties? It takes two or more to tangle and you have no idea of what the railroad management might have done to precipitate the walkout. So far the only news I have found about the reason for the strike is here;
Don’t let the union website address scare you the story is from the Fort Worth newspaper and is posted witout any union spin or comment.
It does not even suggest the BNSF denies there is a dispute. This is for public dissemination and the reality is probably a lot more messy. The railroads are so understaffed it is amazing. They are planning on new technology to reduce the numbers of dispatchers and others to reduce the total numbers of employees they need. Unfortunately, they enacted the job reductions before the installed the technology.
My railroad experience encompasses 40 years…20 year on the managment side and 20 years on the labor side.
Management is ‘empowered’ by Labor Relations to violate any contract provision that management believes they can get away with. While that policy is not writtten, if you ask Labor Relations for a ‘ruling’ concerning a contract provision, that is the answer that will be presented to you.
Labor’s obligation is to see that Management follows the provisions of the contract as written.
If BNSF management were following the provisions of the BNSF Dispatchers contract there would not have been a work action.
If anyone wants to dump on anyone…DUMP ON BNSF MANAGEMENT for their failure to follow the contract that they agreed to.
That is management’s dream but the reality is there are still a lot of switches that have to be hand lined and trains stopped by detector to be inspected. I doubt the server will have the wherewithall to accompoli***hose tasks with a train crew for some time to come.
A union president does not take his members off the job on a whim. I doubt this job action in Ft Worth was a spur of the moment decision.
I do heavy construction and am glad my company is union free. I have been there 5 years and make more than some with 17 years in. I also don’t get laid off when its slow,they do. I know many of you are hard workers( you know who you are) but I cant see paying someone lazy or dumb to keep working just because of seniority. [soapbox]
The reality of commuting in Chicago(and probably most big cities) is there are going to be days when commuters are delayed and it doesn’t matter what form of transportation one uses. The dispatcher strike(1-1.5 hour delays) got a lot of attention here, but the very next day I-55 was shut down for 5 hours due to a massive 5 truck pileup. I also remember the day when a crane fell through an overpass and blocked the outbound Eisenhower X-way completely for 12 hours. We’ve also had a number of rail mishaps, strikes, and management lockouts - most notably a time when ALL the commuter railroads shut down for 3 days and folks downtown were parking cars on draw-bridges. The great loop flood even impacted commuters who live and work downtown and walk to work, since many buildings were without power. These were all man-made delays, weather is a whole other story.
It’s true that 99+% of the time, one can literaly set their watch based on how the tains run on the BNSF Q-line - that may be why commuters get so upset when things do go wrong. On the other hand they should remember that it’s those same dispatchers who are in part responsible for that on-time performance record.
My son who has a degree in labor relations says the proper method is to go to your union with whatever grievance you may have & at that point it is up to your union delegates to correct the situation. To just take a punitive action like was done will in no way correct the situation that was bothering the dispatchers. Most likely the BNSF was aware of the grievance in the 1st place.
[banghead] To your comment I say this…Our world would be a much better place to live in if only more of us lived their lives in a more “black and white” fashion…in other words “right and wrong” and not a million different shades of gray. I was raised to believe that right is right and wrong is wrong, with not so very many BUT’s in the middle. Oh so many of us have adopted the “ME, ME, ME, ME” philosophy.
sped:
Well, I have a degree in Labor Relations as well. Sure, that’s the way it is supposed to work but if one side sticks their feet in the mud and refuses to follow the contract the other party is left with little other recourse. Railroads are known for pulling new restrictions on Labor out of thin air and imposing them upon workers as a management perrogative. Unfortunately, this may contradict with unwritten conditions of empolyment, the way things have been done in the past, and thus require negotiations with the unions before they can be imposed. The railroad will never recognize this situation until if has gone to arbitration and the neutral party reminds them. It happens time and time again but management just ignores decades of labor law anytime they want to get things their way. I am sure your son learned that in his classes as well. This is also the period when the next labor contract is under negotiation and the carriers have served some really onerous Section 6 notices upon labor. The chances of labor having an extremely adverse contract shoved down their throats by a Bush appointed Presidential Emergency Board is highly probably. People are not happy and parties are posturing with regard to negotiations.
eolafan:
The texture of life would be so bland if it only came in black and white. The reality is that it does not and you cannot make it that way. Conservatives try everyday with imited successl even after resorting to beatings and murder. Think totalitarian and fascist here. I doubt that is what you really want on a personal level.
bobwilcox:
There are thousands of people in Libby, MT who have been poisoned with asbestos by W.R. Grace company that are relying on lawyers and laws to help them survive for what little time they have left. I doubt they would agree with king Henry VIII and your position. One of the great things ov Democracy over Monarchy is the chance to talk things over instead of having it imposed. See the above note to eol
How about getting rid of all the politicians first and start over, but make a new requirement they can not be lawyers they have to know what they are going to be doing. Have a CPA as treasuer and engineers actually right the specs for anything new not a commitee who wants something on it because it looks nice.