A lot of people are wondering why the railroad is facing a strike. It’s not money folks, that’s been ironed out already…It’s quality of life issues. About 50% of railroaders are on call 24/7 unless they’re on personal time or already at work. We don’t have a schedule, there isn’t one we are on call. After 16 years I get 3 weeks vacation and 9 personal days a year. That’s it… About 30 days. And the railroad wants that to be scheduled. How do you schedule a funeral in October if it’s only February? Schedule to take your spouse to the doctor? Most people get 2 days a week off, with 52 weeks a year that’s 104 days plus two weeks so that equals 118 days off over the year. I get 30 for the year. The railroad is trying it’s best to make us look like the bad guys here but we’re not, we just want to see our family and live a little.
I think most people would understand that, but why is this an issue now? 24/7 on call has been around for many decades… Probably it would have been even more restrictive back before smartphones, when people actually had to wait beside their landline phones. At least now one can go out and mow the grass or go for a walk around the block without fear of missing the call to work… Not that 24/7 on call is much of a life either way… Precision SCHEDULED railroading held out the promise of more predictable work schedules… not sure what happened to that or why that hasn’t happened. In this day and age no one should have to wait around for a call to work… something resembling a regular work schedule should be possible one would think.
What the railroads expect from employees is way, way, way beyond reasonable. If there is a strike, the RRs have only themselves to blame.
PSR is about scheduling cars, not trains. Making trip plans for each car and following those plans.
At least until the train the cars are scheduled to are maxed out and something else needs to be figured out.
Jeff
I’m not a RR employee, but the impression that I’ve gotten is that in addition to the “always on call” aspect that has been part of the job for years…employee pool sizes have been reduced to cut overhead, meaning there is less flex in the schedule, and draconian attendance policy to enforce more demanding schedules.
The road pool here has been as an extra board, for years…and I guess that is becoming more the norm, than the exception. The second you are off duty, you are put back into the que to be called again as soon as your legally required rest is complete…(no more slack)
So it’s like the part of the job that has always been a minus, has been amplified, while the good points are shrinking.
That’s the way it looks to me, anyway
If you have time to mow the grass.
On the extra boards, both engineer and conductor, you very rarely have to sit by the phone. It rings right at 10 hours (or if extra rest was added by being on duty over 12 hours, as soon as you are rested.) after tying up the last job.
Although better now, our conductor’s road pools were turning on their rest all the time. I believe our north pools, both condr and engr, still are turning fast, if not on their rest. (I’ve brought in trains going to the north pool where they had to get a crewmember out of a different terminal because ours didn’t have any available for hours.)
Except for the engr’s north pool, all the others mentioned are guaranteed. If you don’t make the pay threshold, the difference is paid out. They rarely pay guarantee. They make sure the boards are held as thin as possible. At first, it was PSR cost cutting, “sweat the assets” as EHH said. Now it’s because they don’t have the manpower to properly staff the boards, even if they wanted to. We’ve had about 20 borrow out trainmen from Chicago and Texas working in Iowa this summer. It’s helped, but there are still times when everything is shot.
Shortages have happened before. In times past, they usually only lasted a few weeks or a month or two. Then things would get back to a more “normal” level. Since PSR, and the PSR-lite program we had before going full bore, the boards have been kept as thin as possible all the time.
We are allowed by contract to have a “reasonable” amount of time off. Since cost cutting on steroids as become the name of the game, the definition to the companies of reasonable has changed. The change in the respective attendence policies show that. Depending on company, it seems now like reasonable is once a month. I believe most are on a 90 day floating calendar. Work credit
Because pre-PSR BS, you could actually get off when you needed to do something important. Or you could take a job that had those off days.
So much has changed in the past few years (And since the last contract), that it is hard to really understand unless you had the fun of working it.
PS. it might not be a strike. It may very well be a lockout.
During that era there were actual crew callers employed in every terminal, and they might call around if they couldn’t find you (you could also call in and say where you would be if you weren’t at home for a bit, and they would call that place).
It was also rare for missing a call or booking sick to turn into an investigation and discipline, now that is the norm.
As an aside… the crew callers were sometimes called “call boys”. Max Ward (of Wardair) worked as one in Edmonton in the 1930s… in his book he has a few funny/interesting stories about it…
Back in the days of the REAL Call Boys - there were no privated telephones - the call boys would take their call list for they jobs they were calling and travel over town to knock on the doors and windows of those employees being notified.
Later when telephones were the norm, they were all, what are referred to today as ‘land lines’. Telephone lines that terminated at a specific location where the employee was expected to answer it.
Today, most if not all employees, have mobile cell phones and can be anywhere in the world and still get the call from the computerized calling system.
At one time the carriers wanted to work with employees to get them to work. In the 21st Century the carrier want to get employees fired for the least transgression in reporting for work. At one point in time the overall feeling was 'we are
And Boys meant boys. Boys as young as 12 were once employed to go find crews. The agreements had limits of one to one and a half miles for how far a crew caller would be required to go from the office.
They carried a little book that the crew members would sign, showing that they acknowledged being called for a job.
Jeff
PS. The machinists voted down the carrier’s contract proposal today.
Stand with rail workers