UP isn’t laying off anybody. They are reducing (early retirement or separation) non agreement positions. It is mainly applying to managers. Here is part of the announcement from the employees web site:
August 16, 2017 | 07:40 a.m. CDT
Program application deadline is Aug. 25
Union Pacific today announced a nonagreement employee workforce reduction program that will offer nonagreement employees the option of applying for participat
No they aren’t laying anyone off. Yet. If they don’t get enough voluntary separations then they will.
Supposedly there is talk of a buyout for agreement people in the works. Some of us are thinking it will be aimed at the remaining pre-1985 people.
Jeff
Maybe because UP isn’t making radical changes quickly. Although I question that they haven’t lost some productivity or haven’t driven away some customers. It’s just not as extreme or apparent as EHH has done at CSX.
Jeff
This happening is all over the industry as a whole. Too many chiefs. There should be no issue w management positions finally, finally going away. Long overdue. When Berkshire Hathaway entered the biz in 2009, they at once noticed the operation was too management heavy. It took this long to address the issue. At yards where trainmasters have been abolished and left in the hands of footboard yardmasters, the ebb & flow is doing just fine. Less micromanaging. Road foreman titles are slowly becoming history. One RFE said that once all inward cameras are installed, RFE positions will likely be gone. W/technology way it is, this makes sense. Remote download/audits are done on every mainline train from one central location. No need to pay two people to do job of one.
From a starting point of just under 30K employees, CSX has shed 2800 so far according to published sources. Nearly 10% of the work force in a ‘slash and burn’ manner. Cut the numbers - no matter the muscle, no matter the operation that is disrupted.
Talk going around is that 1200 put in for the management buyout.
Jeff
If 1200 applied it is indicative of a serious management morale issue - to my way of viewing it. Rats wanting off a sinking ship.
Will the layoffs be posponed until all the Harvey damage is corrected.
Or a manifestation of the old saw - the second best day of your life is the day you go to work for the railroad. The best day is the day you leave…
Not necessarily. It is specifically targeted at those who are near retirement as an incentive to get them to retire sooner. Pretty much everybody who applied is going to be leaving the company in the next 5 years or so anyway. Plus a postion has to be eliminated when they go.
As far as “precision railroading”, the MP has had scheduled car and train movements since 1972 and the UP at least since the MP-UP merger. Every car has a schedule and trip plan and measurements and so does every train. Has for decades.
The UP spends a lot of time figuring out how many people it needs. Even though it in the midst of a buy out its still hiring people in other places (mainly crafts).
Prior to Harrison the CSX and the other roads had interchange agreements where the roads would build blocks for each other in order to have run through trains that didn’t have to switch at the interchange point. Harrison cancled all those agreements, so the CSX doesn’t build blocks for the other roads and the other roads, in return, don’t build blocks for the CSX. Everything in interchange to or from the CSX is a switcher. You can imagine what that’s done to Chicago.
Dave,
I’m going out on a limb here and speculating, but I think Harrison has met his match. CSX is nothing like CN and CP that were basically end to end railroads. The ‘spider web’ that constituents CSX is a ‘whole nuther critter’. There are only a few end to end points on CSX while coal was, until recently, the lifeblood of the company. I think Harrison has failed to take that into account in his plan to run a scheduled railroad. If memory serves coal loads depart not on schedule but when the requested number of cars are filled and ready for departure. That may not meet Harrison’s schedule but is reality.