Mike L wrote an article for The Real News Network titled A carman’s perspective on the East Palestine derailment and the railroad industry as a whole (March 31, 2023).
« What is perhaps most devastating about the East Palestine disaster, though, is the fact that it was avoidable. Norfolk Southern has spent the last five years deferring maintenance, furloughing employees, rushing inspections, cutting corners on repairs, and threatening (and retaliating against) employees who didn’t comply with any of the directives put in place to accomplish their ultimate goal of an operating ratio below 60%. »
« I am a carman who has worked at Norfolk Southern for nearly 20 years. During that time, I’ve had a front-row seat to the complete and utter degradation of this industry. »
« Over the past few years, as the Class 1 rail carriers have implemented the cost-cutting, job-automating, profit-maximizing scheme known as “Precision Scheduled Railroading” (PSR), working conditions on the railroads have gotten progressively worse. In a Dec. 2020 Moneywise article, three of the four big Class 1 carriers were listed among the top five worst companies in the US to work for. Norfolk Southern is number two on that list. Just one year prior, Norfolk Southern was listed on Forbes’ top 100 list of the World’s Best Employers. After only a year of implementing PSR, the company went from one of the best companies to work for to one of the worst. »
« The big rail companies would have you believe that PSR is about improving transport efficiency and running trains on a more precise schedule so that the supply chain runs more smoothly. On its face that sounds good, but in practice there is nothing efficient, scheduled, nor precise about PSR. When it comes down to it, PSR is truly about driving down the railroads’ operating costs at the expense of their employees, customers, and the general public, all so the big companies can distribute even more money to their already obscenely wealthy shareholders via stock buybacks and dividends. »
« the operating ratio is how a company measures the efficiency of its business by factoring their expenses as a percentage of revenue. When they talk about “efficiency,” lowering that percentage is the only meaningful efficiency goal they’re referencing. When I hired on, Norfolk Southern kept an operating ratio of around 76-80%. During that time, they were still making record profits pretty much every year. With PSR, though, the goal is now to reduce the operating ratio to 60% or below. »
« For train crews, it means operating trains with ever-increasing and dangerous train lengths and tonnages, as well as complying with ridiculous attendance policies and on-call windows that no one is able to plan for and that lead to, essentially, no quality of life or time with your family. »
« Approximately 40% of mechanical employees at Norfolk Southern have been cut in the last five years or so. »
« When I hired on 20 years ago, someone resigning from this industry mid-career was unheard of. In the last few years, you’ve had employees with 10-20 years of service walking away in droves. »
« Recently, there was a bipartisan bill proposed in Congress called the Railway Safety Act of 2023; if passed, it would go a long way to implementing long-term solutions to the problems plaguing the rail industry. This is a surprisingly well-written bill that covers many issues that need to be fixed in this industry, including capping train lengths, increasing staffing, implementing stricter hazmat rules and inspection requirements, increasing the amount of meaningful fines and penalties for infractions, and implementing new detector rules. However, portions of the bill are vague and leave much of the rulemaking up to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). »
Regulatory Capture. « Don’t get me wrong, regulating the industry falls under the purview of the FRA. However, when partisan hacks are appointed to direct and oversee these agencies, we end up with a regulating body that is completely hands-off. The last FRA administrator, Ron Batory, is a prime example of the hands off approach: as FRA chief operating officer, he essentially gave the railroad companies everything they wanted. During his tenure, I was told by a regional FRA inspector that they were specifically instructed to be hands-off in their duties—that it wasn’t their duty to get in the way of moving freight. The proposed Railway Safety Act of 2023 also fails to address an important issue in that the Surface Transportation Board needs more authority to force this industry to do its job in safely hauling freight across the country. »
Articles of Interest 