Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
A Norfolk Southern freight train passes a train on a siding as it approaches a crossing in Homestead, Pennsylvania, April 27, 2022.
It’s Hugh Sawyer’s 65th birthday, and he is pissed off. A 35-year veteran of Norfolk Southern, he had spent the day before working 12 hours, driving a train from Chattanooga to Atlanta. When Sawyer started his career in the mid-1980s, the average train trip between Chattanooga and Atlanta took five to six hours. Due to understaffing and negligence of rail infrastructure, today it often takes 12 hours to make the same journey.
When Sawyer got home around 7:30 Monday morning, he was able to sleep for only five hours. Now, he is spending his 65th birthday evening constantly refreshing his computer, to see if he is being called into work. It’s 8 p.m., and if Sawyer makes it to midnight without getting called in, he will get a day off.
“It’s just impossible to do anything, even on your birthday, when you have no idea when you are going to work,” Sawyer tells me.
Sawyer’s frustration is at the core of why 57,000 railroad workers are threatening to strike this Friday, unless a deal is reached to address quality-of-life issues. If the two large rail unions—the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, Transportation Division (SMART-TD), and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET)—decide to walk out, it would be the first mass railroad strike since 1980. Friday is the end of a 60-day “cooling off” period triggered the first time the unions threatened to strike back in July.
Under the federal Railway Labor Act, railroad workers like Sawyer aren’t covered by the federal overtime protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Instead, they are only guaranteed ten hours off from work every 24 hours—barely enough time for most railroad workers to sleep.
Scheduling is chaotic, with most workers expected to be on call on their off days to see if they get called into work.
“You miss birthdays, you miss your kid’s plays, you miss doctor’s appointments because you never quite know when you are going to have one day off,” says Sawyer, who serves as the treasurer of Railroad Workers United.
For decades, many railroad workers were forced to put up with this chaotic lifestyle, because the Railway Labor Act gave the power to Congress to block any strike by workers. Time and again, when railroad workers have moved to strike, Congress has stopped them, in the name of ensuring the free movement of commerce across the country.
Some of the 12 rail unions have accepted a wage deal that would increase wages by 21 percent over five years (which would amount to a wage cut, since inflation is at 9 percent). The deal was based on recommendations from an expert panel put together by the Biden administration to monitor the negotiations.
However, SMART-TD and BLET have balked at the proposal, and are holding out for better terms.
The unions are getting additional pressure to strike from groups like Railroad Workers United, a rank-and-file organization of union members from across the different railway unions. A new survey of 3,162 railroad workers released by Railroad Workers United revealed that 96 percent of railroad workers are prepared to strike.
Under the federal Railway Labor Act, railroad workers aren’t covered by the federal overtime protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
This time, the main issues aren’t wages, but time off from work. Scheduling deficiencies have been a point of contention since earlier this year, when BNSF, the Warren Buffett–owned rail company, instituted a new scheduling policy that workers said punishes them for taking time off.
BNSF tweaked its policy in May, but not to the satisfaction of those who say it hampered public safety and damaged worker rights.
Railroads have found themselves under capacity to deal with an uptick in demand for goods during the pandemic, thanks to years of deliberate understaffing to maximize profits. Critics claim that the scheduling policies are an attempt to squeeze as much out of existing workers as possible, rather than hire new ones.
Sawyer has seen a real sea change in how people feel about time off work in the last few years. “I don’t know what happened during the pandemic that woke everybody up, and I’m talking about all of America, but yeah, they had a big effect,” says Sawyer. “People are saying now, there’s something more to life than wasting it on the railroad or at my job. And that’s true across the board. I think it’s helped people re-establish different priorities in their lives.”
Thirty-five-year-old Union Pacific railroad engineer Michael Lindsey is representative of that new culture of young workers unwilling to put up with the conditions of the past.
“The strike absolutely needs to happen,” says Lindsey. “This is not about money. This is about quality of life. This is about getting time off with your family.”
As the railroads have laid off more and more staff, they have forced workers like Lindsey to regularly work 80 to 90 hours a week, leading to an exodus of staff.
“In some ways, a strike has already been going on,” says Lindsey. “A lot of people that are calling it quits, just saying I can’t handle it anymore, not necessarily just because of the work schedule. But also because they realized that these are companies that really don’t care about you.”
With support for a railroad strike running high, the railroads have taken to playing hardball.
Rail management appears to be preparing for the possibility of a strike. On Friday, the nation’s largest rail companies began informing shipping companies that they would not be loading certain types of shipments for rail transportation as they prepared for a strike.
Under the Railway Labor Act, Congress can stop any rail strike by voting to impose a contract unilaterally on workers who haven’t accepted one. (This was last done in 1980.)
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Bloomberg on Monday that if the rail union strikes, Congress would act to stop it. The Biden administration has also been working to try to avert the strike, but Hoyer’s comments, stepping in on the side of blocking a strike, take things to another level.
Union leaders feel that the decision to stop shipping specific types of freight was designed to pressure lawmakers to settle any strike quickly. Both Jeremy Ferguson, president of SMART-TD, and Dennis Pierce, president of BLET, issued a joint statement denouncing the move.
“The railroads are using shippers, consumers, and the supply chain of our nation as pawns in an effort to get our Unions to cave into their contract demands knowing that our members would never accept them,” said the union leaders in a joint statement issued on Sunday. “Our Unions will not cave into these scare tactics, and Congress must not cave into what can only be described as corporate terrorism.”
Currently, both sides are negotiating over a deal that would allow workers to take guaranteed paid days off to go to the doctor. However, the deal would need to be voted upon by the BLET and SMART-TD membership. It’s unclear if the deal would pass, as many workers on the railroad want more freedom to have lives in their off-hours.
“People are sick of being treated like garbage. And they’re ready to go out there, ready to go out on strike and, and the railroads know this,” says Lindsey.
