Railroad Workers United (RWU)

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, December 31, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Stories:

• There is No Drought: California’s Twisted Water Ways - By EastWest, FireWorks Anarchist Counterinformation Project for the Bay Area, December 26, 2014

Railroad Workers, Safety, and the Environment:

• Aging Railway Infrastructure Raises Safety Concerns As Bay Area Readies To Receive Dramatic Increase Of Bakken Crude Oil, Part 1 Of 3 - By Jeffrey Shaub and Giancarlo Rulli, KCBS, December 29, 2014
• Investigation: federal railroad officials ignore regulations on fatigue - By Bill Lambrecht, CTPost.com, December 27, 2014
• Oil Trains: The Industry Speaks for Itself - By Eric de Place, Sightline Daily, December 30, 2014
• Railroads, unions to begin collective bargaining talks next month - By Russell Hubbard, Omaha World-Herald, December 26, 2014

Other News of Interest:

• [Appeal]: Help Capital Bikeshare Employees Unionize!
• Bosnian Workers who Started February Demonstrations are Leaving the Country on Foot - Revolution News, December 26, 2014
• 'Change the System, Not the Climate!' - By Asoka Bandarage, Huffington Post, December 20, 2014
• Green Neocolonialism, Afro-Brazilian Rebellion in Brazil - By Santiago Navarro F., Renata Bessi and Translated by Miriam Taylor, Truthout, December 28, 2014
• How 13 Complaints Against McDonald’s Could Help Millions Unionize - By David Moberg, In These Times, December 23, 2014
• Morton Salt facility partially collapses; further building inspections to come - By WGN Web Desk and Gaynor Hall, WGN TV, December 30, 2014
• Oil-field lodging company slashes jobs, curbs spending - By Collin Eaton, FuelFix, December 29, 2014
• Rio Tinto ‘representative of the destructive and devouring process of colonization’ - By Steven Newcomb, Papua New Guinea Mine Watch, December 30, 2014
• Trafficking, Child Labor May Be Growing In Global Chocolate Industry: Labor advocates say failure to address the root causes of poverty among cocoa farming communities may be leading to both human trafficking and child labor along the chocolate industry’s supply chains - By Carey L. Biron, Mint Press News, December 26, 2014
• Unsustainable growth can’t be wished away: When it comes to explaining destructive growth, many green writers confuse cause and effect - By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism, December 30, 2014
• Up to 700 jobless as Patriot Coal idles mines in western Kentucky - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, December 29, 2014

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, December 30, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Stories:

• Did Somebody Say Direct Action? What’s Missing from the Victory Narrative - By Alexander Reid Ross, Earth First! Journal, December 22, 2014
• Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart - By Rebecca Solnit, Tom Dispatch, December 23, 2014
• Protest too much? 2014 was a big year for rabblerousing - By Heather Smith, Grist, December 23, 2014

Other News of Interest:

• BHP, Rio, Anglo fear effects of Chile’s new labour bill - By Cecilia Jamasmie, Mining.Com, December 23, 2014
• Busting the Myth of “Job-Killing EPA Regulations” - By Ken Kimmell, President, Union of Concerned Scientists, Renewable Energy World, December 28, 2014
• Canadian Pension Funds To Invest In Renewables To The Tune Of $2 Billion - By Joshua S Hill, Clean Technica, December 24, 2014
• A Dollar a Day Keeps the Smokestacks Away [Fundraising appeal for a project involving IWW members] - By Josh, Energy Justice Network, December 23, 2014
• Electricity suppliers are shedding jobs, despite renewables growth - By Melissa C. Lott, Scientific American, December 23, 2014; [related]: Employment Drops in All Segments of the Power Sector—Except Renewables - By Julia Pyper, Greentech Media, December 24, 2014
• Environmentalists Are Gearing Up for the Next Phase of New York's Fracking Wars - By Peter Rugh, Vice, December 18, 2014
• The 4 Day Week? - By Tegan Tallulla, Earth Baby Blog, September 30, 2013
• Innovations or Hucksterism? Three Little-Known Infrastructure Privatization Problems - By Ellen Dannin, Truthout, December 22, 2014
• Marathon evacuates personnel from two North Sea platforms - By Robert Grattan, Fuel Fix, December 23, 2014
• Dave Kerin on Workers’ Cooperatives and the Climate Emergency - By Dave Kerin, Anarchist Affinity, November 12, 2014
• Phoenix warns of bus disruptions as union negotiates - By Brenna Goth, Arizona Republic, December 24, 2014
• Railroads seek permission to put a single person in charge of miles-long freight trains [Quotes IWW members] - By Josh Funk, Star Tribune, December 22, 2014
• Railroads, unions to begin collective bargaining talks next month - By Russell Hubbard, Omaha World-Herald, December 26, 2014
• Talcher workers up against coal mining privatization - Nyooz, December 2014
• TTIP: Chemical corporations against safety protections - By Patrick Gleeson, The Ecologist, December 24, 2014

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC

By Jenny Brown - Labor Notes, December 3, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Paul Proudlock went to bed at midnight to calibrate his sleep for a freight train he was to drive at 2 p.m. the next day. At 2:15 a.m., a Canadian Pacific dispatcher called him and asked him to take a passenger train in three hours.

“I’m not rested,” Proudlock is heard explaining in a company recording. The dispatcher threatened to discipline him and cancel his 2 p.m. train. “You’re obligated to go. If you answer the phone, you have to go.”

“No, I’m not,” said Proudlock. “I’m obligated to do the safe thing first… I drive a train.”

This kind of pressure is commonplace, according to railroad and airline workers. They say managers push workers to pilot planes, trains, and buses when they are too tired to safely do so. The stakes are high for the workers—and for the general public.

3/4 FELL ASLEEP

In a survey of freight train operators conducted by the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, 96 percent said they had gone to work tired. More alarmingly, three-quarters said they fell asleep while working—in the previous month. Among those who, like Proudlock, turned down jobs because of fatigue, 43 percent said they faced investigation or discipline.

“They’ll pressure people… and people don’t know what leg to stand on,” said CSX locomotive engineer J.P. Wright, who is based in Kentucky. “There are so many gray areas in the contract, if you could see a flow chart, it’s like a Merrie Melodies crazy cartoon.”

The railroads claim they don’t push people to work tired. Regulators scolded Canadian Pacific in the Proudlock case.

The main problem with freight railroads, said Wright, is that “they’ve short-staffed everything to the bone.” So when somebody takes time off, others have to unexpectedly fill in, creating cascades of scheduling complexity.

While rest times were increased in a 2008 rewrite of railroad scheduling rules, fatigue problems persist.

And regulations don’t help if the penalties are low, along with the chances of being fined. “I was just told, on a recorded CSX line, that they knew specifically they were violating the rest law but they would just go ahead and pay the fine,” said Wright, who is co-chair of the cross-union caucus Railroad Workers United.

By Jen Wallis - exclusive, September 21, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Editor's note: Jen Wallis meant to give the following speech at the People's Climate March in Seattle on Sunday, September 21, 2014, but had to abbreviate it due to time constraints. Here is the entire speech she would have given:

Hi my name is Jen Wallis, and I’m a founding member of Railroad Workers United. We are a rank-and-file caucus of the various national and international railroad unions. A few of us started this organization to respond to the decades of infighting created by the carriers to keep us divided.

I've been a conductor with BNSF Railway for over ten years. In 2008, I was injured on the job through no fault of my own. I was one of the first workers to file a whistleblower suit against a major railroad for retaliation for reporting a work-related injury. After 6 years of litigation, I won my case in Federal Court this past March, so I know a little bit about what it takes to fight corporations and what they will do to you and your family. I lost much of my support system, and I lost my house to foreclosure. And just as a side note, I first met Kshama Sawant when she showed up and got arrested for those of us fighting foreclosure. She is amazing!!! Over 1,000 railroaders who filed similar complaints have lost. I’m one of a handful to have won. The railroads have a lot of money to fight you, and they usually win.

I’ve taken it upon myself to use my victory to speak out for safety on the railroad because I’m one of the few people who can and not get fired for it, and I was actually in San Francisco speaking at a labor conference this past July when I got word that a group of unelected union officials from the conductor’s union had been meeting in secret with BNSF for 18 months, and unleashed a proposal that would have ended the job of the conductor on freight trains right here in my territory. My job. One person running trains at least a mile long through our communities where there have always been at least two, and engineer and a conductor. 140 years of railroading tradition gone with one contract. All the railroads would follow that precedent.

So we at Railroad Workers United went into what I can only call DEFCON 1 organizing. We had less than a month to mount a campaign to vote no before ballots were to be sent out. There were plenty of carrots in the agreement being dangled for the huge numbers of new hires we have, with things like “worker retention board” which claimed if you can’t hold a job, we’ll pay you to sit at home and not work, ending pay scale for new hires, and huge buy-outs for those getting close to retirement anyway. It was the standard concessionary agreement. Now those of us who have been in the game long enough knew these were only empty promises. We’ve seen enough of these broken in our careers, but the massive numbers of new hires did not, and we saw what scare tactics do at places like Boeing. Unions usually don’t defeat concessionary contracts, even when those companies are swimming in profits.

We knew we had to be bold, as bold as they were. I immediately started a FB group to protest the meeting in Sea-Tac where the officers would be to give us the hard-sell pitch. Now railroaders aren’t allowed to strike, and we haven’t done much in terms of organizing anything since 1894. You won’t find many of us who have ever so much as held a sign on a picket line. So I invited people who are more comfortable with holding signs - I invited my environmentalist friends I’d been trying to build alliances with these last couple of years - people from Backbone, from 350.org, Rising Tide, and members of the more radical unions like the Teamsters and Teachers and ILWU, and they showed up for us. Jess Spear showed up for us. The media we got in Seattle from that little picket inspired towns all across the country to follow suit. In places like Greybull, Wyoming and Creston Iowa, we got the spouses and families out there holding signs, (probably for the first times in their life), because they know our jobs and how terrifying it would be to have their loved ones out on these dangerous trains by themselves working under extreme fatigue in every kind of weather. We added over 2,000 new members to our facebook group in a month, distributed thousands of stickers and flyers and talking points. Many of us put our lives on hold and spent every waking moment organizing around this.

Finally, on September 10th, less than two months after we first got wind of it, the results were in. From the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes to right here in the Pacific Northwest, our members voted that proposal down. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. But as sweet as that victory was, none of that means anything compared to this fight against climate change. I have a 9 year-old son. I read recently that by the time he is my age, at the rate we’re going, this planet will experience a mass extinction. Extinction! And I can’t help but wonder If I’ve really done enough to protect him from that future.

Now our recent victory was a huge inspiration to all of us. We now know what we have to do, and we know what it takes to do it. We understand completely now that we are fighting an industry that cares as much about us as they do the environment, which is not at all...It might seem a little scary for environmentalists to approach labor, and sometimes the feeling is mutual, but when my co-workers saw that tripod up in Everett with the sign that said “Cut Oil Trains, Not Conductors”, they were blown away. Nobody has stood up for us in a very long time. America has what I call an epidemic of fence-straddling. Most people like to be perched up there, listening to information from both sides and occasionally hopping down from one to the other based on the news we get or the friends we know or which side has the most money or slickest campaign. But my friends, the fence is an illusion. If we could all just step back for a minute and notice that big field we’ve been in together this entire time. The fence is capitalism and corporate plutocracy, and it’s time to take it down!!!

By Kari Lyderson - In These Times, September 15, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Railroad workers scored a victory last week in a years-long battle over the introduction of single-person crews on freight trains, a move that railroad workers say is a recipe for disaster. On September 10, a unit of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air and Rail Transportation Workers (SMART) union announced that members had voted down a proposed contract which would have allowed the railroad company BNSF to run more than half its trains with just one worker on board.

BNSF and other railroad companies assert that automation and modern controls on tracks mean freight trains can be safely and efficiently operated by only one engineer, a change that would essentially eliminate the position of the conductor.

Railroad workers, however, say that having only one person on trains that are often more than a mile long is a safety risk for workers and communities alike, especially as more and more trains are involved in carrying explosive crude oil cross-country. The introduction of single-person crews would further a longstanding push by industry to reduce the number of workers needed to operate trains; currently most freight trains have a conductor and an engineer, but in decades past crews of three to five people were common. An industry shift to single-person crews would likely mean significant job losses, and significant savings for railroads on labor costs.

Currently the major railroads like BNSF are not using single-person crews, but smaller railroads are. The July 2013 Lac-Megantic disaster in Quebec, in which a train derailed and caused a deadly explosion, brought increased scrutiny of single-person crews. 

The contract between the union and BNSF had been negotiated by a union leadership body known as the district committee, SMART GO-001, representing about 3,000 conductors, brakemen and switchmen in multiple states. Leaders of Railroad Workers United (RWU), a national organization that includes members from the country’s 13 different railroad labor unions, said that SMART GO-001 leadership had pushed for approval of the single-person crew provision, apparently as a way to gain other concessions from BNSF.

SMART’s national leadership opposes single-person crews, and supports proposed federal legislation on the issue. The Rail Safety Improvement Act (S. 2784) just introduced in the Senate on September 10, and the Safe Freight Act (HR 3040), introduced in August 2013 in the House, would require two workers on any freight train.

In a statement on SMART’s website, SMART Transportation Division President John Previsich says: “No one would permit an airliner to fly with just one pilot, even though they can fly themselves. Trains, which cannot operate themselves, should be no different.”

In an email notifying union members that the proposed contract had been voted down, SMART GO-001 committee general chairperson Randall Knutson said, “Moving forward, this office will notify BNSF Labor Relations that we remain open to informal conversation regarding these matters, but will oppose any formal attempt by BNSF to serve notice to change our existing crew consist agreements prior to the attrition of all protected employees.”

In other words, the leadership indicated that it would not cooperate with the company in pushing single-person crews any longer. Knutson’s email also said the leadership would be in touch with more details about the contract fight in coming weeks.

SMART GO-001 district committee leaders did not return a phone message or emails for this story.