[A train engineer talks about President Biden forcing a contract
on rail workers, the failure of rail union leadership during
negotiations, and why he thinks progressives in Congress should be
commended for their role pushing for seven paid sick days.]
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RAILROAD ENGINEER ON THE IMPOSED CONTRACT: “IT REALLY FELL SHORT OF
RAILROAD WORKERS’ NEEDS”  
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Ross Grooters interviewed by Jonah Furman
December 2, 2022
Jacobin
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_ A train engineer talks about President Biden forcing a contract on
rail workers, the failure of rail union leadership during
negotiations, and why he thinks progressives in Congress should be
commended for their role pushing for seven paid sick days. _

A BNSF Railway classification yard in Denver, Colorado, (Acton
Crawford / Unsplash)

 

On Thursday, Congress voted to impose a contract on 120,000 freight
railroad workers and preemptively break the first national rail
stoppage in thirty years
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move ends three years of negotiations, mediation, and federal
intervention under the Railway Labor Act (RLA), the federal law that
governs railroad workers.

In the final months of the process, rail workers voted down several
tentative agreements, held informational pickets, and raised the issue
of paid sick leave for railroad workers to national headlines. On
Monday, the White House announced their intention
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impose the labor secretary–brokered tentative agreement on the
workers; through public pressure and legislative maneuvering,
progressives forced a vote
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paid sick days in the House, only for the demand to lose in Senate,
with a 52-43 vote in favor failing to clear the sixty-vote threshold.

Throughout the showdown, Railroad Workers United (RWU), a
rank-and-file organization across all twelve rail unions, pushed for
stronger agreements, workers to vote no on bad contracts, and federal
action on the side of the workers, rather than railroad companies.

We spoke with Ross Grooters, cochair of Railroad Workers United and a
working locomotive engineer in Iowa, about the contract fight, the
failures of rail union leadership, and how to build a rail labor
movement that can win.

JONAH FURMAN

What’s the situation now? What is the tentative agreement that is
being imposed on workers?

ROSS GROOTERS

I’d argue what Congress is doing now is kind of an unfair labor
practice [[link removed]]. Why would
the carriers negotiate if Congress is imposing a deal? Congress has
acted very prematurely here.

The tentative agreement (TA) originally came out of a Biden
administration Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) that issued its
recommendations back in August. Out of that, to avert a rail strike in
September, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and others acted as
intermediaries to bring the railroads and the rail unions together to
broker some additions to that PEB package, to try to get a little
frill around the edges. I wouldn’t even call it a bow on the package
— it really fell short of where railroad workers’ needs are with
what we’re going through.

So that tentative agreement was put out to membership. Eight unions
approved it (some after multiple attempts), and four, who represent
over 55 percent of rail labor, rejected it. And those votes were
occurring in a situation where a lot of people were resigned to the TA
because Congress can do exactly what they’re doing now. A lot of
people felt strong-armed by the process, by pundits and politicians,
and felt that there wasn’t a chance to do better.

 

JONAH FURMAN

The Walsh-brokered tentative agreement also added self-sustaining
pools to the deal. Can you explain that?

ROSS GROOTERS

The self-sustaining pools are a change in operations by the railroads
to make the reduced staffing they’ve adopted through “Precision
Scheduled Railroading” (PSR) fit the contractual agreement. Because
right now, they’re violating our national agreements every day to
make the railroads operate.

A self-sustaining pool will further speed up the work-rest cycle to
get workers back to work quicker. So instead of being on a [schedule]
where you have multiple people in front of you and you know that
you’re, say, the tenth person on that roster to be called and you
know that tenth train will come sometime tomorrow — which is still
very unpredictable — now all of a sudden, you can get called out of
the blue to go to work fifteen minutes from now because they need
somebody to fill a train.

JONAH FURMAN

How did the union leadership handle the TA?

ROSS GROOTERS

If you looked around and saw what rail labor leadership was doing, it
would sort of reaffirm the viewpoint that there was nothing further
possible. Union leadership was slow to roll out the details of the
agreement to membership, and, frankly, tried to play both sides of the
fence, and say, “Well, I’m not going to tell you how to vote”
while simultaneously trying to soft-sell the contract and talk about
how good it was.

Also, various unions set different dates for their tentative agreement
votes and cooling-off periods. It wasn’t like rail labor was trying
to move a similar or the same contract all at once.

JONAH FURMAN

What do you think of the assessment that the rail unions banked on a
favorable deal from the Democratic Party, and when that didn’t
materialize, they didn’t have a plan B?

ROSS GROOTERS

I’m not clear on that, I guess. Part of the problem is I’m not
part of those conversations. What I saw was the lack of communication
throughout the three years that we haven’t had a contract.

Even the TA timeline: we didn’t see a lot of the information
initially. When we did, it came out very top-down. Some people saw the
contract, some people did not, and largely it depended on how
connected a worker was [with leadership]. The companies have refused
to negotiate for three years, and now we’re expected to basically
vote blind.

JONAH FURMAN

What do railroad workers think of the decision of progressives in
Congress to vote to impose the tentative agreement as part of a deal
to get a vote on the paid sick days?

ROSS GROOTERS

Your average railroader is not paying attention to that. Your average
railroader knew that this was probably going to be imposed by
Congress. For them, I think, there are arguments about whether it’s
enough. But the [proposed] seven paid sick days [bill] is probably
what’s being paid attention to the most.

That’s a win. That took a lot of work from the same progressives who
are coming under fire — people like Jamaal Bowman, who really stood
up and were advocates for including the paid sick time. I think they
need to be commended for that action. That was not easy to do,
especially in the face of your president, your party leader
essentially, saying “Nah, railroad workers don’t deserve anything
more.” They’ve stuck their necks out for railroad workers, and I
think they deserve praise for that.

I understand the frustration. But my frustration is not with the
politicians who voted to implement this thing, it’s with the process
itself. I don’t blame Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, for
voting yes for it. I understand the strong feelings about it because I
don’t disagree — it is strike breaking, and it is an unfair labor
practice, but that is the process; we sort of knew that going in.

This wasn’t a surprise for railroad workers. There’s not animosity
about that vote occurring. It was sort of a foregone conclusion.

 

JONAH FURMAN

The next round of rail negotiations starts in 2025. What will the
unions and rail workers need to do to win next time?

ROSS GROOTERS

This is what we really need to ask ourselves. If we want to win,
we’re going to have to change the way we’re going about things.

I’d point to Sara Nelson and the Association of Flight Attendants,
which has found ways to work within the RLA to put pressure on their
employers to bargain. Instead of declaring a nationwide strike, the
flight attendants have figured out that they even under the RLA they
can have rolling strikes that are unpredictable. So say today they
strike in Atlanta, Georgia, and shut down that airport, and it causes
disruptions across the system: flights are cancelled, et cetera.
It’s a short window, it might be a day, it might be eight hours.
They do this over a series of dates, and it puts pressure on the
airlines to negotiate.

Something like that could be tried with the railroads. Whether it
would have the same effect remains to be seen. The railroads might
react very differently from the airline industry. But it’s
definitely something that could be attempted.

This is the root of where we’re at today. A lot of this takes
organizing membership. It takes having conversations and getting
membership activated to be involved in the process. That’s step one.
It wasn’t even until this year that these contract negotiations were
on railroad workers’ radar, really. The last two years without a
contract, things had been quiet. And that’s because there’s a
disconnect between leadership and membership.

Leveraging the power of the rank and file to do things like
informational pickets, getting stories out there — all that work
that could put pressure on the bosses wasn’t done. For whatever
reason, rail labor has removed that from the process.

One of the things this round of bargaining has exposed is that
railworkers don’t have the job that people thought they did. We have
OK jobs. But at one time they were good jobs _because_ we can shut
down the economy. Because we’re so critical to the nation’s
infrastructure and freight infrastructure. And that’s gone, that’s
been pulled away.

So it’s only recently that people have started to learn how
difficult railworkers’ jobs are, how difficult the scheduling
demands are, the unknowns of when you’ll be able to go to work, and
the conditions that we kind of accepted because we had decent benefits
or had the ability to self-manage when we had more staffing.

It is only within the last five years, under PSR, that that’s really
been ratcheted down, and the vises have been squeezed on working
people. I’d argue that even since the first step of the RLA
negotiating process, three years ago, that the conditions of work have
changed so much that the contract we’re negotiating today doesn’t
fit the conditions of three years ago. That’s how rapidly things
have changed on the railroads.

Railroad Workers United has spoken out about this contract.
Repeatedly, we’ve been attacked by union leadership. Much of the
time the attacks are that we’re sharing misinformation or incorrect
information. I’ve read the contract. I feel like I’m pretty good
at reading contracts and interpreting them. I think that’s really
the only thing they can say, because the facts aren’t on their side.

And the way leadership tried to roll this contract out, it ignored the
negative things that we’re bringing up. Because membership knowing,
for instance, that we’ve negotiated away health care increases in
future contract raises would make them vote against the contract.

The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes (BMWE) smartly invested
internal organizing a few years ago. They were some of the first
crafts to face work being contracted out — and realizing this, they
started to try to activate their membership. They tried to reach out
across crafts and build contract coalitions to do informational
picketing and work together as different craft unions.

Because of that, you now have a Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way
Employes Division rank-and-file caucus, and you saw the results in the
contract vote: BMWE membership rejected it pretty soundly. I’m sure
rail labor leadership is not going to like this, but the sick leave
proposal did not come from them — that came from rank-and-file
members.

Rail labor is not organized. We’re not where we need to be. And
membership isn’t active enough for us to win the kinds of things we
want to win in future contracts. We’ve got to make that happen.

JONAH FURMAN

What’s going to happen now?

 

ROSS GROOTERS

Railroad workers are going to get a contract, especially in the
operating crafts, that will lead to further workforce reduction. We
have a lot of workers who are approaching twenty years in the
industry. At twenty years, depending on your age, you may be eligible
for retirement. You may be eligible for disability; railroad workers
have a lot of health issues due to the way we’re worked and the
lifestyle.

And you have a lot of older workers who are ready for retirement, who
are just holding on to get the back pay, the bonuses. They know the
terms of this contract are going to continue to lead to workforce
reduction. It is not going to resolve the root issue of inadequate
staffing, to make our workplace safer and healthier and more
sustainable.

This contract helps the railroads turn this into a revolving door job
instead of a career. And in two years we go right back to the
negotiating table.

In my mind, the work that we’re doing now shouldn’t stop. That’s
what I’d impress upon railroad workers and our allies that have seen
this moment and been activated. People who are frustrated with the
progressive caucus — try to keep this on the front burner and
organize with us. Keep pressure on the carriers; this thing isn’t
going away. The problems we have are going to continue, and it’s
going to continue to jeopardize the supply chain and the economy.

Railroads are not being operated to move freight, they are being
operated as a bank to extract wealth. To correct that, we need to
operate railroads like public infrastructure — like the necessary
piece of our economy that they are. This is something that RWU has
pushed: public ownership
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It’s a way for us to go on the offensive, to start pushing that
there is another way to do this that doesn’t have as great a
negative effect on workers.

That’s my biggest message. Within the last couple months, we’ve
built a network of people who are looking to RWU for guidance in this
process. That could be being done by our rail unions, and they could
be pushing some very big demands for the whole working class. It’s
not just railroad workers who need predictable scheduling, who need
time off the job — all workplaces need that.

Turning that from a railroad struggle into a broader class struggle is
my kind of vision. 

_Ross Grooters is a union train engineer and member of Railroad
Workers United._

_Jonah Furman is a staff writer and organizer for Labor Notes._

_Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month.  _

_As a 501(c)3, all eligible bequests and donations to Jacobin
Foundation are tax-deductible.  Contact us at development [at]
jacobin.com for more details._

* Railroad Workers United
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* railroad workers
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* Paid Sick Leave
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* Progressive Caucus
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* President Biden
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* Railway Labor Act
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