Supply chain crisis will ‘get a lot worse’ with rail mega-merger: Railroad workers explain

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I got work. All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and listen, I know that there is just so much going on in the world right now and it’s really overwhelming. I work in the news, trust me, I know. But today we are going back to the Nation’s railroad system to talk about a really important story you may not have heard about, but you should definitely care about. As Reuters reported in late July, union Pacific said it would buy smaller rival Norfolk Southern in an $85 billion deal to create the country’s first coast to coast freight rail operator and reshape the movement of goods from grains to autos across the United States.

If approved the deal would be the largest ever buyout in the sector and combine Union Pacific’s stronghold in the Western two thirds of the United States with Norfolk Southern’s 19,500 mile network that primarily spans 22 Eastern states. The deal will face lengthy regulatory scrutiny amid union concerns over potential rate increases, service disruptions and job losses. The 1996 merger of Union Pacific and Southern Pacific had temporarily led to severe congestion and delays across the Southwest. The deal reflects a shift in antitrust enforcement under US President Donald Trump’s administration. Executive orders aimed at removing barriers to consolidation have opened the door to mergers that were previously considered unlikely in a statement. Railroad workers united across craft, inter union solidarity caucus of railroad workers across North America said this about the potential merger the group Railroad Workers United has issued a formal resolution and statement opposing any and all mega rail mergers such as the one under question in recent weeks between rail Giants, union Pacific and Norfolk Southern.

Should that merger move forward and be condoned by the US government. RWU notes that the remaining two class one railroads, BNSF and CSX would in effect be forced to amalgamate as well, resulting in just four major rail corporations controlling not just the industry but the infrastructure as well. Upwards of 90% of the rail traffic of North America will be controlled by these four corporations according to RW. General Secretary Nick, worst in no other in the world outside of North America, do huge rail corporations not just run the trains but own the tracks, yards, signals, shops and other infrastructure allowing a handful of privately held extremely wealthy and powerful corporations. Unaccountable to no one but the shareholders is not in the interest of railroad workers, passengers, shippers, Trackside communities nor the nation as a whole. So if this merger does go through, what will it actually mean for railroad workers, customers, and for the general public?

What can be done, if anything, to stop it in a recent CNBC interview? Union Pacific, CEO, Jim Vina and Norfolk Southern CEO Mark George said this about the merger. We have guaranteed jobs for anybody that’s unionized at Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific because we’re absolutely sure we’re going to be growing our business. It’s all about delivering for America. They say it’s delivering for our customers, having a better service product and absolutely making it so they can move it at a very much better pace. So with all of that upfront, I want to introduce our guests because we’ve got a full panel of railroad workers from Railroad Workers United here, and I’m going to let them introduce themselves to you really quick. So gentlemen, let’s go around the table and quickly introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Ron Kaminkow:

Hi Max. My name is Ron Kaminkow. I’m a member of Railroad Workers United. I’m currently serving as a trustee. I’m a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainman Division 51 here in Reno, Nevada. I recently retired from Amtrak. Prior to that I worked for Norfolk Southern. Prior to that I worked for Conrail. So I had firsthand experience in a major merger in 1999 where Conrail was carved up and I did work for Norfolk Southern before coming to Amtrak in 2004.

Jeff Kurtz:

Hello, Max. Jeff Kurtz. I’m out of Fort Madison, Iowa, BLET member and I hired out in 1974 with the Santa Fe, retired in 2014 with the BNSF. I was a union member, or I mean a union officer most of my career. And I lived through the BN Santa Fe merger in 1996 and it didn’t turn out well for anybody, employees, shippers, you name it. It turned out well for the shareholders. And that was it.

Derek Masters:

My name’s Derek. I’m a conductor for a major class one railroad. I’m not going to mention the name. I’m a member of Smart TD and I work primarily in the northeast.

Matt Weaver:

Hello Max, thank you for the invitation to join you. My name is Matt Weaver. I have been a class one railroad in maintenance away since 1994. I am the legislative director for the B-M-W-E-D in Ohio, and I’ve lived through the Conrail carve up. It’s not been good for the members, not been good for real labor and job cuts followed. I don’t think this is a very good thing for the workers in the railroad.

Matt Parker:

Matt Parker, rank and file locomotive engineer member of railroad workers united out here in Nevada with over 20 years of experience on the railroad.

Nick Wurst:

My name’s Nick Wurst. I hired out initially as an intermodal worker, but I now work as a locomotive engineer and conductor for a major class one railroad here in Massachusetts where I live. I’m a member of Smart td.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well gentlemen, thank you all so much for joining us today. As I’ve said before on this show, just the mere fact that we could get this many railroaders on a call at the same time as a feat in and of itself because as folks will remember from all the interviews we’ve done with you all and your fellow railroad workers over the years, you all live a very hectic, intense life on the rails and your schedules are really nuts. And we’re going to kind of refresh folks’ memories here in the course of this conversation of what the labor conditions are on the rails, and we’re going to link to previous episodes that we’ve done on the number of deaths that happen on the rails every year. We’ve done endless coverage of East Palestine and the train derailment and chemical disaster there caused by Norfolk Southern, one of the two rail companies at question here in this merger.

So we’re going to refresh your guys’ memories here with our guests about what it’s actually like to work on the rails in the year of our Lord 2025, how things have changed if at all since the high stakes potential strike that was of course broken by Congress two years ago. But we’re also really going to focus in on this merger, what it means for workers, for the public, for shippers, for the rail industry, and why folks listening should care about it. So let’s start there. I want to go back around the table starting with Ron and just ask if you guys could help our listeners understand what the hell’s going on with this merger, what it’s going to mean for you all and your coworkers and for the public that’s already very worried about trains derailing in their backyard, people who are already experiencing the cost effects, people are getting hit in their wallet because of the issues in our supply chain, including on the rails. So let’s break this down for folks. What’s going on with this merger? Why should people care about it? And from a worker perspective, what is this going to mean for you guys and for all of us, Ron, kick us off.

Ron Kaminkow:

Okay, thanks Max. I’m going to specifically talk about the danger of this merger in any of these big mega mergers. The danger to railroad workers. And so having lived through what they call a meltdown, a massive service failure in 1999 that actually continued into the year 2000, I think they didn’t get this mess cleaned up for probably about 18 months. Our main line looked like a parking lot and the Norfolk Southern takeover of our portion of conrail was an unmitigated disaster. And how many hundreds of thousands of carloads were lost to competing railroads to trucks and how many marginalized businesses actually failed as a result of not being able to have reliable rail service to their factory along the right of way will perhaps never be known for railroad workers. These sorts of meltdowns and the conrail carve up was hardly the only one. The up takeover, the SP resulted a few years earlier in a very, very similar state of affairs.

This is not good for railroad workers. We worked endlessly largely 12 hours every time we went to work. My record was moving a train one mile in 12 hours other people had me beat. But to go to work every shift, every time you go on duty, you’re there for 12 hours. It’s a complete chaotic environment with crewing and deadheads and switching power from this train to that train and finding power that’s literally run out of diesel fuel from sitting for a week not being able to have a crew to move it. This is not a safe environment. Workers are demoralized. It’s a state of confusion and we are all constantly fatigued and we’re pretty upset that we’ve seen our railroad turned upside down and largely destroyed by a corporate takeover. So I would postulate that this kind of meltdown is certainly not in our interest and there’s very good reason to believe that a UNS merger would result in this.

That’s the first thing. The second thing is mergers take place in industries and the rail industries, no exception because they want to gain economies and eliminate what they call redundancies. So these two railroads meet at least five major terminals. New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago. These terminals are already congested and complicated with multiple class one and railroads all working in that terminal. I would suggest that each railroad, N-S-N-U-P at each one of these terminals has its own diesel facilities, car shops and a classification yard. They will be looking to consolidate that downgrade one or the other or outright eliminate it. So this idea that everyone’s going to have a job I think is a bunch of baloney. That’s the second thing that railroad workers have to be really concerned about. And last but not least, the fact that we will be paired down to four class ones at this rate in North America gives these carriers inordinate power like they’ve never had.

And the more powerful they are, the weaker we are and the more powerful they are, the more likely they will be successful in lobbying for the eradication of longstanding safety rules of labor legislation that guarantees us the right to collectively bargain and choose a union to represent us and so forth and so on. In other words, the robber barons of the 19th century never dreamed of having this much power. And here we are today potentially on the threshold of allowing a mega merger which will be followed and we’ll talk about that later probably by the other two railroads merging and a consolidation, the likes of which we’ve never seen and that can only bode poorly for the political power of organized labor, particularly rail and labor.

Jeff Kurtz:

Yeah, max, I would like to talk about what’s going on with the general public. I’ve been pretty intimately involved with East Palestine and I’m going to go a little macro here. I want to talk about the leadership across this country, the whole spectrum, politics, business, religion, sports, you name it. Probably the worst I’ve ever seen. And it’s illustrated by what they want to do with this merger. One of the principles in this merger NS was the primary culprit in East Palestine and we’ve got some information from the Freedom of Information Act that Jamie Wallace from East Palestine sent to me and I did send it to you, but I’d like to relay some of that information and kind of piggyback on what Ron was saying about the power that these people have right now and it’s only going to get worse. One of the things that they found out, the EPA lied to ’em, EPA soil sampling, the EPA altered its initial plan, collecting baseline samples from the most plume impacted areas, undermining any honest assessment of long-term contamination.

So I mean they don’t know how badly they’re contaminated there. EPA removed five compounds from testing. They were all precursors to dioxin the EPA delayed and concealed dioxin testing. Their FEMA coordinator who was from what I understand was sort of speaking up from these people. He was silenced and they had a FEMA cancer cluster discussion because as you know that they’re starting to see these cancer clusters and it looks like it’s probably from the derailment. There’s no public plan or healthcare support for these people. And this just kills me, CDC field team illness and withdrawal. Half the CDC team sent to assess residents fell ill with the same symptoms. East Palestine citizens reported they left without warning and only returned after advocacy pressure. And despite confirming chemical absorption, they offered no immediate medical response except to treat cancers the chemicals may cause. And the CDC actually suppressed testing.

Local doctors were told not to test or treat residents for chemical exposure, dismissing the possibility that continued contamination could be verified through these results. That was just the NS in our government. What do you think a combined NS up is going to look like? It’s just amazing to me. And one more thing that I do want to get in. There was a letter sent to members of Congress from business interest and think tank creatures. I guess that’s the only way I’d refer to ’em. But one of the sections says the largest section of the rail safety bill, that was pretty weak tea to begin with, but they say the largest section of the bill deals with the movement of hazardous material triggering an unfathomable number of future rulemakings pertaining to issues such as train size, which is something we should have done something about a long time ago as currently written, these rulemakings would avoid cost benefit analysis.

CBA conservatives have long championed the need for CBA because no human activity is a hundred percent safe a hundred percent of the time. So in other words, you’re going to be reduced to A CBA if you live along the right of way here and God only knows what’s going to happen if you’re involved and one of these mega railroads do this, they can kill your whole family and apparently not only will they not be punished, they’re going to be rewarded because what’s going to happen with this merger is all the executives of the NS that were responsible for this stuff, they’re going to get richer and more powerful. This is just bizarre.

Derek Masters:

Yeah, I mean the merger, it’s clear that the phrase too big to fail comes to mind with these companies. They’re huge. And the fact that if this up Norfolk Southern merger comes through, we already had a letter from a hedge fund, private equity, whatever you want to refer to them as to CSX ordering CSX to explore a merger with BNSF. That’s the nature of capitalism in our system is they’re going to force these companies together. And when there’s four class one railroads in the United States, who’s really in charge? Is the federal government regulating the railroads or does the railroad dictate what happens on the railroad to the federal government? And we already have seen layoffs with this administration with they just laid off a ton of FRA employees along with other parts of the Department of Transportation. They’re hammering them pretty hard. And as far as our work situation on the ground, the only thing that keeps conductors like me working is the federal regulations.

If I could work longer than 12 hours, they would keep me there longer than 12 hours. If the federal government didn’t say you have to be off the train and not working anymore after 12 hours, they would keep me there as long as they possibly could. You have contracts going on with up where they want 11 days straight for four days off. Alright, that’s the contract that they were trying to negotiate now. And to a normal person they thinking they hear that it, it’s like, well, yeah, 11 days and they get four days off. That’s not bad. But we don’t go to work like that. We don’t go to work every day at nine o’clock in the morning. That means for 11 days, as soon as I time off, within 10 hours, they can call me back to that yard. If you think people are going to work tired now and it’s five and six days for 48 hours off, it’s only going to get worse.

And the only thing that there is to really protect us is the federal regulations and those are going to be out the window when there’s four companies left and they can just dictate everything. You saw it in the banking sector when everything crashed in 2008 and nobody went to jail. This is actual physical things that can happen this than just numbers on a computer screen like this is East Palestine and these disasters are going to get worse and they’re going to get bigger and it’s always in the railroad, do more with less and there’s going to be less investment and less oversight and it’s just not a way to sustain.

Matt Parker:

Ron really hit the nail on the head when he talked about the lockups, the meltdowns that occurred after the SP up merger in 1996. And that is evidenced in the fact that there was an article that came out last week and there was a brokerage house, I don’t remember which one it was that pulled back its rating on Union Pacific from buy to hold because they expect to see major operational challenges If this merger is approved. We have 45 years of history here since passage of the Staggers Act where this consolidation has happened and everything and has it benefited the public? Has it improved service on the railroads? Has it lower? No, it hasn’t done any of that. It’s done the exact opposite. And you combine two factors in particular from what I’m seeing in my area, the unreliability of locomotive fleets, locomotives breaking down all the time, trains being held out online for 18 hours or more because of this obstructions of the network not able to run trains and just the incompetence of the management of the railroads is staggering.

It has gotten so bad. You put those two factors together and service just doesn’t exist in the railroads anymore. How are they able to get by with this? 45 years ago when they were 45 class one railroads in this country, a railroad run this poorly would be out of business. They’d either go under or they would be the next one to get swallowed up by somebody better. Today, this is status quo in the industry. Why are they able to get by with it? Because there are no other choices. We’ve eliminated all those through the consolidation and mergers that we’ve already seen. Is approving another major merger or two going to help that? Absolutely not. It’s just going to make the problem worse. History demonstrates that.

Matt Weaver:

Some great points by my brothers, my opinion’s going to be short and sweet. There will be no one in rail labor that will be served well by this merger. You cannot have anyone tell me that any other merger has shown that rail labor has benefited from a merger of two railroads. 1899 to 1900. There were 132 class one railroads after World War I, we had 2.1 million railroaders we’re down to 117,400 at the end of the last round of bargaining. The railroads got a lot of free land from PAC taxpayers money and it came because they had common carrier obligations to serve the people and to serve the shippers. They’re not doing that. The shippers are facing great trouble and getting their good shipped. They’re shifting their freight to the highways and that endangers the public. So this merger will not benefit the workers, the public or society in general. The only ERs of this will be the shareholders and the investor class.

Nick Wurst:

I just want to weigh in with some specific examples and numbers that kind of back up some of the points that people were making. So when people were talking about the regulatory process and increased their increased power when it comes to regulation and everything like that, I mean the current head of the FRA is the former president of Pan Am Railways, which in my neck of the woods CSX bought up a couple of years ago. So this guy’s sort of his failed upwards, his railroad gets bought out and then he gets to move up to be the head of the main rules regulatory body for the industry. His railroad, PanAm railroad held, and I think maybe still holds the record for the largest criminal fine ever paid in the state of Massachusetts where I live, where they neglected to report the fact that they had spilled thousands of gallons of diesel.

So the idea of railroads having increased political power and increased influence over regulations, that’s where it is right now, right? Imagine how much worse it’s going to get. And on the idea of meltdowns and too big to fail, I mean we don’t even have to go all that far back to look at a meltdown. So there was a couple of years ago a merger of two class ones when Canadian Pacific Block, Kansas City Southern. And this is a place where they only have, my understanding is sort of like one major interchange point where the two railroads met and swapped cars and things like that. So this merger, like Ron was saying, is on a completely different scale. Union Pacific Ns, completely different scale from the CPKC one and the CEO of the new CPKC was talking when the news about Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern came out about the fact that when they had the computer cut over to basically merge the computer inventory systems about where all the cars are and everything like that, this happened with the Conrail carve up.

But here it is now happening in the year of our Lord 2025 that it caused three months of congestion and confusion and disaster all across the network. This is two railroads that met in one place merging, right? So we can imagine how much worse that’s going to be if it’s on the scale of Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern. And yeah, that idea of too big to fail, railroads have failed before in the northeast. All of the big railroads ran themselves into the ground and that’s where we got conrail from and that’s where we got Amtrak from where the government had to step in and sort of guarantee service. I mean these cuts and the guiding sort of strategy of precision scheduled railroading that’s been imposed on the industry over the last couple of decades, what happens when they cut too deep and the meltdown becomes so bad that the investors just move on?

They find some other industry to cannibalize, some other corpse to go pick for profit and we’re left footing the bill and the cleanup. So I do think that aside from sort of the immediate threat, there’s the long-term health of the industry. I mean since 2000, the year 2000 carloads have fallen by over 30%. The class one railroads are moving less freight. And that’s as different companies merged and carved each other up, the share of railroads versus trucking has declined. And talking about how it was already pretty close to a monopoly in this study that was done and over 10% of what the US Census Bureau calls freight analysis zones, which includes some of them include just entire metropolitan areas. 10% of freight analysis zones in the country had access to only one class, one railroad provider that was before even CPKC.

And over 60% of freight analysis zones have access to no more than two railroad providers. So with this merger, that’s going to mean real monopoly for a lot of people and I think that’s going to push even more traffic. The shippers organizations have already sort of complained about this. I think this is going to push even more traffic away from the railroads. And that means less jobs, more cuts, more layoffs, more furloughs. And I’ll stop there, but I’ll just mention that passenger associations are also speaking out about how bad this is. All the passenger service runs over freight owned tracks, how much worse is it going to get for them? So yeah, that’s it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess just to sort of put a stamp on that before we take our first break, while all of those horrible things are piling up on the other side, the rail companies are raking in more profits than they ever have, right? So if you listening to this may be wondering why would we be going in this direction where we’re moving less freight, quality of service is going down, quality of life for workers and the number of workers keep going down, shippers are pissed off, passengers are pissed off. So who’s actually benefiting from this? Well, there’s your answer. It’s the executives and the shareholders who have managed to turn this who model of anti-competitive, all oligopoly into the most profitable era of the rails in the United States. Now gents, I really appreciate all the breakdown that you gave us on this potential merger between Union and Pacific and Norfolk Southern in the first half of this episode in the second half, I want to kick things back off by bringing us back down to the shop floor level.

And I want to ask if you guys could remind folks what is like working on the freight rail system today? What are workers going through in this era of mega mergers, corporate consolidation, the Wall Street ification of our rail system? And you all mentioned that many of you have experienced working at a rail line that is involved in one of these mega mergers. I wanted to ask if you could sort of flesh out for our readers what concrete changes you were feeling during those mergers. How did these mergers impact the day-to-day labor that you and your fellow railroad workers are doing across the different crafts?

Ron Kaminkow:

Okay, so as I reference on June 1st, 1999 a day that we’ll live in infamy, we got our power from the diesel house in Elkhart, Indiana. And we knew something was wrong because at Elkhart, the Robert M. Young Yard was the biggest railroad yard in the world in 1958 when it was built, this is a huge yard with multiple smaller yards sort of receiving yard departure yard and classification yard all smooshed together about six miles in length. And we heard nothing on the radio. It was so ghostly. So I said to my conductor, something is radically amiss. And of course we did not realize that this was day one of what would be 18 months of hell. And sure enough, the railroad bungled it. Computers didn’t work as expected. All the cars, and like Nick had pointed out, here we are 25 years later, Kansas City Southern and CP is messing it up once again.

So the cars were all lost. They had clerks out there watching trains go by with notepads and pencils. It was like going back in time back to the 1950s. That was one of the problems. The railroad was completely unprepared for how to amalgamate its section of Conrail into the Norfolk Southern. And remember this was first talked about in 96, the merger actually didn’t affect until more than three years later. So they had plenty of time you would have thought, but it was a very unpleasant experience. Often you would be called when you were working what was known as the Elkhart Chain gang, you would be called to recr one or more. That was a very common call. We almost never got called for that prior to this. But now you would drag trains in that couldn’t make it into the terminal Chicago to Elkhart a hundred miles away.

Trains needed to be recruited because the crews could not make it in 12 hours. And so you’d be called to go out 10, 20, 30 miles in a cab, recr the train, bring it into Elkhart, get back in the cab, go out again, bring in another dead train, et cetera. And so just the demoralization of seeing a railroad like a permanent traffic jam, it would be like going to work every day and you are simply in a traffic jam for 12 hours. Nothing seemed to work. It was total crisis management. Minute by minute, everyone was exhausted, everyone was disgusted, everybody was demoralized. And I feel that in this context, one could say this is my opinion, but I think it’s pretty objective. Managers on the ground, road foreman train masters terminal superintendents are going to be pushed to the limit to do what they got to do to unclog the situation.

And that means get the train out of the yard under any circumstances. Don’t worry about the air test inspection, don’t worry about all sorts of safety protocols, but cut corners, we got to get this railroad buggered up. And that is an incredibly unsafe, dangerous situation where you are being ordered to do things that are against all sorts of protocol and all sorts of rules. And so once again, having experienced it firsthand 25 years ago, and as Nick said, a very simple merger with CP and KCS and they’re sort of bungling that to imagine a much, much, much bigger merger than anything we’ve ever seen before. I personally feel that the likelihood is it’s not going to be pretty for the railroad workers for at least six months to a year if this is approved by the Surface Transportation Board.

Jeff Kurtz:

Yeah, I would like to talk about my time in 1996 when the BN and Santa Fe merged, what we started to see, I very rarely would go 12 hours. Then the merger hit and it was an every trip event, you would be at least 12 hours. And what people don’t realize, you may not be able to perform service after 12 hours, but you’re still stuck on that damn train. The worst I ever experienced as far as being stuck on a train. I was on there for 38 hours one time and this was an everyday thing for a while. We couldn’t get off in less than 20 hours because of all the congestion. I remember one time I went to work and I got to Chicago in five hours and I thought, I’m actually going to make it this time. I sat outside of the yard, we were less a mile from the yard.

I sat outside for another nine or 10 hours and after my 12 hours, they didn’t even come to get me. They let me sit out there another couple hours after that and it was still one of the shorter trips that I’d had in that time period. As far as today, what’s going on with a lot of these guys, they’re being forced to run with what we call a trip optimizer. It’s like a cruise control. They call it an ai. Its cruise control is what it is and it does not do the job that an engineer would do. In fact, that came in just before I retired just a couple of months and I was coming into Streeter, Illinois and I called the conductor over. I said, come here and take a look at this. The trip optimizer was playing with the throttle, which my God, if that would’ve happened years ago, if that would’ve happened in the seventies when I learned to run an engine.

And if I would’ve been playing with a throttle like that, my engineer would’ve come over, taken the brake valve handle out of the air where we set the air brakes and he would’ve beat me to death with it because that’s not, you do not touch that throttle if you don’t have to. Well, this thing is every second, it’s screwing around with a throttle. And I wanted this conductor to see what this thing was doing. Of course, we turn it in and they say, well, it doesn’t matter because you are going to use it anyway. So these guys are forced to use this. And I think that what I heard 95% of the time they have to use this. We have heard that it was being used in East Palestine and that just delays you being able to stop that freight train because you’ve got to come out of Trip Optimizer, you’ve got to adjust your slack.

You’ve got to make sure that when you stop, especially a train as big as that one in East Palestine was, you’ve got to make sure you know what you’re doing and a train that you cannot stop and the amount of time you need to stop. That’s a dangerous train. And these guys are going through that all the time, not just with the size, but with the Trip optimizer and the railroads don’t care. They say they’re saving money, but what they’re actually doing with this Trip Optimizer is just getting rid of people. And these things have been turned in, they’ve been turned in and nobody’s doing anything about it.

It’s going to get worse. What’s going to happen is they’re going to go to Congress or whoever and say, look, we’ve got this thing that’ll run this train. So we want one of those people that’s on the head end and they will run this before it’s ready. And believe me, I don’t think it’s ever going to be ready, but that’s the kind of power they’re going to have. And they neglected to put that the NTSB report had nothing about a Crip optimizer. It had nothing in there about that train had broken apart. I think it broke a knuckles someplace in Illinois, nothing in there about that. And that’s because the NS was able to squelch any of the real problems that they had with this thing. I just thought the NTSB report on this was, it was not good, but it’s going to get a lot worse.

Derek Masters:

I can talk a little bit about what the day-to-day is like right now on the ground, the motto seems to be in all crafts from talking to other guys is just do more with less all the time, do more with less, and the trains get bigger and the hours get longer and it’s everything is made by a decision in an office somewhere without any context or any looking at crew sizes. Where are the crews located and what do we have going where it’s all just arbitrary decisions made in an office somewhere by somebody with an MBA. And I tell people that I train that like 50% of the time you have an average day out here, but that other 50% of the time, anything can happen. Anything can happen. You can put cars on the ground, you get on an engine and you have three engines and only one of ’em works or two of ’em works and they have traction motors cut out.

It’s just everything is run so thread bare. And Ron talked earlier about removing redundancies and there’s nothing left at this point to remove and they’re going to combine these two and it’s like there’s just no redundancies to remove. And I don’t know, the really only concern is intermodal freight at this point, like domestic intermodal freight, moving it from coast to coast. And that puts a lot of midsize factories in my area and also in the Midwest. It puts them in a tough spot. They have to rely on trucking for everything. Trucking is a lot more inefficient than rail service, but the bigger these companies get is the less interest they have in servicing anyone but giant ships that are bringing in thousands of containers at a time. The money isn’t there for them, but it’s all about cutting jobs and raising the stock price. That’s all they care about is raising the stock price.

Matt Parker:

There’s been some interesting points that these guys have brought up so far, but really what it comes down to is, as an example, I can go to work, I can take a train from my home terminal to my away from home terminal where I lay over to rest. I get there, I end my shift. I look at my position on the board and the number of trains that are running and say, okay, it’s 10 o’clock at night now I’m going to be going to work at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning, so I’m going to stay up for a few hours, have something to eat, watch a movie, read a book, whatever, and go to bed around one o’clock, two o’clock in the morning or something so I could sleep well until the phone rings. And I do that. And next thing I know, I’m waking up at 9, 10, 11 o’clock in the morning going, why hasn’t the phone run yet?

And I look, and now I don’t stand to go to work until six or seven o’clock tonight. Why? Where’d the train go? Where’d the train that I was supposed to catch? Go. It’s still in Utah because a locomotive failed and it’s sitting there waiting for another one to be brought out to rescue it, or the train broke in pieces or something and it’s been delayed. Well, they put it back together. This is a common thing that goes on. And we’ve experienced on the railroads what we call break in tubes, which is where, because of the slack action in the train, if it’s mishandled, it could break a coupler that has to be repaired to put the train back together. And there was a day that I was talking with one of my coworkers and he said, Hey, do you remember the day that so-and-so broke that auto train out here east of sparks with three pieces?

And I said, well, yeah, everybody remembers that. Everybody heard about that. He goes, why did everybody hear about that? I said, because it didn’t use to be a common thing. A broken knuckle was one thing, breaking three of them at one time. That was unheard of. Now it’s common with these long trains that we have. And again, it delays the train, it blocks up the network for hours, brings things to a standstill, delays everything. What does the railroad do about it? They don’t care. They don’t have to anymore because there is no competition and who’s suffering. It’s the shippers and it’s the public who are waiting longer times for transit of their goods and are paying more for it. This is the thing about all this cost cutting that they’ve been doing under this, what they call precision scheduled railroading, which we’ve covered in the past very well, has nothing to do with either precision or scheduling.

Show me one example of where service has improved and or freight rates have gone down as a result of this cost cutting. Show me one, I’ve made this challenge repeated times. Nobody’s ever been able to show me one, because it’s not out there. It’s all going back to the shareholders. And again, it’s the public, the shippers who are paying the price for this. And it’s the result of this consolidation. And again, it’s only going to get worse if we allow further consolidation. This is what people really need to be aware of. And it was also brought up a little while ago about all the land that was given to the railroads when they first started in this country to help the railroads out. Back in the mid eighties, there was a failed merger between Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads. They tried to merge and that merger was turned down by then the Interstate Commerce Commission when it was still in existence.

One of the things that I had heard was that what they did is the two companies merged all of their assets other than the railroads prior to receiving ICC approval for the merger. When the ICC declined that merger, the Santa Fe Pacific Corporation ran off with all the land holdings that left the Southern Pacific Railroad with nothing. I actually met a gentleman, I met him a couple of years ago, but I saw him again last year and had a chance to have a conversation with him. He retired very high up in the accounting department of Southern Pacific before it merged with Union Pacific. And we were talking about this and I told him that. And he goes, oh no, no, that’s not true. He goes, the railroad still holds a lot of that land. And of course now it’s Union Pacific that owns this as a result of the fact that they took over the Southern Pacific in 1996.

And he talks specifically about these vast landholdings in the Sierra Nevada that the railroad still has. Now, real estate in California is expensive to begin with, but this is prime land up in the mountain country and everything that’s worth huge amounts of dollars. And the railroads still have that came from the American public. So when we talk about does the public have the right to demand better from the railroads, absolutely. The railroads were among the first of the land grant institutions in this country and got huge amounts of land as a gift to help them finance the construction and operation of the railroads. And in some cases, they’re still holding onto a lot of that belonged to the American people and was given to them. So do we have a right to demand better from them? I think so.

Matt Weaver:

So from a personal perspective, from the conrail carve up, I can tell you that I saw, at least in the yards, I work in 65% man count reduction, living conditions, worse for the guys on the road, more guys who had been comfortable in a headquarter position in this way, having to go back on the road. Norfolk southern guys were going back to camp cars after years at home, living in camp cars. It’s absurd. The crazy hours, the combined work weeks and shorter times off for maintenance away employees. And I can’t even imagine what the guys in transportation had to put up with on being ready on standby on extra boards. What a bunch of chaos. Yeah, floating jobs were increased. And then I’d like to double down on Brother Parker’s comment, what benefit from any merger in the last 100 years has been served to the public, to the shippers? How have things been better for society by allowing any merger? So I think the NTSB and the STB need to take a good hard look at this and we need to have rail labor come together and say, this is not a good thing for the workers. This is not a good thing for the shippers, and this will not serve the constituents of the United States of America.

Nick Wurst:

So I haven’t worked through a big class one to class one merger. I’ve seen a smaller merger, a bigger company buying up a smaller one, but I also worked through the pandemic and the sort of 2021 service crisis, which both of those really were meltdowns sort of maybe not to the same scale of what these guys are describing with being part of the conrail carve up or any of these big mergers. But when I hired out in intermodal working in a yard, loading and unloading containers from trains, I remember during the pandemic we started losing people. We started losing people and they didn’t hire to replace them. And so morale started to spiral because all of a sudden it went from, yeah, you got overtime every so often and when you got it, you appreciated it. It was a little bit of extra money to now everybody’s working five 12 hour days in a row and they’re calling you to try to get you in on your off day.

I mean, it got bad enough where there were days where I worked a first shift for eight hours, went home and slept for eight hours and then came back and worked the third shift for eight hours. They didn’t have anybody else to run the office. And intermodal guys aren’t subject to hours of service law the same way that some other railroad workers are. And again, that was the pandemic. That wasn’t the merger or anything. But we went from sort of this dip, this initial dip in traffic to all of a sudden being so overwhelmed where there were inbound cars that were waiting to get unloaded that were parked out on tracks that we couldn’t get to because we were still unloading traffic from two days before. And the lot was just so full of containers that you couldn’t even move. You had to wait for a trucker to pull one out before you could then go and park up another one and the cranes were breaking down and all of that stuff.

And same thing with once I went over to the transportation side and I went to work in sort of the tail end of the pandemic, people were talking about how this one yard that we worked at, we used to have four yard jobs, three shifts and then a relief job that covered the off days of each of the normal shift. And now they were doing the same work but with one yard job and no relief job and the trains parked on the main line going all the way back to the next terminal. You were playing dog catcher the whole time of sometimes, yeah, like Matt’s saying, you would get called in and your train wasn’t there. So you would go and get some other train and bring that in. And there was no such thing as, oh, you finish all the work, you guys get to go home early.

Oh, you did a good job. You got that mask cleaned up. Guess what? There’s another mess. And we’re going to caveat you out there right now. As a result of the smaller merger that I saw, I saw two days worth of traffic, two full-size road trains that didn’t make it onto the other territory parked. And so they had another crew who doesn’t normally handle that train, doesn’t normally run on that territory, double up two days of traffic into one massive train, take it onto unfamiliar territory. And the dispatcher said, wait, how long are you guys? They told him and he said, we can’t fit you anywhere because the normal deal was you park it and then another crew gets on and takes it the rest of the way. We can’t fit you anywhere. You’re too long. So you’re going to have to take it 25 miles over unfamiliar territory or you’re going to be blocking up like every crossing in the world.

That kind of stuff has happened before will happen if this merger goes through. And the last thing I’ll mention is the proper marshaling thing. Like Ron was saying, when stuff gets bad, local managers get under huge pressure from managers above them, right? Yard masters get put under huge pressure by train Masters and MTOs and all the way down there’s this massive pressure to clean up this mess that is so much bigger than could ever be done in one day. And it’s not just rules and regulations, but it’s also best practices that get ignored. Like Matt was saying, PSR, right? It’s not really precise, it’s not really scheduled. It’s not even really railroading. But one of the things that about East Palestine worth reminding people about that derailment was probably made worse by the weight distribution in that train. The fact that so much of the weight was towards the tail end of the train.

The best practices passed down by generations of railroaders who we’ve lost is weight towards the head end of the train, don’t have a bunch of empties, and then a bunch of really heavy cars behind it so that when you go down a hill, they all crash into the empty stuff and pop it off the rails. It’s not just when they come under this pressure to get these cars out of the yards to move ’em so that the dwell time doesn’t scare the shareholders and then drop the stock price that’s going to be like, oh, let’s smush all this stuff together. Who cares what order it’s in? Who cares where the weight is? Let’s just get it out of the yard. And well, that might not necessarily cause a derailment. It still could. It might make any derailment way worse. And the worst accident that I’ve ever seen with my own two eyes was because a road train came built in reverse station order with the cars that you were supposed to drop off first on the rear end. And so now you’re hanging on to a mile, a mile and a half of train trying to switch to make a rear end pickup and set out that stuff can happen the minute that that pressure gets mounted up. And then when it does happen, then that’s somebody else’s 12 hour shift trying to clean up or 16 hours or whatever.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s a real testament to the Orwellian reality that we’re living in these days, that the rich and powerful can just continue to sell these things as great for America and American workers as if we don’t have half a century or more of evidence that these things are fucking America and American workers over and over and over again, hearing Union Pacific, CEO, Jim Vina and Norfolk Southern CEO, Mark George say with a straight face on CNBC that this merger is all for the benefit of America and that workers are going to benefit it. It’s like hearing President Donald Trump and his ilk talk about how more and more massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich is going to be great for America. And it’s all going to trickle down like Reagan told us. When that shit has patently blatantly, repeatedly and overwhelmingly benefited the rich and concentrated wealth and power in the hands of the elite while making life demonstrably harder and harder for working people in this country, it’s just such a topsy-turvy fake reality that they’re pushing with all evidence to the contrary, and I hope folks listening can hear from this panel of current and veteran railroad workers explaining to you all why that is bullshit.

I really hope this sinks in, but we’ve got our work cut out for us because clearly the rich and powerful feel that they can just lie their way into getting whatever they want, whether that be the White House or whether that be a mega merger like Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific are trying to push through. And so I wanted to end here with the last few minutes that I have you guys by talking about what can be done, if anything, to fight back against this. Like what are railroad workers doing? What’s RWU calling for to stop this mega merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern? So in the last few minutes, let’s go around and talk about that, if there’s anything that folks listening can do to push against this and anything you guys want to say in your last message about why regular people should care about this and get involved in this effort.

Ron Kaminkow:

Well, max, I think railroad workers got to take the lead on this one, and that is exactly where Railroad Workers United is. At our steering committee meeting in August, we decided we would go full bore against the merger. And so we have issued a press release. We’re doing interviews. We got a media outreach committee of more than a dozen members, mostly working, including a few retirees like myself. We’re talking to media outlets all over the country and we are attempting to inspire others, particularly rank and file railroaders and our unions to get on board. At this point, about half of rail labor has issued some sort of statement or another. The Transport Workers Union, which is very small, has a very small handful of class one freight railroad workers has come out unequivocally against the merger. However, a number of the other rail unions have made statements to the effect of, we have concerns.

We’re taking a wait and see attitude devil’s in the details and this kind of stuff. And so our goal is to basically agitate to get them to see the light. This is not in our interest. History has proven from all that what we’ve heard today from all of us here on this panel. It should be a no-brainer, I would think, but let’s hope that rank and file railroaders are able to attend their union meetings, make it very clear to their local union presidents and their general chairman, the local chairman, general chairman, and the international officers, that this is something we don’t want. It is not in our interest. So we need to get rail labor on board. And I encourage every working railroader out there, don’t take a cynical attitude, don’t believe you can’t stop the class ones and don’t grovel for crumbs. Don’t think, well, maybe I’ll get a two or $3,000 bonus or something if we support, or rather I should say, if my union supports this merger, and often we see this with rail labor, there’s this fatalistic attitude that, well, you can’t stop them.

They’re too big, they’re too powerful. So let’s grovel for some crumbs, let’s see what we can get out of it. And I think that’s the wrong position to take because you never win that way. And incrementally you’re on your knees and it does not appeal to the rank and foul either because it makes your organization look cowardly and incapable of leading a principled fight. So if we can get the unions on board, a number of shipping groups like the National Industrial Transportation League has come out against this. There’s other big shipping groups that are very powerful and they have lobbyists as well, and they own a chunk of the American economy like the American Chemistry Council. I mean this might be strange bedfellows, but these are the people who are potentially our allies. Railroad Workers United is a member organization of the Rail Passengers Association, also another advocacy group called the Rail Users Network.

They have not come out with a statement yet. We hope that they will come out unequivocally opposed to the merger. And I should correct myself, they have come out with a statement, at least in the case of RPA with concerns. But what we need is organizations who advocate for passenger rail organizations of rail labor organizations, of shipping groups and community organizations along the tracks. We need to build a coalition where we are saying, no, this is not bargain able. This isn’t something we want a handful of crumbs from and a bunch of promises. We are opposed to this. And if we build that coalition, we do have the potential to stop the merger.

Jeff Kurtz:

And Max, I’d like to talk about what the general public could do because believe me, they’ve been called on a lot to get ahold of their representatives, their senators, whatnot, over a variety of issues. They need to, every time they see a train block crossing or they see a derailment or one of a lot of other things that can happen, call up your representative, call up your senator, tell ’em that these trains are too long. These railroads have too much power. We don’t need consolidation. This is killing us. And besides that, they can run for office too if they get tired. Enough of this stuff. Run for office. Do something about this. And I’d like to leave you with this. I found this when I was working on some East Palestine stuff, but this is a quote from John Maynard Deans, I think, and I think it was before World War ii, that he came up with this quote and it reads like capitalism is the belief that the worst of people, for the worst of reasons, will do the best for all of us. I can’t say it any better than that. Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, that may be my new tattoo, baby.

Jeff Kurtz:

Okay. If I get to put the ink on

Derek Masters:

Railroad Workers, United even if you’re not a railroad worker, you can get on our mailing list and read our newsletter. And if you’re a member of a union that’s not necessarily transportation related, bring it up to your union. Maybe they pass something to show their support and their solidarity with the rail workers in this. And there’s always the cliche of call your local representation, call your congressman. Sometimes it actually does work, and I’ve heard it working as far as manpower and pool mergers and pool movements in our industry. That has happened in Ohio and in New York where they’ve moved jobs from one area to another because the congressman there wanted the tax money there and that stuff. It sounds cliche, but it actually does work sometimes. So yeah, call your representation and just stay informed.

Matt Parker:

We had a bill in the Nevada legislature this year that among other things would limit the length of trains, which of course was opposed by the railroads. And as a presenter of that bill, I made a challenge to the opponents to demonstrate how longer trains are safer. I knew they couldn’t do it. It simply can’t be done. That’s the Kochi Maru of precision scheduled railroading. There’s plenty of evidence out there that they’re unsafe. There’s literally no concrete evidence whatsoever that longer trains enhance safety in an attempt to get out of the corner. I painted him into on that. The railroad’s PR mouthpiece made the statement of, well, longer trains means fewer trains on the network and therefore fewer accidents. And I leaned over to my union counterparts sitting next to me and whispered in his ear, my head hurts from that level of stupidity. I knew I was going to be able to blow that one out of the water and nothing flat.

And I did. I went home, got on the federal Railroad administration’s accident database and looked at numbers following the great recession coming out of the Great Recession when we were running a lot more trains, shorter trains on the network at that time. And the number of train miles in those years, I think it was five years, 2010 through 2014 that I looked at there, the number of train miles traveled in those years showed that there was more traffic on the rail networks. And in those years, every single one of those years, the rate of incidents per million train miles was lower than it was last year when the number of train miles was significantly down showing a drop in traffic in every one of those years except for one, that rate decreased. How was I able to know right away that I could refute that statement?

Because the trends in the field tell us why is it that an office rep will make such a misguided statement based on overly simplistic kindergarten level thinking? Because they don’t know what the trends in the field are saying. This is what people need to realize going forward. If you want to know what’s good, bad, right and wrong in the railroad industry, you need to listen to the people who know what the trends in the field are saying. And that is the people who are in the field, us, the railroad workers of this country. When it comes to these things, the people need to be listening to what we are telling them about this.

Matt Weaver:

So I think one of the best ideas that’s come up in one of the steering committee meetings is to work on a petition or a survey and move people to call on their congressmen to say, Hey, this big business, these oligarchs, these robber barons are damaging our way of life. Shippers can be involved in this, they’ll be our allies in this. And a big call on your congressman thing could be helpful. I’ve seen these things work. I wish I had a better answer. The next big thing that would be really exciting from my perspective is a singular coalition of all of rail labor coming together like we did under the A-F-L-C-I-O-T-T-D and say, this is not good for rail labor. This is not good for our communities. This will not be good for the shippers. It’s that simple. I don’t know how to make it any clear that we’ll lose manpower, we’ll get worse service and more freight will be moved to America’s highways because of a merger like this.

Nick Wurst:

Yeah. I want to echo what a lot of the other brothers have said. Working class people have power. We have power in this country. Sometimes we don’t feel like we do, but that’s the fact we do. So on that front, yeah, I want to echo what Ron said about we need a coalition, we need everybody involved environmental groups, community groups from Trackside communities. I mean, when this news first came out, I remember I shared it on my personal Facebook and a brother from East Palestine commented and said, everybody should be worried about Norfolk Southern now running through their backyard too. So I think there’s a lot of power there, and I don’t think it’s got to stop at calling Congress people and things like that. I think there’s a lot more that can be done. But I really want to echo sort of, labor has a big role to play in this.

So in 2024, there was a proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons. Kroger is the biggest supermarket retailer in the country. Albertsons is the fourth largest. And a bunch of UFCW locals launched to stop the merger campaign and brought the UFCW International on board and they campaigned against it and they got other unions to sign onto it. They got community groups to sign onto it. They held rallies, held protests, and it got blocked by the courts. So I think let’s take that model and let’s take a look at that. I mean, there’s a couple obstacles in our way. Matt’s talking about we have, instead of one union that represents our industry, we’ve got 12 more depending on how you define it. And a lot of times those unions are at each other’s throats. I mean, I think there’s a lot of danger in this situation because first, I don’t think we can count on this taking a while to go through a regulatory process. I think there’s a lot of pressure to get this done very, very, very quickly. And so I don’t think we have unlimited time here. We’ve seen our unions get pitted against each other so many different times before when Ancora, which is a quote activist investor hedge fund, was looking at taking over Norfolk Southern because they claim Norfolk Southern wasn’t doing enough to drive costs down and increase profit. And this is Norfolk Southern, right?

And they were pushing an even bigger, an even worse version of PSR, right? And what happened in that situation was two rail unions backed in Cora and the rest of the unions backed the existing Norfolk Southern leadership in what’s essentially a fight between two different factions of PSR pushers. And I think that’s an absurd situation to be in. How can anyone be backing the current Norfolk Southern leadership when they cause these Palestine? We’ve seen what they’ve done, but how can anyone back ancora knowing that Ancora wants to cut even deeper and even harder? And the only thing I can think of is promises were made, promises were made to individual unions, to individual crafts, and people sold out the other crafts and the other unions based on that. I’d love for there to be some evidence to the opposite, but I think we have to avoid that situation.

And so when we see these statements from some of the unions saying, oh, well, we got to wait and see, I mean a cynic, cynic like myself might say, well, what are they waiting for? Are they waiting for an offer? Are they waiting for a promise? I mean, and how can we trust any of that? We know this is going to be bad for us. We know it just from the fact that they’re talking about how awesome it’s going to be for us. If they’re happy about it, we should be very, very concerned about it. So I just think we can have, I think we need rail labor to unify and lead a united campaign on behalf of all the crafts in the industry that says this merger. We are drawing a line in the sand, no job losses, no attacks on benefits, no attacks on wages, and has a plan of escalating action for how to get the membership involved and bring the full weight of the membership to bear and basically make sure that if they don’t listen that we have a next step.

And this is the last thing I’ll mention. I think the rest of the labor movement has a role to play here. Derek was talking about sort of allied workers. I worked briefly in a factory that received rail service. It was between railroad jobs and I was a member of USW United Steel Workers when I was there. There’s so many locations. There’s so many companies, industries around the country that are reliant on rail service and workers there are unionized. Or even if they’re not unionized, they stand to lose, right? If rail service takes a shit, if there’s a big meltdown. And so everybody, if you’re a member of a labor union, but even if you’re not, reach out to your local A-F-L-C-I-O, reach out to your local central labor council and say, I think this is going to be bad for the economy, for the local economy, for the jobs, for the different locals and the different industries here. And I think we need to campaign against this because yeah, rail labor definitely has a part to play, but we need allies, we need support from other workers. And I think we can also ask the ffl CIO as well as the transportation unions to get involved in this and try to lead this fight. And let’s take that example of blocking the Albertson Kroger’s merger. That’s a big deal. That’s a big victory. And I think not a lot of people know about it. We can win. It’s happened before, so let’s try to emulate that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and just like a final quick postscript on that, when you’re describing the situation that rail unions are in, having to choose between a Quora that wants to take over Norfolk Southern and do even more cost cutting or defend Norfolk Southern and the status quo, I’m sure everyone listening was thinking the same thing. I was thinking, I was like, that sounds like our elections. That sounds like the position that working people are always put in where we feel like we have to choose between the lesser of two evils, both of which are representing the interests of the rich and powerful and trying to get us to pick a side. And it can feel so hopeless and you can feel so cynical if you stay trapped in that cycle, which again, we’re seeing on a national scale, but when working class people actually rally together and assert our needs and our priorities as workers as a class and don’t operate on the terms that are given to us by our masters, we can actually create a new kind of politics, new coalitions, and really build power the way that you’re talking about

Matt Parker:

Max. Thank you. There’s one more thing that I wanted to interject here, and you mentioned evil, and I think that’s a good place to start this. One of the two parties we’re talking about with regard to this merger is Norfolk Southern. And let us not forget who we’re talking about when we’re talking about Norfolk Southern. We are talking about the company that in its final report on the East Palestine disaster, the National Transportation Safety Board found that Norfolk Southern knowingly and deliberately withheld information from local emergency responders with regard to the decision to conduct that vent and burn operation. And further, they found that that burn operation was unnecessary. So when you hear Norfolk Southern come at you and tell you how wonderful the merger is, don’t forget their track record.

Nick Wurst:

Yeah, union Pacific, it’s been highlighted in some of the statements. Union Pacific was found guilty of coaching its employees on how to respond to an investigation into safety culture in the workplace. This is a company that was telling employees how they should respond to what’s supposed to be a survey, an investigation into the internal safety culture. We’re doing a lot of crap on Norfolk Southern here, but let’s be very clear that Union Pacific is certainly not necessarily a better actor. The last thing I want to mention is the public rail now campaign, because what you were talking about of like, okay, are our options really two different kinds of crap? No. There’s a third option out there, and this is what the Public Rail Now campaign is about, is it’s campaigning for public ownership of the railroads and alternative vision. I think it’s funny, everybody I talk to at work, all the old heads, everybody who’s got more time in the industry than me, I love to the joking question, Hey, have you ever seen it get better?

No. They always say it only ever gets worse. But we have a vision of an alternative that isn’t just endless. PSR driven cuts to a critical industry to the point of failure of what if the rail industry expanded? What if the goal of the rail industry was not to actually move less cars for a higher profit margin, but was actually to move people and goods as safely and quickly and efficiently as possible, including two areas where it’s not necessarily profitable to do it, but it’s incredibly important to do it anyways. What if there was expansion instead of contraction of our industry? What if there were more good union jobs with good retirement that doesn’t require a college degree? And what if? And so that’s kind of what the Public Re Now campaign is about, and they’ve done a ton of really good research about the long-term trends in the industry under the domination of the Class one railroads and also some seriously impressive studies of what alternatives might look like.

There’s an entire economic impact study that not just details like how bad it is now, but also how much better it could be if there was a shift. I mean, there’s just one number here that I pulled up. Increased rail service. This is from the executive summary, which is like four or five pages. You can breeze through it in 30 minutes. Increased rail service and frequency could save us shippers about $400 billion annually by 2050 and a hundred billion by 2030. Shipping by rail would result in an estimated 4 million new US jobs by 2050 and a hundred million new US jobs by 2030. That’s an alternative vision for a railroad industry that actually works for everybody, railroad workers, shippers, people in track side communities, and I think we’ve got to keep that in mind when we’re talking about fighting back against this merger. We’re not just fighting back. We shouldn’t just fight back against this merger and postpone it, right? We should fight back against it and look to put it to bed permanently.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guests from Railroad Workers United, Ron Kaminkow, Jeff Kurtz, Derek Masters, Matt Parker, Matt Weaver, and Nick Wurst. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you we really need it and it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.