Editor’s Note: Allegations that railroads place too great an emphasis on lowering the operating ratio dominated the Surface Transportation Board’s two-day hearing April 26-27, “Urgent Issues in Freight Rail Service.” To assist
Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” They also are very different from the labor union brothers and sisters they employ.
Call it a “Marty Party” scheduled for April 26-27 at which CEOs of the four largest U.S.-headquartered railroads will be placed as frogs on a lily pad in a lake of pain to be grilled as suspects in the offense of failing to provide adequate service to shippers.
The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division of the Teamsters Rail Conference (BMWED) was rebuffed by a federal district court March 30 in an attempt to sever itself from multi-employer contract negotiations (national handling) in this current round of wage, benefits and work rules negotiations.
The Surface Transportation Board (STB) will hold a public hearing March 15-16 to consider finalizing a long-pending, shipper instigated rulemaking that could loosen the standard for imposing a competition enhancing Reciprocal Switching remedy created by Congress in 1980. The proceeding is officially known as Ex Parte No. 711 (Sub-No. 1). Its roots date to 2011.
The nation’s railroads today asked the National Mediation Board (NMB) to keep at the bargaining table the dozen unions with which they are negotiating wage, benefits and work rules amendments to national labor contracts.
WATCHING WASHINGTON, RAILWAY AGE MARCH 2022 ISSUE: “The farmer and the cowman should be friends,” wrote Rodgers and Hammerstein for the 1943 musical, Oklahoma! In 1967, Aretha Franklin recorded R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Five gets you 10 that neither friendship nor respect exist at the bargaining table where rail management and labor have been negotiating contract amendments since January 2020.
How remarkable that the customarily staid Association of American Railroads (AAR) is following a Marx Brothers comedy script to derail a Surface Transportation Board (STB) proposed rulemaking intended to assure railroad competition. One scene violates first-year law school advice not to irritate judges hearing your case; another vandalizes economic science by comparing a highly competitive soft drink market with rail service monopolies.
WATCHING WASHINGTON, RAILWAY AGE FEBRUARY 2022 ISSUE: Were a Jeopardy quiz show answer “infrastructure investment” and “transparency,” the question would be, “What can be done to ease supply chain congestion?” To understand its magnitude, imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger struggling to fit into Danny DeVito’s wardrobe.
What’s the consequence of appointing as chairperson of the Surface Transportation Board (STB) a veteran of rough-and-tumble Chicago politics? Contentment and consternation, it seems.