Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Railway Worker Interview

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Max Alvarez interviews Michael Paul Lindsey, a locomotive engineer and a 17 year employee of Union Pacific in Idaho. They talk about his experience working at the company through a period of deregulation, consolidation, and cuts to the workforce.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Max Alvarez: https://therealnews.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories

shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, I also want to address the Tonys. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace, listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Maximilian Alvarez. I'm the editor-in-chief of the Real News Network and host of the podcast Working People. And this is the art of class war on Breaking Points. Last time I was in the Breaking Points studio,

we talked about the unbearable heat conditions that UPS workers in package cars and warehouses have been enduring on the job. Part two of that segment, where we'll look more at heat as a workplace hazard impacting workers across many industries is still coming. But we're pushing that back just a little bit more to bring you this special edition of The Art of Class War to talk about the crisis on the country's freight railroads as we count down to a potential national rail shutdown this Friday, September 16th.

If you follow our work at The Real News Network, then you know that for the past eight months, journalist Mel Buer and I have been extensively covering the ways that corporate greed has wrecked the freight rail industry, the supply chain, and freight rail workers themselves. And, you know, Breaking Points is one of the few other outlets that have actually covered this story regularly. The stalled negotiations between the major rail carriers and the 12 different unions representing rail workers have been going on for over two years, officially reaching an impasse in late spring of this year. And, you know, the issues that workers have been raising the alarm about have been plaguing the industry for years, if not decades. And yet, it's been next to impossible to get media and political elites to

pay attention. And when they have paid attention, they almost never talk to the workers who make the railroads run about what they think. But now, finally, just days before we are poised to cross the final threshold to a rail strike initiated by the unions or a rail lockout initiated by the rail carriers, suddenly corporate media and DC politicians have decided to take an interest in this story. Now, things are moving very quickly. And just this past weekend, for instance, ahead of the deadline for when lockouts can legally start, the rail carriers began what some describe as a soft lockout by notifying customers and shippers of immediate carrier initiated slowdowns and embargoed freight. Meanwhile, the union leadership in 10 of the 12 railcraft unions have reportedly agreed to accept the recommendations of Biden's presidential emergency board as the new terms for a new contract. But the membership still needs to

have their say and vote on it. Now, the two unions standing their ground and rejecting the Presidential Emergency Board, or PEB's, recommendations, which collectively represent close to 60,000 engineers and conductors and trainmen, are the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Teamsters Rail Conference, or the BLET, and the Transportation Division of the Sheet Metal Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, or SMART-TD. In a joint statement released this Sunday, Jeremy Ferguson, president of SMART-TD, and Dennis Pierce, president of the BLET, said about the embargo, quote, the railroads are using shippers, consumers, and the supply chain of our nation as pawns in an effort to get our unions to cave into their contract demands,

knowing that our members would never accept them. Our unions will not cave into these scare tactics and Congress must not cave into what can only be described as corporate terrorism, end quote. And on Monday, Republican Senators Richard Burr and Roger Wicker introduced a resolution, quote, to adopt the PEB recommendations to avert a rail strike, end quote. Now, it remains to be seen if Biden and the Democrats will have anything more than that to offer all these truly beaten down but fired up workers who say they are getting screwed, that the supply chain is getting screwed, and if they can't strike, that they have zero power to do anything about it. If a resolution is not reached between the

unions and the rail carriers, 12 a.m. on Friday the 16th could be the moment strikes or lockouts begin around the country. Now, Congress may force a contract down workers' throats and compel them back to work for fear of the seismic economic damage a shutdown would do. But will workers obey? To talk about all of this, I'm honored to be joined today by Michael Paul Lindsay, a locomotive engineer and a 17-year employee of Union Pacific in Pocatello, Idaho. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today on Breaking Points. Thank you for having me. So, yeah, I really appreciate it, man.

I know there is a lot going on, both in your work life and, you know, in the broader crisis that the railroad industry is in right now. And so before we really sort of dig into the moment that we're at right now, approaching the threshold of a strike or a lockout, let's start by quickly getting to know more about you. So I was wondering if you could tell folks a little bit about how long you've been working on the railroads, what kind of work that you do. And, you know, for those who are just now learning about the crisis that has led us to this point, talk about what your typical, quote unquote, work week looks like.

Okay. I've been an employee of the railroad for about 17 years. I'm a locomotive engineer, so I work out of Pocatello. So I've worked around the country and other places as well, but that's been my primary home base for most of my career. A typical work week for us, more like work in general, the whole year would be being available for call. And you're available for call, and whenever your spot's up to be called, they call you, and it doesn't matter whether it's six in the morning or 1 a.m. or noon. It doesn't really matter. You get called, you take your call and you go down there and you perform your assignment. You take your train

over the road or you work in the yard or you work a local. You don't really know day to day what you're doing exactly. But usually when you go out of town, we're gone for up to 48 hours at a time. We'll take a train across and it might take 12, we might be on duty 12, 13, 14 hours by the time we actually get to the end of our shift and get relieved and get a van back to wherever we're going to be. And then we go to a hotel and we're in a hotel for 16, 18, 20 hours, sometimes more. And then we take a train back the other direction. And there's a lot of downtime in between shifts where we're not getting compensated, which that's time that we're not getting compensated for. So that needs to be taken into account on our rate of pay. And then also there's a lot of away from home

meal expenses because we're stuck away from town, eating out, eating away from home. We don't have an alternative. And unfortunately, our meal allowances have not gone up since 1993. So as an engineer for Union Pacific, I'm still making $12 on my non-taxable meal allowance. Meanwhile, the IRS says that $60 per day is the acceptable amount, and we're still making $12. And that goes into these contract negotiations and how they did not address that in any way. That was not one of the things that were included in the contract. Right. And we're going to talk a bit about the contract negotiations such that they are and the shortcomings of President Biden's Presidential Emergency Board, which as you alluded to, did not really address any of the quality of life and workplace safety issues that railroaders like yourself have been screaming about for many years. So we're going to talk about that, but

I want to kind of pick up on that sort of, you know, the daily grind of it, right? What working in this sort of environment, being on call 24-7, having no sick days, right? Having no set schedule and, you know, having a workplace that literally moves and sometimes your rest time is being stuck out in a strip mall somewhere in a motel before you can hitch a ride back home. I want to kind of talk about that because that's where I first entered into this story. When I reported for the Real News Network in January on the quote-unquote high-vis attendance policy at BNSF Railway, another one of the class one freight railroads. And I learned that workers, 17,000 of them were prepared to strike over this attendance policy. I learned that a U.S.

district court judge blocked workers from striking for fear of what it would do to the supply chain. And then I learned more about what this kind of attendance policy and these sorts of work practices that are really the case across the industry, not just at BNSF, what that says about how the industry has changed over the years. So I want to pick up on that. And since the 1980s, when there were over 30 class one railroads operating in this country, deregulation and corporate consolidation on the railroads has led us to the point that there are now just seven. And over that same time period, the railroad workforce, as you know, was slashed dramatically from over 500,000 employees in 1980 to less than 150,000 today. And I mean, you know, this is something I try to stress for folks that even before COVID-19, since 2015, the rail carriers collectively have laid off over 30% of their combined workforce. And now they're complaining about a labor shortage. So can you talk about what it's been like to work while all of this slashing has been going on around you? And what does this approach to staffing and the way that these companies generally treat workers like yourself, like, what does that tell us about the larger system shift that has taken hold of the rail industry? Why is this happening?

We mentioned deregulation going back to the 80s and all. There was a time when the railroad industry was not profitable like it is now. They were in a hard time. Well, several decades have passed. The consolidations have occurred, the reductions in staffing and lines and abandonments of lines and everything has occurred. And now this industry is ultra, ultra profitable. And like you said, they've consolidated into seven systems. Two of those are Canadian railroads, actually. The big four, Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, are the ones that, for the most part, they're the ones that we're talking about here.

And they work together and collude together like a big, happy cartel. These railroads are owned by the same people. They're primarily controlled by the same institutional investors, and they make the same choices and decisions. So the high-vis attendance policy has been the most publicized attendance policy. But make no mistake, all the railroads have these attendance policies. And what happened in the last few years is the railroads have implemented this plan they call precision scheduled railroading. And that means very different things depending on who you ask. But for the most part, it involves cutting crews, cutting maintenance, cutting locomotives, cutting terminals, slashing and burning the railroad in any way possible to get a lower operating ratio, to increase the dividends, to increase the

share buybacks. And they have paid more to share buybacks over the last 15 years, every year consistently, than they have to capital improvements. In fact, they've essentially invested nothing into their railroad. They're not investing in expansion. They're not investing in expansion. They're not investing in electrification. They're not investing in anything that would be good for the economy or people or anyone else. They're investing in their stock price growth and their dividend growth. And so

part of that was to cut their crews. And so about five years ago, they started cutting dramatically, and our seniority has gone downhill. They furloughed a whole bunch of people that were hired on like 2016, 2017. They furloughed them for two and a half years or so. And then when it finally came time, they realized, oh, we need these people. We need to bring these people back. None of them came back. Very back. None of them came back. Very, very few of them came back. I mean, it was like single digit retention rates in a lot of parts of the country. And this was on all four of the big carriers. So no one really came back

and they realized, oh, we got a manpower shortage now. And it was self-inflicted. Of course, they're trying to blame COVID. It had nothing to do with COVID. And they've realized that they cannot hire people anymore because people realize what a terrible work-life balance you have or lack of any work-life balance that you have. And so since they can't get new employees, they impose these horrible attendance policies, which make it to where every time we take any sort of day off, we lose points. And in order to get any points back, you have to be available for an obscene amount of time. For us, in order to get any points back on UP, you have to be available for call or working for 28 days straight to get any points back whatsoever. I mean, that essentially the way it's structured means that you can get very, very few days off per year,

especially if you count days that are kind of unplanned, like a sickness in the family or you need to go to the dentist or anything. You can't get days off. The only way to get days off is to take family medical't get days off. The only way to get days off is to take family medical leave. That's about the only way to get days off now. And so the railroads have in unison been pushing these policies to keep us working. And since the boards are short, since there's no people available to move these trains, there have been times where you're literally gone for 36 or 48 hours out of town. You come home, you're home for 10 hours, then you're gone for 36, 48 hours again, then you're home for 10 hours, gone for 36, 48 hours again. And then there's issues with

locomotive shortages and every other sort of delay you can imagine related to basically the railroads failure to adapt and be able to move their trains and because of that you may think you're going to work and you're expecting okay I'm going to go to work it looks like I'm going to go to work about you know one or two in the afternoon today, you know, I'm waiting for a call. And you wait around the house all day for a call. And then something happens. They don't have locomotives for the train because they've been cutting their locomotives and cutting their maintenance staff. And the train never actually goes. And then right about the time you're getting tired, about nine or 10 o'clock at night is when they decide to call. And there's no sort of ability

to mark off when you're not rested. And like I said, you accumulate points every time you take a day off. And eventually they threaten you with termination over taking basic days off. So, well, and like, you know, this is again, like why, you know, looking at these attendance policies reveals, right, the much larger issue here. Right. Because as you mentioned, right, there is a serious problem. And I completely understand right now that folks who haven't been following this story are suddenly hearing that there could be a national rail strike or a rail lockout this Friday. They're worried about what that will do to the supply chain. They're worried about what that will do to costs at a time when inflation is already high. But what I would stress to folks to understand is that the very greedy corporate practices,

the profit-seeking, cost-cutting practices that we are describing here have already damaged the supply chain irreparably. This is what railroad workers like Michael have been telling me all year. And the proof is really in the pudding, as you mentioned. I mean, Surface Transportation Board Chairman Martin Oberman estimated that since 2010, class one freight rail carriers have spent $46 billion more on stock buybacks and dividends than railroad maintenance, right? So that's a sizable difference. And what does that translate to, right? Shippers and customers are repeatedly complaining about poor quality of service, right? So quality of service, the amount of freight have all been going down for years at the

same time that quality of life for workers on the railroad has also been going down at the same time that, you know, prices, profits and stock buybacks have been skyrocketing, right? So this has been a slow building crisis that folks are just now waking up to. And I think the thing that is really mind-blowing is that we can't go through the whole process here, right? But folks, if they want to know more, they can watch our coverage at The Real News Network or here on Breaking Points to understand why we've had to clear so many hurdles to get to this point.

Right. Negotiations have stalled for two and a half years, officially declared at an impasse in late spring. President Biden appointed a presidential emergency board to try to broker an agreement. They released their recommendations in August. The rail carriers enthusiastically endorsed those recommendations, rail workers not so much. And it's because, as rail workers continuously say, the Presidential Emergency Board does not address, it punted on every one of these workplace safety and quality of life issues that workers are talking about. But not only that, there was salt very much rubbed in the wound in this PEB report. And I will quote from the infamous page 32, where the Presidential Emergency Board wrote, and I quote, quote, the carriers, again, these are the companies that

own the railroads, the carriers maintain that capital investment and risk are the reasons for their profits, not any contributions by labor. So, Michael, I wanted to, you know, we don't have a whole lot of time, but I wanted to ask you first, how did it make you feel reading that? And can you break down for folks like why the PEB fell so short of addressing the concerns that you and your fellow workers are raising? Yeah, you've got to love that quote. It's kind of become a meme around the railroad industry. You know, everyone knows that quote now. And it was really offensive, especially hearing that quote, and then looking just a couple pages earlier on page 28, where the PEB recommendations spoke about part of the profitability increases in the railroads were caused by tax cuts the previous couple years.

And, you know, I just have to ask, so I'm not a Harvard MBA or anything, but were corporate tax cuts considered risk or were they investment? Since all their profits are made by risk or investment, I got to ask. But the PEB recommendations fell so short because they literally just addressed general pay increase and health insurance, and that's it. So it addressed a general pay increase, which did not keep up with inflation, but it also removes the cap on our health insurance to make it to where we're going to be paying significantly more every month on our health insurance, which is going to erase any gains that we gain through a raise. In addition to the fact that the general rate wage increase itself did not actually keep up with inflation even though the railroads are touting this as a record

pay increase the other thing it did not do is it did not address the fact that we lost our ability to write off away from home meals we used to be able to count up our days that we were gone and let's say you were gone 200 days away from home for the year and the irs allows 60 a day to be able to count up our days that we were gone. And let's say you were gone 200 days away from home for the year, and the IRS allows $60 a day to be written off. That's a $12,000 deduction on your taxes. We lost that when the tax changes happened a few years ago. We basically lost our ability to itemize. And so that right there is costing us, on average on the road,

at least $6,000 or $7,000 a year in real pay decrease because it's being taxed away from us. We're not getting reimbursed for our away-from-home meal expenses. Like I said, we still make $12 as engineers at UP. Another thing is it did not do anything to address the working conditions, the fact that we have zero reliability on our scheduling, the fact that we have attendance policies preventing us from ever taking days off. None of this was addressed. The PEB basically punted all these issues back to mediation,

back to negotiations, which the railroads and the unions have been negotiating for almost three years, and they haven't been able to come to an agreement on any of this. So what makes you think that they're going to be able to reach an agreement now? And it's not going to happen. So that is the reason why we're threatening to strike is because they failed to address the issues that really matter to us, which are not just purely financial. The railroads will try to say that we're just being greedy and this is, you know, wanting more money. That's not it at all.

We literally want to take control of our life back. We want to be able to take care of our family and actually have a life again. And especially since the railroads have been so successful in being profitable. And since railroad employees are the most productive employees the railroad has ever seen now in the 150 years that the railroad industry has been around, 150 plus. I mean, you look at the length of our trains now and how we have locomotives on the front, middle, and rear of the train on a lot of these trains, and they're running them 12, 13, 14, even 15,000 feet long. And we are controlling all the locomotives from the head end. We've expanded our ability to move freight dramatically. And we're not seeing any benefits from being more productive and doing an absolutely fantastic job at moving their freight you know moving these

trains and and learning how to actually successfully operate these trains over the road which a 15,000 foot train would have been completely unheard of just 20 years ago it can't happen there's too many limitations but we do it now we're getting no credit no credit well not only are you doing it right but you're doing it with as you mentioned like fewer people right those those shorter and trains used to have like four or five person crews and the railroad carriers have been trying to get it down to one person on running those massive vehicles and and you know the unions have been fighting tooth and nail to maintain two-person crews and again when you have you have longer, heavier, more unwieldy trains that are carrying hazardous

materials, like this is really setting us up for potential catastrophe. And that's what we mean when we say the supply chain is already at risk and people need to look at the reasons why. And, you know, man, we've got to wrap this up. But, I mean, you've packed so much helpful information in there for folks. I know that things are happening quickly. We don't know what's going to happen here in D.C. We don't know if Congress is going to force people back to work. We don't know if workers are going to obey that order. We don't know if Congress is going to force

a P.E.B. based contract down everyone's throats. There's a lot of fluidity to this situation right now, but I wanted to just round out by asking if you could say to folks out there watching and listening around the country and beyond, like, what should they know ahead of Friday about what this dispute is really about and what can they do to show solidarity with you and your fellow railroad workers?

Well, Congress is actively discussing and they have announced that it is their intention to try to end our strike before it even begins. And there, I guess there's a tentative bill out in the Senate right now. So they are actively discussing doing that. I think that everyone and all the people listening need to, if they want to be supportive here, try to contact their congressmen, their representatives, and remind them that in a country that's allegedly free and democratic, we absolutely cannot allow us to be forced back to work by law. And anyone that wants to advocate for better wages and work conditions for any industry that you're in, it doesn't matter whether you're in health care or education or retail or service. It will hurt all of you. It will hurt everyone if we set this precedent again that whenever there's a dispute, Congress will just force us back to work. And they need to know, too, that there's a mass exodus from the

industry right now. And there are lots and lots of railroaders that are standing by and have actively stated that if they don't get a good contract, if we lose further ground, then they're just going to step away from the industry. And we're going to get the effect of a strike regardless as people just resign in greater numbers at the railroad. And they already have a hard time hiring people. So Congress needs to think long and hard about that, too, before they force us back to work. People are ready to quit, and they are quitting. There have already been plenty of people that have quit in response to the attendance policy and the work conditions. So yeah, contact your representatives

and let them know it's unacceptable to force laborers back to work by law and to allow railroads to have a cop-out in negotiating work conditions. So that is veteran railroad engineer Michael Paul. Lindsay, Michael, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us today on Breaking Points, man. I really appreciate it. No problem. Thank you. To all of you watching, thank you so much for watching this segment on Breaking Points. And be sure to subscribe to my news outlet, The Real News, with links in the description. See you soon for the next edition of The Art of Class War.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling aboutsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones, the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also want to address the Tonys.

On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams, I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I? I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace, listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams

from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.