CSLRA

This story was published in the Daily Breeze on August 9, 2024. Below is a summary of the article — click here for the full story at the Daily Breeze.  If you get restricted by a paywall, a copy of the full story is included here as a PDF.

Freight rail yards in Southern California will have to add clean-air technology under a new rule from a pollution-fighting agency.  The South Coast Air Quality Management District board has approved the Freight Rail Yards Indirect Source Rule, which is expected to remove 10 1/2 tons a day of toxic nitrogen oxide emissions from the air between 2027 and 2050.

“While there is no single rule or regulation that can achieve federal air quality standards on its own, today’s adoption is a big step in the right direction,” board chairperson and former state Sen. Vanessa Delgado said in a news release of the Friday, Aug. 2, 2024 vote.

A railroad industry trade group opposes the rule, saying it’s superseded by federal law and will interfere with rail operations.  The rule will take effect if and when the federal Environmental Protection Agency approves it, along with a California Air Resources Board rule applying to locomotives and drayage truck fleets.

In a Tuesday, July 30, 2024 letter to the air district, the Association of American Railroads wrote that, while the trade group shares the district’s goal of slashing air pollution, the rail yards rule is flawed and “unfeasible and unworkable.”  Freight trains are more fuel efficient and emit less pollution than trucks, and while rail yards are already using zero-emission equipment, zero-emission locomotives are not yet commercially viable.  The federal government, not the states, oversees the railroad industry, and allowing the new rule to take effect would create a burdensome, state-by-state patchwork of regulations, the association said.

This story was published in the July 2024 issue of Railway Age.  Below is a brief summary of the article — click here for the full story.

The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) and the Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART-TD) are again locked in combat, alleging a litany of grievances.  The underlying cause for each to leap at the other’s jugulars are declining numbers of dues-paying conductors and engineers as new technology has allowed Class I railroads to improve productivity and efficiency while slashing total employment from 458,000 in 1980 to under 116,000 today. 

Exacerbating tensions is a blurring of once bright craft demarcation lines that assured representation of conductors by SMART-TD, and engineers by BLET. Collective bargaining agreements now provide for an ebb-and-flow of train crews across craft lines, creating for both unions a temptation to poach the other’s members as either may represent those sharing the locomotive cab.  If this appears counter to the responsibility of labor unions to protect member jobs, consider that three parties sit at the negotiating table—rail management, and labor unions wearing two hats. Economic theory holds that self-interest is paramount when the choice is between a union’s financial security and its members’ job security.  

As with railroads that unified in search of greater efficiency, rail labor organizations recognize their own mergers can be a financial lifeline. For BLET and SMART-TD, when marriage failed to occur, the fallback strategy was plunder. Before SMART-TD predecessor UTU consolidated with SMWIA, and BLE with the Teamsters, the two failed at six merger attempts that would have produced substantial cost savings and better situated the unified BLE and UTU to fend off a race-to-the bottom as railroads played one against the other.

The greatest of rail labor leaders, Eugene V. Debs, wrote in 1893: “What can labor do for itself? The answer is not difficult. Labor can organize, it can unify, it can consolidate its forces. This done, it can demand and command.”