By Grace Renderman, Associate Editor
Six months into his new role, Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) National President Eddie Hall is working to engage younger union members. He’s pressing Congress to adopt the Railway Safety Act of 2023. And he continues to negotiate and reach agreements with railroad management that balance high wages with quality-of-life changes.
Hall, along with Vice President, Safety Task Force Randy Fannon, talked with RailPrime during the union’s annual Midwest regional meeting June 26-28 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Not long after Hall — a locomotive engineer with Union Pacific Railroad and vice local chairman of Division 28 in Arizona — was elected BLET’s national president in December 2022, he told RailPrime that one of his top priorities would be boosting union membership engagement. Since then, BLET has taken steps to revamp its engagement, recruitment and education programs to attract younger workers. Among the steps: making the website more user-friendly, providing push notifications via social media, and offering more classes, training and leadership techniques and development, Hall said last month. The goal is to teach these younger members to lead their own local BLET chapters and take initiative.
Hall was heartened by the number of young people who attended the Milwaukee meeting, and that many expressed interest in becoming union leaders.
BLET Vice President, Safety Task Force Randy Fannon says the union will continue protecting locomotive engineers’ access to high wages and quality-of-life benefits. Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen “[Engagement is] something we work on every day,” Hall said, adding that there’s “still a long way to go to get engagement levels where he'd like them to be. “They want to attend these local chairman classes, these secretary-treasurer classes, our legislative representative classes.”
Getting information out faster and developing effective awareness campaigns — all with a “new, fresh” look through a sleeker website and more user-friendly social media pages — is essential for getting younger workers into union leadership positions, Fannon added.
Quality of life is key
What’s also essential for Hall and his team is to keep quality-of-life issues front and center. For BLET members, those issues include ensuring wages keep pace with inflation, receiving paid sick leave and other time-off opportunities (doctor’s appointments, etc.), and ensuring a safe working environment, BLET officials said.
“I remember when there was a time where people would work 10-12 days straight … and you made enough money, and then you took off three or four days,” Hall said. “You can’t take that time off anymore.”
There’s been some movement on that front. In recent months, rail unions have reached several agreements with railroads — two of them ratified by BLET rank-and-file members. An agreement with Norfolk Southern Railway provides 3,300 BLET-represented workers with up to seven paid sick days per year and flexibility to convert up to two extra days of existing paid time off to sick leave. Last month, UP and BLET reached an agreement to provide 5,600 locomotive engineers with up to seven days of paid sick leave. Five days will be considered paid sick days with the ability to convert two additional paid leave days for use as paid sick time, UP officials said in a press release. The new agreement is effective Aug. 1.
Through early July, NS was the only Class I to have reached a sick-leave agreement with all 12 rail unions. In April, CN announced an agreement covering 3,000 Unifor members, while NS and CSX announced agreements with the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers–Transportation Division focusing on sick leave and other quality-of-life issues.
While those agreements provide much-needed relief for workers, there is still more to be done if the railroads expect to be able to recruit and retain engineers, Hall said. Wages need to keep up with inflation and railroads need to hire more people to avoid disruptions and delays caused by short-staffed terminals and switching operations, he said.
“They have cut back so far with the crews that work in the yard, now they can’t bring in trains and they have to sit out there for hours, sometimes just tied down for days,” said Hall, who began working for Southern Pacific Railroad in 1995 in El Paso, Texas, before transferring to Tucson, Arizona, where he’s worked in the engine service for more than 20 years.
“When I went to work as a switchman in Tucson, we had six jobs on duty – two ends of the yard, three on each side – and now they’re usually down to one on one side and two on the other,” he said. “The yard’s the same size, they still get the same traffic, but there’s no one there to switch cars anymore.”
Worker fatigue is another BLET concern — one that can’t truly be addressed without solving the short-staffing problem, Hall said. Since trains are becoming longer, trips on them are longer, too, sometimes more than 12 hours. Train crews are mandated to have 10 hours of rest between shifts before being called back in, but they often must wait longer on the job for relief to arrive, Hall said.
Safety is the name of the game
As ever, worker safety remains a top BLET concern. Hall is a big proponent of the Railway Safety Act of 2023, which he believes would raise the standard for U.S. rail safety, boost the rate of train inspections and increase penalties for violators. Introduced by U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), JD Vance (R-Ohio) and John Fetterman (D-Penn.) in response to the Feb. 3 NS derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the bill would require various rail safety improvements, such as enhancing safety procedures for trains carrying hazardous materials, establishing requirements for wayside defect detectors, increasing fines for wrongdoing by railroads, and creating a permanent requirement for railroads to operate with at least two-person crews.
Hall plans to lobby for the two-person crew mandate, not just in the interest of worker safety, but also of public safety in case of an accident or emergency, he said.
As head of BLET’s safety task force, Fannon champions a range of membership concerns, including automated labor and remote-controlled locomotives (RCLs). After two RCLs collided in UP’s Davidson Yard in Fort Worth on June 26, RCL use skyrocketed to the top of Fannon’s concern list. The railroad reported minor injuries.
In the meantime, Fannon is looking forward to the role BLET will continue to play in the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the East Palestine derailment. As party to the investigation, Fannon will make recommendations to the NTSB, Federal Railroad Administration and railroads upon the investigation’s conclusion. At the NTSB’s June 22-23 public hearing in Ohio, Fannon served as the union’s representative.
“The FRA has done some things, but they need to do more,” he said. “They need to act in regulated situations to prevent these accidents from happening.”
