Month: October 2010

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SAN FRANCISCO – With the San Francisco Unified School District facing a deficit of $113 million over the next two school years, a decision is looming to cut the number of buses to save money.

UTU Local 1741 officer Paul Stein was quick to intervene, telling the San Francisco Examiner newspaper that “any potential cuts would not only affect the contracted bus drivers (UTU members represented by Local 1741), but students themselves.”

Stein was joined by Ellie Rossiter, executive director of Parents for Public Schools, who told the newspaper, “Parents rely on public transportation and school bus transit to get kids to school. It could be the deciding factor in school choice.”

Tags deficit, Local 1741, Rossiter, San Francisco, San Francisco Unified School District, school bus, school bus cuts, Stein

The UTU and railroads party to the national rail agreement will meet next week and again in mid-November in continuing negotiations aimed at amending a contract covering wages, benefits and working conditions.

These will be the sixth and seventh negotiating sessions between the UTU and the National Carriers’ Conference Committee.

The national rail contract came open for amendment Jan. 1, 2010.

Carriers in national handling, under the umbrella of the National Carriers’ Conference Committee, include BNSF, CSX, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific and many smaller railroads.

Some 40,000 UTU members are affected by these national contract talks with the NCCC, and the resulting agreements frequently set patterns for other negotiated rail agreements.

The Oct. 12-13 negotiations will focus on health-care insurance; and the Nov. 15-17 negotiations will focus on wages and working conditions.

“These upcoming negotiations could be potentially productive,” said UTU International President Mike Futhey, who is the UTU’s chief negotiator. “Nothing has been agreed to, but progress is being made. It is impossible to say that any issue has been finalized until all issues are agreed on,” Futhey said.

Other UTU officers on the negotiating team include Assistant President Arty Martin; International Vice Presidents Robert Kerley and Delbert Strunk; and General Chairpersons John Lesniewski (GO 049), Pate King (GO 680) and Doyle Turner (GO 347).

The existing national agreement remains in force until amendments are concluded under provisions of the Railway Labor Act.

Negotiations also continue between the National Carriers Conference Committee and two rail-labor coalitions.

One, led by the Teamsters Rail Conference, includes the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes, the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, the Brotherhood of Boilermakers and Blacksmiths, the National Conference of Firemen and Oilers, and the Sheet Metal Workers International Association.

The other, which has asked for mediation under provisions of the Railway Labor Act, include the Transportation Communications Union, the American Train Dispatchers Association, the International Association of Machinists, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the Transport Workers Union.

LOS ANGELES — A former Federal Railroad Administration chief safety officer, Jim Schultz, who later became a highly respected safety officer at CSX, is advising Los Angeles Metrolink as it moves to lead the rail industry in installing and implementing a positive train control system on Metrolink’s seven-route, 512-mile system serving the Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernadino and Ventura.

Schultz, who was the FRA’s chief safety officer during the mid-1990s, won substantial praise at CSX during the late 1990s for his efforts — not entirely successful — to end the industry’s 19th century military legacy of top-down management engaging in employee harassment and intimidation to enforce safety rules and regulations.

In its place, Schultz, a former Air Force fighter pilot and Chicago & North Western operating officer, advocated peer intervention and coaching within a progressive corporate culture that recognizes employees do not intentionally violate safety rules and regulations.

Now semi-retired, Schultz is advising the Los Angeles Metrolink board of directors, which last week agreed to award a $120 million contract to Parsons Transportation Group to manage and integrate what the board calls “an aggressive implementation schedule” for PTC.

Recognizing the United Transportation Union’s perennial strong advocacy for positive train control, Schultz accompanied Metrolink CEO John Fenton to Washington, D.C., last week to brief UTU International President Mike Futhey and Alternate National Legislative Director John Risch on Metrolink’s PTC progress.

“Metrolink was the nation’s first rail operator to receive FRA approval for its PTC implementation plan,” Fenton said, and intends to be the “first railroad” to put it in operation. A federal mandate requires that freight and passenger railroads install PTC on designated lines by Dec. 31, 2015.

Positive train control, which has been on the National Transportation Safety Board’s “most wanted” list for more than a decade, is collision avoidance technology that monitors and controls train movements remotely, can prevent train-to-train collisions, prevent unauthorized train movement into a work zone, halt movement of a train through a switch left in the wrong position, and stop trains exceeding authorized speeds.

The Los Angeles Metrolink system, said Fenton, will consist of:

PTC on-board computers, display screens, GPS tracking, and radios on 57 cab-cars and 52 locomotives.
Stop-enforcement at 476 wayside signals.
Specialized communications to link wayside signals, trains and central dispatch.
A new central dispatch system.
Full interoperability with PTC eventually installed on freight railroads over whose track Metrolink operates — BNSF and Union Pacific.

While at CSX, Schultz said, “More than 150 years of ingrained tradition and culture must be changed” — replaced by “safety advocacy … We must create an open workplace where employees, their labor unions and management work as a team to take advantage of every opportunity to catch and push the company to a zero tolerance for safety breaches.”

Schultz was an early advocate of joint labor-management collaboration to draft improved safety standards, which is now embodied in the mission of the Rail Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC), through which all segments of the rail community work together to fashion mutually satisfactory solutions on safety regulatory issues.

Tags LA, Los Angeles, Metrolink, positive train control, PTC

Airline pilots who sleep in the terminal because lodging is not provided?

Flight attendants who can’t afford dental care and have used Super Glue to mend a broken tooth?

Pilots and flight attendants who qualify for food-stamps?

For airline pilots and flight attendants employed by many small regional airlines, that’s the professional life they lead — hardly the glamour that many Americans associate with airline employment.

The United Transportation Union, which represents some of these workers, will be asking the new Congress in 2011 to pass legislation requiring air carriers who participate in the Federal Essential Air Service Program to pay a livable wage to their employees.

Essential Air Service is a program that subsidizes carriers who provide service to mostly rural destinations that would have little or no air service without the program. The communities that benefit from the service are, for the most part, located in areas with limited transportation options and rely on the program as a vital connection to the larger transportation network.

“Employees of Essential Air Service carriers — air carriers that receive millions of dollars in federal subsidies to serve rural areas — are professionals responsible for the safe transport of their passengers,” said United Transportation Union International President Mike Futhey. “While these employees are subject to the rules and regulations applying to all commercial pilots and flight attendants, Essential Air Service pilots and flight attendants receive compensation that is oftentimes barely above the minimum wage.

“In many cases, the crews are paid an average ‘credit time’ for their flights, meaning if they run over because of weather or terminal delays, they are not compensated for prep time, de-icing time, taxi time or even some of the flight time,” Futhey said. “Yet, some of these airlines are controlled by millionaires who pocket the taxpayer supplied federal subsidies while their employees suffer living standards equivalent to those on food stamps.”

UTU National Legislative Director James Stem said, “The United Transportation Union will collaborate in solidarity with other labor organizations to end the Essential Air Carrier abuse of this taxpayer-funded program and Essential Air Carrier employees.”

Airline pilots who sleep in the terminal because lodging is not provided?

Flight attendants who can’t afford dental care and have used Super Glue to mend a broken tooth?

Pilots and flight attendants who qualify for food-stamps?

WASHINGTON — The Federal Railroad Administration has announced it will make permanent its Emergency Order No. 26 restricting the use by on-duty train crews of cell phones and other electronic devices.

Some changes, as described below, are to be included in the permanent ban.

The emergency order was issued in October 2008, and the permanent ban will go into effect in late March 2011, following mandatory carrier instruction of train and engine workers covered under the ban.

During the interim, Emergency Order No. 26 will remain in effect.

The emergency order and the permanent ban prohibit the use of an electronic device — whether personal or railroad supplied — if it interferes with that employee’s or another employee’s performance of safety-related duties.

The permanent ban, going into effect in six months, contains some different provisions from the 2008 emergency order and/or the FRA’s May draft final of the permanent ban:

Engineer and conductor certification

The final rule will not immediately subject engineers or conductors (when conductor certification, required by the Railroad Safety Improvement Act of 2008, is implemented) to revocation of their certification for a violation of the ban.

However, the FRA said it “may be appropriate” in the future to revoke such certification following a violation.

After the FRA unveiled its draft final rule in May, the UTU and other rail labor organizations filed written comments in June, strongly objecting to making such violations subject to revocation of certification.

Personal cellphone records

The final rule scraps an FRA suggestion in its draft final rule that train and engine workers provide railroads access to their personal cellphone records in the event of an accident. The FRA said it already has such authority under the law. The UTU and other rail labor organizations had argued that such a provision would “result in harassment of our members by accessing their personal phone records for any and every incident.”

Personal emergencies

The final rule will not create an exception for personal emergencies. The FRA said such an exception “would present significant obstacles,” as an operating employee “found with a cellphone turned on while on a moving train could easily say the phone was on because of a sick family member, whether true or not.”

The UTU and other rail labor organizations had urged adoption of a personal emergency exception. But as the rule is now written, an employee will be prohibited from contacting health care providers or sick family members in emergency situations no matter how serious the situation is and even if their railroad employer would have permitted them to do so.

GPS devices

In the final rule, the use of personal global positioning service (GPS) devices is not permitted. “Locomotive engineers,” said the FRA, “are required to be familiar with the physical characteristics of the routes over which they operate. Thus, engineers should already be aware of where sidings, road crossings, and other physical characteristics are located.”

Calculators

The FRA’s final rule does permit calculators to be used to determine formulas such as train stopping calculations or tons per operative brake.

Cameras

The final rule allows for stand-alone cameras (not part of a cellphone or other electronic device) to document a safety hazard or a violation of a rail safety law, regulation order, or standard. However, the FRA final rule will permit the use of railroad-supplied multi-functional devices that include a camera for “authorized business purposes as specified by the railroad in writing” and only after being approved by the FRA.

The UTU and other rail labor organizations had argued that it “is unnecessary to require employees to carry several separate electronic devices on a daily basis to effectively and safety perform their duties.” The labor organizations recommended — but the FRA rejected — that a cellphone camera be allowed to document a hazard or violation of a regulation and then be turned off immediately.

To read the FRA’s Sept. 27 final rule, which is more than 40 pages when printed out, click on the following link:

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov:80/2010/2010-23916.htm

To read the June 17 joint filing by the UTU and other rail labor organizations to the draft final rule, which is 17 pages when printed out, click here.