Category: Leadership Messages
SMART-TD responds to carrier vaccine mandates
Recently, Amtrak, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern announced that they will require their employees, including those represented by SMART Transportation Division, to be vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. It is anticipated that many of the remaining, if not all Class I r [...]
Unions join to fight Union Pacific on COVID orders
CLEVELAND, October 15, 2021 — The Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART-TD) and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) are jointly taking on Union Pacific Railroad (UP) over a [...]Unions join together to thwart Norfolk Southern’s effort to eliminate train service crafts
CLEVELAND, Ohio (Sept. 30, 2021) — The Transportation Division of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART-TD) and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) have joined forces to defeat efforts by Norfolk Sou [...]
Carrier groups’ waiver extension request denied by FRA
The Federal Railroad Administration on Sept. 21 sided with a SMART Transportation Division request to reject the extension of COVID-related regulatory waiver requests by the Association of American Railroads (AAR) and the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). The [...]
Coordinated Bargaining Coalition statement: Sept. 22, 2021
September 22, 2021 — The Rail Unions comprising the Coordinated Bargaining Coalition (CBC), negotiating together in the current round of National Negotiations, have issued the following statement: “As we advised in January of 2021, the CBC and the nation’s rail carriers have [...]
TD members may act in solidarity for striking workers, but actions limited by RLA
Local 313 (Grand Rapids, Mich.) member Chris Larson, a member of our union for seven years, wrote to the office of SMART-TD President Jeremy Ferguson asking the extent that members can go to support and show solidarity to an ongoing labor action by another labor union against [...]
Statement from President Ferguson on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks
A statement from TD President Jeremy Ferguson: Twenty years after the shocking and devastating terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we pause to remember the lives that were lost and irreversibly changed on that day. Members of our union, as many other people did in Pennsylvan [...]
A Labor Day message from President Ferguson
Great challenges are best faced together, and we have encountered many these past few months from those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to carrier practices that place profits before safety, jeopardizing safe operations that affect the general public and our members. This yea [...]