Rail craft unions to fight bosses?
Submitted on Wed, 04/19/2006 - 10:51am
By Ron Kaminkow, iu 520 - Industrial Worker, April 2006.
Faced with rail freight carriers' demands for one-man crews, the leadership of the United Transportation Union and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen issued a public statement in February proclaiming solidarity with one another, and calling off - for the moment at least - their long-standing feud.
The unions have pledged to stop raiding, stop maligning, and stop threatening each other, and agreed not to sign agreements surrendering each other's jobs. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the U.S.'s big freight railroads, complains that this violates bargaining ground rules under which the two unions had agreed not to share information with each other or to coordinate their bargaining.
While union leaders were raiding each other and trying to cut deals to preserve their jurisdiction at the expense of rail workers more generally, rank-and-file members of UTU and BLET formed Railroad Operating Crafts United and began to organize around a platform of rail labor unity, rank-and-file democracy, a BLET-UTU merger, and a militant fight back against single employee operation of trains, among other things.
Finally, when the NCCC threatened to seek a National Mediation Board ruling of impasse, union leaders finally were made to realize that the carriers are serious. They want to destroy our crafts, run their trains with a lone employee, eliminate thousands of jobs in the process, compromise our safety and that of the general public, and totally change the railroad landscape forever.
Unfortunately, while they may have finally woken up to the dire threat that the carriers' proposal entails, they have not developed any kind of fight back strategy. ROCU has drafted a proposal and is circulating it among the rank-and-file of both unions calling for community education and outreach about the dangers of one-employee operations, an assessment to build up a strike fund, organizing strike committees, and laying the groundwork for industrial "self help."
Given the dire threat posed by the NCCC's aggressive bargaining stance, the need for the greatest possible unity in rail labor at this time, and the financial crisis brewing in the UTU, a merger could also be on the horizon. But cautions Ed Michael, a ROCU activist and Union Pacific engineer, "The rank-and-file does not want to settle for just any old business-as-usual merger agreement. That's why the last attempt failed. We want a merger based upon our proposal for a democratic rank-and-file based union."