UTU News Digest - Tuesday, December 14, 1999

UTU Daily News Digest

Information of interest to operating railroad and transportation employees

Tuesday, December 14, 1999

WASHINGTON: Freight railroads, Amtrak to halt operations before midnight New Year’s Eve

WASHINGTON -- Major freight railroads and the Amtrak passenger service said on Monday they will temporarily halt operations just before midnight this New Year's Eve as a precaution against Year 2000 computer problems, Reuters reported.

Although millions of dollars have been spent on avoiding the computer glitch, the railroads and many city subway systems are reliant on outside supplies of electricity and telecommunications and have decided to take no chances.

"We are going to take a short pause to take everything down and bring it up and make sure it all functions,'' said Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. (BNI.N) spokesman Richard Russack.

In the nation's capital, where thousands of revelers are expected to use the Metro to come downtown for "America's Millennium Gala,'' the trains will stop at stations with their doors open for about 10 minutes starting five minute before midnight, a spokeswoman said.

The Chicago Transit Authority plans a similar exercise just in case of problems relating to the old programming habit of allocation two digits for the year in dates. "It's just a precaution,'' said a spokesman.

Delays on the national passenger railroad, Amtrak, may last anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour on some routes through less-populated portions of the United States, a spokesman said.

"We will stop at the biggest station along each route so that if, God forbid, anything goes wrong, we can get those people off if necessary,'' Amtrak spokesman John Wolf said.

Although Amtrak maintains its own tracks in parts of the Northeast, it is mostly reliant on right of way agreements with freight railroads such as Burlington Northern, Union Pacific Corp. (UNP.N), CSX Corp. (CSX.N) and Norfolk Southern Corp. (NSC.N).

Freight traffic is traditionally light or absent on any New Year's Eve so the pause around midnight is not expected to be terribly disruptive to freight operations.

"We run very little business over the New Year's holiday anyway so we give most our employees the time off,'' said Union Pacific spokesman John Bromley.

Norfolk Southern issued advice to customers Monday that it would begin suspending operations on the afternoon of Dec. 31 and restart operations beginning with selected trains early on Jan. 1. Normal operation would resume Jan. 2.

CSX spokesman Robert Gould said the company would coordinate a brief stoppage of about 19 Amtrak trains through its system near midnight on Dec. 31. Freight operations would be unaffected.

NEW YORK: Transit strike could begin after midnight
NEW YORK -- As the city began emergency operations for a transit strike that could begin at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, negotiators on both sides of the contract talks said there were hints of progress Monday, although they acknowledged that the negotiations remained snarled over wages, The New York Times reported.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani expressed skepticism about the reports of progress in the talks. He said the city would go to court Tuesday morning to try to stop the threatened walkout if there was no change overnight in the negotiations.
But subway and bus passengers across the city reported delayed trains and erratic service Monday, as they did last week, when a dissident faction of the union called for a work slowdown. The union denied any deliberate disruption.
The mayor had planned to go to court Monday, but he said he had backed off at the request of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whose contract talks with Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union have increasingly angered and frustrated him. Giuliani has no role in the talks.
"I don't like deferring," Giuliani told reporters at a morning news conference at City Hall. "You know that. I deferred to their judgment that the negotiations were going well."
The president of Local 100, Willie James, told reporters that he was encouraged by the negotiations. He would not specify what type of progress had been made, but he said the MTA "had come up a bit" and the union had "come down a bit" in its demands.
The executive director of the MTA, Mark Shaw, said moderate progress had been made on nonwage issues. "It's picked up some speed," he said of the talks. "I wish it could pick up more speed."
The MTA's chief negotiator, Gary Dellaverson, said some elements involving health and pension negotiations had been resolved.
But Giuliani was also skeptical of the relatively positive news that MTA officials were reporting, and said several times Monday morning that he was hearing the opposite from "other people" at the negotiating table. It was not clear whether he meant union representatives, other MTA sources or both.
"Right now they say they're making progress," Giuliani said of the MTA's pronouncements. "Other sources that I have tell me that they're not making as much progress as the MTA says they're making."
Although the mayor temporarily backed off from the court action, he continued his vitriolic criticism of the union, saying that striking transit workers "actually kill people" because ambulances would be delayed in the resulting traffic jams. He also said that the city's 33,000 bus and subway workers would be "absolutely immoral" if they "try to have a whole city collapse as a result of your desire to get a few more bucks."
A court injunction would be sought by the city and the MTA together. If granted, it would order workers not to strike under the state's Taylor Law, which prohibits walkouts by transit workers and other government employees. If the workers violated the injunction, they would be held in contempt of court and subjected to what the mayor has called "massive" financial penalties as well as jail time.
"Our litigation strategy surrounding the Taylor Law is a tool," Shaw said. "We think it's useful to keep it and use it as a hammer over everybody's head."
A city official said Monday night that the goal was not to jail transit workers, but to "remind the union members who vote for a strike what the repercussions are."
"It's a road map for what the penalties are," the official said.
Deputy Mayor Joseph Lhota said that if workers do strike, "serious consideration ought to be given to firing the leaders who caused the strike to happen." The MTA, not the city, has the authority to fire workers in the event of a walkout.
Giuliani has said that the city will have to spend millions of dollars to prepare for a strike. On Monday, he said that some of those costs -- to hire private buses in time for Wednesday morning and to pay for police overtime -- were already being incurred. Last week, the mayor said the union would be liable for all costs related to the strike, which he estimated would be at least $3.5 million a day. The transit union was fined $1.25 million after an 11-day walkout in 1980.
"We'll seek to impose on the union every single penny that they have cost the citizens of the city of New York," Giuliani said.
The union has asked for a 27 percent wage increase over three years; the MTA has offered a 12 percent increase over four years. The average salary for transit workers is $39,000 a year.
The contract talks ended Monday at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan at 4:30 a.m., then resumed at 9 a.m. On Tuesday, the union has scheduled a 10 a.m. "informational meeting" -- city officials are calling it a "strike meeting" -- to explain the status of the negotiations. The union's 46-member executive board is scheduled to meet Tuesday night to decide whether to authorize a strike, accept the MTA's latest offer or continue negotiating.
Giuliani and other city officials complained bitterly Monday about a militant faction of dissidents, called New Directions, that makes up nearly half of the union membership. James, who was nearly defeated in his campaign for president by the dissidents last year, has been under heavy pressure from them to obtain higher wages in the talks. Giuliani called the dissidents "the group that is most enthusiastic about violating the law."
On Monday, the leader of the dissidents, Tim Schermerhorn, and the leader of a taxi drivers' organization announced that they would work together in the event of a strike. Although the city's emergency plan calls for taxi drivers to pick up multiple fares, Bhairavi Desai, an organizer for the New York Taxi Workers' Alliance, said that her group would not cooperate with any plan that hurts taxi workers. Ms. Desai's group represents about 2,000 drivers out of the 42,000 in the city.
The mayor countered, "The vast majority of taxi drivers, believe me, are going to take advantage of the opportunity to make a lot more money during the strike."
The mayor said he had kept in touch in the last week with Gov. George Pataki, who has been visibly absent from the public exchange of threats and accusations surrounding the contract talks. "The governor's the head of the Transit Authority," said Peter Vallone, the speaker of the City Council. "He should be involved in these negotiations."
But City Hall officials said the governor was involved behind the scenes. "I am in touch and have directed them to be responsible and work round the clock to try to reach agreement," Pataki said Monday at a news conference in Manhattan.
Although the mayor has been highly critical of what he calls the MTA's sluggishness in the talks, he has not extended that criticism to the man who effectively controls the MTA, Pataki, whose good will Giuliani needs if he runs for the U.S. Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

NEW YORK: Dissident transit workers group stokes discontent

NEW YORK -- Like many such rabble-rousing efforts, it began as a newsletter, in this case named "Hell on Wheels." Fifteen years ago its leaders waged what they now unabashedly call "propaganda campaigns" to topple their union leadership, The New York Times reported.

For years, slowly and methodically, they stoked the discontent of the city's 33,000 transit workers over wages, benefits and other contract provisions, like the use of welfare recipients to do work done by union members.

That dissident band of transit workers, now called the New Directions Caucus, is wielding unusual influence over contract talks, pressing the union leadership to strike rather than accept an unsatisfactory contract.

Indeed, if they have long been a thorn on the side of Willie James, the president of Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union, they have lately emerged as the force that could add bite to James's bark.

Monday, the quiet-spoken leader of the caucus, Tim Schermerhorn, 44, told reporters that union members ought to vote to strike at a membership meeting today if the contract package is not substantially better than management's last public offer. He said that he had not seen the latest details of the talks, but that at a time of economic boom in the city, a satisfactory package would have to include wage increases significantly above the cost of living, and a reversal of management's new disciplinary system and the policy allowing welfare recipients to take union jobs. The dissidents have 22 of the 46 votes on the union's executive board, which must authorize any strike by a simple majority vote; that voting bloc, along with some swing votes, could make or break any deal.

"If we don't get a contract that is just, if we don't get a contract that represents some advancement for members of the union, we should walk," Schermerhorn said at a news conference yesterday outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel, where negotiations continued between officials of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the union. "If we can't win a good contract now, we won't win ever. The economy is a primary consideration."

How many members they can persuade to vote to strike remains unclear. But the caucus does seem to have considerable support. These days, New Directions slogans can be frequently seen on transit workers' lapel pins and scrawled on the sides of subway tunnels.

The mayor has even singled out New Directions in his most caustic remarks against union agitators. In the last elections, Schermerhorn, a subway motorman, narrowly lost to James.

Clearly, this is New Directions' moment, partly because this contract dispute could shift the balance of power within Local 100.

Also at stake is the tenor of union-management relations for years to come. It would serve the transportation authority well to make an attractive contract offer to James. Otherwise, during the next round of talks, the authority could face far more militant union representatives, led by the New Directions crew, on the other side of the bargaining table.

Today, New Directions leaders stand to gain or lose considerably.

If James delivers a promising contract package at the membership meeting today at the Manhattan Center, New Directions leaders can claim credit for holding his feet to the fire. If he does not, they can argue that he sold them out.

By contrast, if they force the union into an unsuccessful strike, Schermerhorn is likely to share the blame along with James.

"On the one hand, they've positioned themselves as militant advocates of a very good contract," observed Joshua Freeman, a history professor at Queens College. On the other hand, he said, they're not leading the negotiations. "They have responsibility without authority, and that's a pretty tough position to be in."

For his part, James has described Schermerhorn as "a publicity seeker" bent on torpedoing any progress made in contract talks.

Nor did Schermerhorn have many words of praise for James.

"Willie is coming off to the public as militant," he said with a laugh yesterday. "The ranks of Local 100 don't see him that way. They see him as a union official under pressure, and we have to keep the pressure on."

The transit workers union has had a radical thread throughout its history. And it is that legacy, particularly the militancy of the union under its longtime president and founder, Michael Quill, that Schermerhorn and the New Directions cadre are trying to invoke. "The real powers that be in the city -- business -- is planning an orgy of profit-making," he said, referring to holiday shopping and the tourism season.

"They're not going to rake it in if the trains aren't running."

Schermerhorn was 9 when his father, a car maintainer, took him to the 1966 union meeting at which his father voted to strike.

"The thing I was impressed with most was the power of these meetings, how the strength and self-confidence of people would infect each other," he recalled in an interview on Monday.

In his last 17 years on the job, Schermerhorn said, that strength and self-confidence are what he has sought to engender in his co-workers through New Directions.

"Whatever we get is because a strike threat was made real," Schermerhorn argued.

So will there be a strike starting tomorrow?

"I think the strike is possible, but not likely," he said, "because I think our union officials will do everything possible to prevent one."

OHIO: CSX tells trains not to clog 14 sites

TOLEDO -- Fourteen railroad crossings between Willard, O., and Cleveland, including one on State Rt. 13 south of Fitchville that blocked an ambulance in August, are now "No Stopping Zones" for trains, CSX Transportation Corp. announced, the Toledo Blade reported.

Although the railroad's policy has been to avoid blocking a crossing or uncouple a train when delay is unavoidable, the "No Stopping Zone'' effort will serve as a reminder that vehicular traffic needs to keep moving on key roadways, a CSX statement said.

A list of the 14 crossings will be distributed to train crews, and signs will be posted at each site, the railroad said. CSX and local emergency management officials plan to publicize the campaign with news conferences today in Greenwich and Wellington, O.

The crossings, which are in Huron, Lorain, and Cuyahoga counties, "will be kept open in all preventable circumstances," the railroad statement said.

State Rep. Rex Damschroder (R., Fremont), who introduced a bill Tuesday that provides for designating "No Stop Emergency Crossings" across Ohio, said he was pleased with the CSX announcement as long as local officials were consulted in drafting the list, which CSX said was done.

"It sounds to me like they're doing what's pretty consistent with my legislation," Mr. Damschroder said. "I applaud their foresight in going ahead with it. I certainly hope they'll expand it all the way to Toledo."

But Bill Ommert, Huron County's emergency management coordinator, said the list doesn't include enough crossings, and he questioned CSX's degree of cooperation.

A CSX representative met once with county leaders and distributed a crossing list, he said, but then announced the program without providing time for response.

Gary Wollenhaupt, a spokesman at CSX's regional office in Indianapolis, cited the initial meeting as a cooperative effort and said CSX will discuss adding more crossings to the list, in Huron County and elsewhere.

CSX and Norfolk Southern have come under increasing criticism for trains blocking road crossings, sometimes for hours and even days, throughout northwest Ohio. They have blamed the congestion on complications of their June 1 division and integration of former Conrail routes.

Governor Taft toured northwest Ohio by helicopter to survey railroad conditions and stopped in several cities that have been plagued with train problems. Next Thursday, transportation committees of the Ohio House and Senate will convene a joint hearing in Huron to discuss grade-crossing problems.

One stopped train blocking Route 13, south of Fitchville, forced an ambulance to take a 20-minute detour while transporting a patient. On Nov. 20, a parked CSX train blocked New London Sectionline Road for nearly 18 hours.

The Route 13 crossing and a one farther south on the same road both will be "No Stopping Zones," CSX said.

Others in Huron County are State Rts. 60 and 162 in New London; Huron County Road 150 near Greenwich; U.S. 250 south of Fitchville, and Huron County Road 45 near Willard.

EUROPE: EU agreement will encourage rail competition

LONDON -- The European Union agreed to open its cross-border rail freight market in an eleventh-hour bid to stem an accelerating decline in traffic. But private companies still face an uphill struggle to break the stranglehold of state-owned monopolies in several key member states, the Journal of Commerce reported.

EU transport ministers agreed on a package of measures to allow any licensed rail operator to run services on a so-called trans-European rail freight network, both within one country or across borders.

Licensed operators also will be allowed to run services connecting the rail freight network to seaports and nearby inland cargo terminals.

To gain access to the earmarked networks, operators must meet safety standards that the European Commission, the EU's executive body, will draft to replace the current patchwork of national standards. An independent body will license rail operators and set prices for access to the freight networks.

It now is virtually impossible for rail companies from one country to run independent services to or through other countries. This restriction is viewed as a chief reason that rail's share of the EU freight market has slid to 13% from 32% in 1970.

Last week's deal marks a potential breakthrough in a 10-year campaign to open the European rail freight market.

Finnish Transport Minister Olli-Pekka Heinonen, who chaired the negotiations, said railroads "will not die away, but will get a new boost."

But France's insistence that the word "liberalization" not appear in the agreement underlines the difficulties facing private companies wanting to break into the French freight market.

France, fearful of antagonizing its militant unions, has long fought plans to allow private operators to penetrate its rail network. Last week's agreement allows France to avoid private competition by continuing cooperation with other national railways.

But Paris has agreed that other EU countries can chose amore liberal system, paving the way for full-scale deregulation across a large section of Europe from Scandinavia through Germany and across the Alps to Italy.