UTU News Digest - Wednesday, November 10, 1999

UTU Daily News Digest

Information of interest to operating railroad and transportation employees

Wednesday, November 10, 1999

WASHINGTON: Black Workers Sue Amtrak, Unions

WASHINGTON -- A group of two dozen current and former railway employees filed a class-action lawsuit here against Amtrak and many of its labor unions yesterday, alleging that black workers were ridiculed, harassed, and denied jobs, promotions and training, the Washington Post reported.

It's the third such class action filed by black employees against Amtrak. Last month, the court approved an $8 million settlement in another racial discrimination case brought by black managers who had worked at Amtrak. A case also was filed by trackmen in the Northeast corridor.

At a news conference, a group of Amtrak service attendants, conductors, ticket clerks and engineers spoke about their case, some sobbing and others visibly angry. Amtrak employee Mike Helton, a baggage clerk who started at Amtrak in 1989, said one white supervisor frequently made racist jokes and another made racial slurs, but they were not disciplined.

Ken Campbell, the lead plaintiff in the case, said rampant cronyism and nepotism among white railroad workers made the racial problems worse.

"An atmosphere that permits such outrageous and widespread racism in a company of this size, particularly one that is a public carrier and one that receives U.S. government subsidies, is a disgrace," said attorney Warren Kaplan of the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, which is representing the workers.

In a statement, Clifford Black, director of public affairs for Amtrak, said the company would not comment on the lawsuit because it has not yet had time to review it.

"Amtrak is committed to diversity and has a zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind in the workplace," Black said. He said Amtrak has made "significant changes" to its personnel policies recently "to ensure fairness, respect and diversity" throughout the company.

Attorneys for the workers said they sued the unions to ensure that improvements in personnel policies would be included in future collective-bargaining agreements.

CANADA: Amtrak train hits dump truck killing driver, injuring 37

ACTON, Ontario (AP) -- A high-speed Amtrak train carrying 37 passengers crashed into a dump truck yesterday, killing the truck driver and injuring 11 passengers, new services reported.

The crash of a Chicago-bound train knocked the train's locomotive onto its side and sent four passenger cars off the rails at a road crossing near Acton, 12 miles west of Toronto.

Police Sgt. Frank Phillips said the truck driver was killed and six people were hospitalized with minor injuries. But a spokesman for the William Osler Health Center in nearby Georgetown said 11 people had been admitted for treatment.

"The patients ... are in stable condition with various head, neck, chest, and knee injuries," spokesman Don Trant said.

The Amtrak train was bound for Chicago, and was operating under a contract with Via Rail Canada Inc.

OHIO: Train delays pile up grain at elevators

RAWSON -- A Norfolk Southern grain train that was scheduled to load corn last month at the Blanchard Valley Farmers Co-op elevator near here finally showed up yesterday - more than two weeks late.

And in Custar, the Deshler Farmers Elevator Co. is still waiting for a train that a company official said should have arrived a month ago.

Grain piling up in outdoor heaps at elevators across Ohio and Michigan is the latest consequence of railroad shipping delays that have plagued lines throughout the eastern half of the United States since Norfolk Southern and CSX Transportation took over the operations of Conrail on June 1.

"I can't think of a local elevator that depends on a railroad that's not experiencing shipping delays," said John Bender, grain manager for Blanchard Valley, which operates nine elevators in Hancock County - including the Dyer Station site near Rawson, and one in neighboring Putnam County.

Overall, Mr. Bender said, grain trains seem to be running between two and three weeks late. Extra handling for about 1 million bushels of grain stored outdoors at several sites has cost Blanchard Valley about $200,000 so far, he said.

But Mr. Bender said there does not seem to be any risk that local grain will spoil before it can be shipped. Such fears had spread in central Michigan before CSX announced Monday that it will rush 500 grain cars to overloaded elevators there.

Railroad delays are nothing new for other area industries that have been struggling with the railroads for months to get their raw materials and products shipped promptly.

"The yards are still very congested and the transit times are still long,'' said Paulette Spotts, transportation manager for Sauder Woodworking in Archbold.

Some Sauder shipments have been held up for a week at a Norfolk Southern railyard in Elkhart, Ind., she said. The company has been forced to use trucks for some shipments and to change production schedules because of late materials.

And Dan Hughes, operations manager at the Walbridge Coatings steel processing plant in Wood County, said shipments that took three days before Conrail was broken up continue to take nine or 10 days.

"Right now, if you own a trucking company, you can name your price,'' Mr. Hughes said. The tight supply of trucks and drivers qualified to haul heavy steel coils means some traffic still has to go by rail, he said.

Mr. Hughes blamed the delays on continuing problems with car-management computers that Norfolk Southern and CSX use to track shipments and distribute empty cars for loading.

Rudy Husband, a Norfolk Southern spokesman, said the computer glitches have been ironed out, but the railroads still have to deal with service bottlenecks that developed because of train routing changes because Conrail was split up.

With traffic at an annual peak because of the harvest, new model-year vehicles streaming off assembly lines, and holiday shipments, congestion is likely to continue at least until January, Mr. Husband said.

"Congestion was not unusual on Conrail at this time of year,'' said Mr. Husband, a former Conrail spokesman, though he conceded it is worse this year.

By this time next year, he said, Norfolk Southern plans to have completed capacity improvements so that the congestion won't reoccur.

And Chuck Sear, general traffic manager for Cooper Tire & Rubber in Findlay, said the shipment delays and inconsistent local-delivery service the firm has encountered since the Conrail breakup seem to have eased.

"It does appear here in the last month or so that things are getting better,'' Mr. Sear said.

Mr. Husband said grain traffic was "a fragile situation" to begin with because grain shippers have increasingly relied on having freight cars available for loading during a short time window close to the harvest.

Mr. Bender agreed that as local grain production has shifted from export to domestic markets, "the need for timely trains in the fall has become more critical." But the change has been gradual enough that the railroads should have been able to cope with it, he said.

Don Seedorf, a grain tester at Deshler Farmers, said the Custar elevator closed to deliveries several times this fall when trains did not show up on time and the elevator filled up. Pleasant weather that has allowed farmers to harvest quicker than usual and low market prices that kept elevators' stockpiles high have compounded the situation.

Blanchard Valley, which accepts 20 million to 22 million bushels of grain and oilseeds a year, ships 95 per cent of its corn, 25 per cent of soybeans, and 50 per cent of wheat by rail, Mr. Bender said.

Arranging transportation is typically the grain buyer's responsibility rather than the seller's, so Mr. Bender has been calling buyers, asking where the train is, instead of answering such calls.

The shortage of rail cars, however, has led some large, competing poultry farms in the Southeast to work together and share trains they normally would not, he said.

Many area elevators that have huge storage bins and do not ship much grain or oilseeds by rail are not affected nearly as much.

Ken Lake, a grain merchant at Michigan Agricultural Commodities, said a new bin east of Blissfield that holds 1.3 million bushels eliminated the company's need for rail cars during harvest when they are always hard to get.

CANADA: CP to hold a moment of silence for veterans

CALGARY -- Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) announced today that at 11 a.m. local time on November 11, 1999, its employees will bring all trains across Canada and the United States to a halt, observing two full minutes of silence. Not since the death of CPR's visionary builder, William Cornelius Van Horne, in September 1915, has CPR stopped all trains in such a show of respect.

Citizens of Canada and the United States are closing out this century this millennium as a free and peaceful population. We wanted to pay special tribute this Remembrance Day to the millions of Canadians and Americans who served in World War I, World War II and the Korean War, and especially remember the 33,127 of them who were Canadian Pacific employees, said Rob Ritchie, president and chief executive officer, CPR.

It wasn't an easy thing for mothers to say goodbye to their sons and daughters as they went off to war. Our employees wanted to perform a tangible gesture to show our appreciation for our freedom. Two minutes of reflection is time well used to honour those who served, and in particular the many thousands who sacrificed their lives, including 1,774 Canadian Pacific employees.

At 11 a.m. local time on Nov. 11, 1999, all CPR trains across its network will come to a full stop in a safe zone and observe the tradition of two minutes silence. At the end of the two minutes, they'll blast one long whistle as a final tribute to this century’s freedom fighters.

"Our hope is that when the train whistle blows in Revelstoke, Smiths Falls, Toronto or Minneapolis, the sound will unite our thoughts in a moment of thankfulness for our freedom," said Mr. Ritchie.

CANADA: Impact of ILWU lockout may widen

VANCOUVER -- The management lockout of British Columbia dockworkers has diverted cargo to U.S. West Coast ports and left operators bracing for work interruptions at U.S. terminals, the Journal of Commerce reported.

And if the lockout drags on, ocean carriers may increase their rates for intermodal cargo moving to the eastern half of North America.

U.S. West Coast ports began receiving containerized cargo diverted from Vancouver, British Columbia, even before a lockout Sunday by Canadian employers against the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

"There already was a significant amount of diversion leading up to the action in Vancouver," said Imbert Matthee, a spokesman for the Port of Seattle. Cargo also was diverted to Tacoma, Wash., and Portland, Ore.

Shippers and carriers had been alert for weeks to the possibility of a work stoppage in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the International Longshore and Warehouse Union's contract expired Dec. 31.

The Canadian ILWU negotiates separately from the ILWU at U.S. West Coast ports, where a three-year contract was agreed upon in July.

Terminal operators in U.S. ports have been watching for the possibility of pickets at their facilities by Canadian ILWU members. The ILWU Coast Labor Relations Committee on Friday sent a memo to locals at U.S. ports alerting them to the possibility of a lockout in Canada. The memo said that if the Canadian ILWU sent pickets to U.S. ports, the committee said it was confident the U.S. longshoremen's contract would allow them to refuse to cross the picket lines.

The Pacific Maritime Association, which represents shipping lines and terminal operators at U.S. ports, takes the opposite view.

"We've been to arbitration before on the same issues and won," said Joseph Miniace, PMA president, citing similar incidents involving Canadian pickets at U.S. ports in the 1980s.

Although wages are an issue in the Canadian labor dispute, the main issue appears to be a single operator's hiring last year of a small nonunion company to sample sulfur cargo.

The ILWU, seeking to protect its jurisdiction from incursion by nonunion operators, refused to agree to contract terms unless the sulfur sampler was replaced.

After negotiations stalled, Canadian employers locked out the ILWU.

Most container lines that call in Vancouver, Canada's largest container port, also call in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The vessels stop in Vancouver before or after their U.S. calls, so diverting cargo through Seattle, Tacoma or Portland is relatively easy.

Initially, most of the lines intend to slow their vessels to maintain their same basic schedules in the trans-Pacific while skipping calls in Vancouver. "You have to keep to your schedule," said Bill McKinstry, general manager for the Pacific Northwest at Zim-American Israeli Shipping Co. in Vancouver.

"We hope this is settled quickly, but for now we're trying to keep our rotation in place," said Howard Finkel, director of pricing at China Ocean Shipping Co. in Secaucus, N.J.

A lengthy closure of Vancouver and other British Columbia ports could force importers and exporters to pay a surcharge to cover the added costs of shipping their cargo through U.S. ports.

Vancouver has become an important gateway for U.S. as well as Canadian cargo.

Shipping executives say intermodal rates on Canadian Pacific or Canadian National railroads are $600 to $800 per container less than those on Union Pacific and Burlington Northern & Santa Fe railroads in the United States.

Because of the higher costs of U.S. railroads, shipping lines in a discussion group known as the Canadian Transpacific Stabilization Agreement have talked about a lockout surcharge, but have not come to a decision, said Brian Conrad, deputy executive director of the Canadian TSA.

Conrad holds that same position with the Transpacific Stabilization Agreement, a discussion group that covers the U.S. inbound trade from Asia but has a different membership.

If the lockout continues in British Columbia, the Canadian TSA lines may establish a voluntary surcharge for members, or the individual lines may revise their own tariffs so they don't have to absorb the added cost of the inland move through the United States, Conrad said.

However, if cargo that is already in transit was booked at a certain rate, shippers will pay the rate that was quoted until carriers begin booking cargo at new rates, he added.

The lockout of the British Columbia longshoremen, which follows a job action in August by independent harbor drivers, comes as blow to Vancouver, where containerized volume has jumped more than 40% this year.

Three carriers this year began new services that made the Canadian port the first inbound call on their North American services from Asia.

Barrie Sime, terminal manager at Vancouver's Deltaport terminal, said only about 100 import containers were stuck at the terminal, but that more than 2,000 containers were waiting to be exported. "A lot of our customers are frustrated, that's for sure," he said.