Railroads and Unions Divide and Scramble

As the Trump administration prepares to take power, the nation’s freight railroad companies are at the bargaining table with rail craft unions representing 115,000 freight workers who move essential goods across the country.

Already the bargaining looks very different from the last round of negotiations, which finished in 2022. For the first time since 1963, multiple railroads have gone rogue, breaking with the employer association in which they typically present a united front.

Under the Railway Labor Act, the Trump administration can affect both bargaining and the federal rules under which the railroads operate. Railroad employers may be emboldened at the table since the executive branch can intervene and force a deal, and employers and unions alike recognize that the Trump administration would be likely to favor the employers even more heavily.

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CUTTING FRENZY

The railroads are already engaged in a decade-long cost-cutting frenzy as part of their 40-year push for “precision scheduled railroading” (see box below). The companies would jump at the opportunity to have even fewer workers and less exacting standards. At stake for workers: wages, safety, health care costs, and work-life balance in jobs that play havoc with workers and their families.

A quick primer on how rail bargaining works: The Railway Labor Act, which predates the National Labor Relations Act, governs rail labor negotiations. It sets unions up for long, winding negotiations, which often take years. The chart on page 15 helps explain the process and how winding it can be. Sometimes the process ends in “self-help,” which includes a union-initiated strike or an employer lockout.

The freight negotiations that ended in 2022 began in 2018—which is how a six-year contract settled only two years ago is already back up for negotiation. Typically, the process begins without a ton of fanfare: The 12 unions representing freight rail workers and the railroads state that they are going to bargain, and exchange initial proposals. The freight railroads typically negotiate together under the National Carriers’ Conference Committee, while the rail unions negotiate in two or more coalitions (or on their own) against the employers. This was all set to begin in November.

SUDDEN SCRAMBLE

But this round of bargaining took a sharp turn. Ahead of the customary start of negotiations, CSX began seeking deals with individual unions—and getting them. In August, CSX announced the first of its tentative agreements with the Transportation Communications Union and the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, both affiliated with the Machinists. The agreement, like the ones that followed, was relatively basic: an 18.8 percent (compounded) wage increase over five years, earlier access to vacation days for new workers, some small health plan improvements, and few to no changes to work rules.

This move hit unions and the other railroads by surprise, leading to a scramble for agreements and predictably chaotic results. Some unions reached tentative agreements with some railroads, some settled more deals than others, and some reached no settlements. But none settled with all the railroads.

If each union bargained separately with each railroad, there would be more than 50 contracts. Additionally, some unions, like SMART-TD and the dispatchers (American Train Dispatchers Association or ATDA), have multiple regional agreements with the same railroad that are voted on separately. One group of CSX dispatchers ratified the agreement by 73 percent, while the other rejected it by 59 percent.

Things have only gotten more complex as tentative agreements have moved to ratification by members. At least 17 agreements were ratified, but six so far have been rejected, at CSX (including the dispatchers mentioned above) and SMART-TD at BNSF and NS. Machinists District Lodge 19, which represents locomotive and heavy equipment mechanics, rejected its agreement by 61 percent. The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWED, a Teamsters division that represents track workers) voted no by 68 percent. SMART-TD conductors who work in the Northeast portion of CSX rejected by 65 percent.

Many SMART-TD members voted against their agreements over the inclusion of a new job title that members worried would significantly change the way conductors do their jobs and ultimately lead to job cuts.

‘IT DOESN’T ADD UP’

Will Royston, a BMWED member at CSX, said workers there rejected the agreement because it simply wasn’t good enough: “When you start looking at the time we put in, traveling and away from our families, it doesn’t add up,” Royston said. “The guys are saying: send out another contract and if you’re not talking about more money we’re going to turn it down again.”

According to Royston, the conditions that led to the 2022 standoff, particularly work-life balance, were largely unaddressed by the tentative agreement. The wage and vacation tweaks for new workers weren’t sufficient to get the deal passed.

The agreement “didn’t do enough for our health care costs, and the major quality-of-life issues that have been such a big deal for railroaders,” said Nick Wurst, a SMART-TD conductor at CSX, whose union also rejected the deal. (Wurst is a leader in Railroad Workers United, a cross-craft organization that promotes united bargaining) The railroads have continued to cut back, and conditions are arguably worse than when the last agreement was settled.

The fragmentation and unusual speed of the current negotiations seems to favor the railroads, and has raised the eyebrows of workers who are used to negotiations dragging on for years. It “encourages an attitude of ‘let’s get ours,’” said Wurst. “It promotes being early adopters for preferential treatment, and to say ‘screw the other guys.’” He adds, “If [the railroads] prefer this over national negotiations, or a strike vote, it makes me very suspicious that we’ve gotten what we can get.”

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The rejected agreements with Machinists District Lodge 19, BMWED, SMART-TD, and the ATDA all happened as East Coast longshore workers were returning to work from a three-day strike with a tentative agreement for 61 percent wage increases. Several union members who spoke to Labor Notes for this piece said that this was a big part of the impulse to vote no.

WORKERS LEFT ANGRY

Why did it happen this way? First the 2022 settlements, many of them forced on workers by the federal government—or under the threat of forced agreements—left workers angry. Members of two unions, the Locomotive Engineers and Machinists District Lodge 19, voted out their leaderships, angry about how 2022 went down.

Some union leaders may have calculated that rather than face angry members after another set of drawn-out negotiations, they’d be better off reaching a quick settlement. In their joint statement announcing the first round of tentative agreements, the TCU and BRC said that it had been clear from bargaining surveys that “our members wanted an agreement without waiting for years of unnecessary delay which has long been the standard in this industry.”

And then there was the uncertainty about the outcome of the federal election. The RLA negotiations process is heavily influenced by who holds the reins of government. Not knowing who would win the 2024 presidential election, some employers and unions rushed to settle, rather than wait and see.

For the “operating crafts”’—engineers and conductors—the existential issue of how many workers must be on a train is potentially at stake in the remaining deals. Under Biden, the Federal Railroad Administration mandated two-person crews, a core union demand. SMART-TD, representing conductors, secured that in its contract for the next five years—assuming the tentative agreements are ratified. If the Trump administration gets rid of the two-person crew mandate, workers may have to demand it at the bargaining table.

The Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document, a blueprint drafted largely by alums of the first Trump administration, says that the Federal Railroad Administration’s “singular focus on job preservation is contrary to FRA’s mission.” The document targets not only the two-person crew rule but also track inspection requirements which govern how, how often, and by whom tracks must be inspected.

GETTING MESSIER

If things continue as they have, we can expect an intermittently chaotic period of bargaining. Not much will happen right away—railroad negotiations usually move slowly, and employers and unions alike will be watching to see what the Trump does.

If the unions without agreements can’t unite at the bargaining table—or at least coordinate—things will only get messier. Dozens of deals remain to be negotiated. Some may be settled easily, while others may flare up with threats of strikes or lockouts with particular unions at particular railroads. Avoiding such situations has been a major reason that the railroads have stuck together in bargaining before.

Confrontations can snowball when there are many separate negotiations. In 1992, a strike by the Machinists—and only the Machinists—at CSX turned into a national rail lockout when the railroads decided to shut things down. Led by President George H.W. Bush, the federal government quickly passed a law ending the strike and lockouts, forcing arbitration on all of the unions.

It’s possible that we could see the railroads adopt the strategy that Canadian logistics employers recently used in railroad and longshore negotiations: force a confrontation, and rely on the government to settle the dispute on terms favorable to the employers.

Rail labor is as fragmented as ever, but so are the railroad employers. In an industry this essential that has been cut to the bone, a little organizing can go a long way. So far we have not seen that organizing, but we could—because business as usual under an extremely hostile federal government is unlikely to deliver the results workers say they need.

To keep all this straight, Labor Notes is maintaining a Rail Bargaining Tracker at bit.ly/railbargaining.