CP Rail to Shed 1,000 More Jobs
When Working Conditions Are at
Breaking Point

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Rail Monopolies' Reckless Disregard for Safety of Workers and Public
• CP Rail to Shed 1,000 More Jobs When Working Conditions Are at Breaking Point
• Ongoing Fight for Rail Safety - Interview, Doug Finnson, President, Teamsters Canada Rail Conference

Rail Monopolies' Reckless Disregard for Safety of Workers and Public

CP Rail to Shed 1,000 More Jobs When Working Conditions Are at Breaking Point

CP Rail's reckless slashing of its workforce is continuing at a time when working conditions have reached a breaking point. Conditions have deteriorated to the degree that Transport Canada issued an unprecedented order on January 14 calling working conditions at CP in British Columbia an "immediate threat to safe railway operations." The Transport Canada letter also demands changes in CP's crew line-up practices.

One week later on January 21 CP Rail announced that it will eliminate 1,000 jobs in 2016. This comes on top of the 7,000 positions that have already been eliminated at CP since 2012, when a new U.S. management took over, led by former CN Rail CEO Hunter Harrison. It is estimated that in 2015 alone CP Rail cut 12 per cent of its workforce. CP is now employing about 13,000 people in its Canadian and U.S. operations.

CP's new management views the elimination of positions as a key component of outperforming competitors in the deadly race over freight transportation in Canada. This means fewer workers, more remote-controlled operations and trains that are longer, faster, and loaded with heavier freight including dangerous materials such as oil and gas. CP also says that further slashing of the workforce is needed to adjust to lower freight volumes as a result of falling commodity prices.

The January 14 Transport Canada order says that CP Rail's conditions are "reduc[ing] necessary rest and creat[ing] excessive fatigue," reducing the alertness of train crews. Transport Canada said this is occurring "at locations on CP within British Columbia including but not limited to Roberts Bank, Coquitlam, and Kamloops."

The letter objects to a number of CP practices as threatening safety. These include not recognizing the workers' transit time to and from away-from-home rest facilities and away-from-home terminals as time on duty, which forces workers to effectively be on shift and on duty before their official start times. Transport Canada also says that CP is forcing workers to accept "call and cancels" without allowing them to book rest thereafter, only to be then ordered to report for duty without the intervening down times being counted toward their hours of service.

Transport Canada also said the workers are required to anticipate work calls using inaccurate train line-ups (posted for workers' reference) which are listed for an insufficient period of time. This is what railway workers call being "on call 24/7" and as a result they are suffering from constant excessive fatigue.

As a result of such egregious safety hazards coming to light Transport Canada ordered changes to provide more regular periods of rest and less instability in the lining-up of crews. However, the order only applies to certain regions of BC, while these problems are known to occur across the country. Transport Canada has been auditing fatigue-management practices of railway monopolies for years and, according to railway workers, this is the first time that it has issued such an order. This in itself shows how critical the situation has become.

Ongoing Fight for Rail Safety

- Interview, Doug Finnson, President, Teamsters Canada Rail Conference -

Workers' Forum, a supplement of TML Daily, recently interviewed Doug Finnison, President of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference on the ongoing fight of railway workers to protect their safety and that of the public. TML Daily is posting the interview below to inform readers about the dangerous practices of the railway monopolies and how the workers are holding them to account.

Workers' Forum: In a recent radio interview, you raised a number of issues regarding rail safety as they pose themselves as this time. You mention, for example, the Safety Management System (SMS), the system whereby the railways themselves work out their safety system and Transport Canada audits their reports.

Doug Finnson: The SMS is something that is private and privileged and not open to anyone outside of the railroad companies themselves. It needs to be accessible and needs to be inclusive of training regulations and training responsibilities. The SMS the way it is right now, you cannot access it, nobody can access it. We don't even know for sure what the SMS contains specifically because it is private. Only until we get a chance to go through the SMS and get a good appreciation of what is even inside there, will we be able to make a detailed assessment about what is going on. Under the Canada Labour Code, we have a senior health and safety policy committee. You would think that they have access to it but they don't. We have a national legislative director that is in charge of the safety for all the railroads in Canada -- a big responsibility -- and he can't get access to it. Even if you take them to court under Access to Information laws you can't get it.

WF: You also raise issues with rail safety at CP Rail regarding the Remote Control Locomotive Systems (RCLS). What is the plan of CP with the RCLS at this time?

DF: The plan right now as I know it, they want to remove locomotive engineers from the freight crews that work the trains within 30 miles of our cities. These crews are called road switchers. Normally in a large city like Calgary or Montreal there are customers on the edge of that city or just beyond. The road switchers would go out to service the customers -- setting off cars, lifting cars, assembling trains, bringing them back in -- on what is called road service. A freight train has a locomotive engineer, a conductor and a trainman. The road switchers go back and forth. Usually they work eight-hour shifts.

What they want is to run these trains without an engineer but they want to have the two crew members, the conductor and the trainman, that we do represent. They want to have them switching from the ground. What CP wants to do is take the engineers off of those trains and replace the engineer with a remote control motor system, the belt pack, which is a piece of equipment that is worn around, they can put it over their shoulders and it gets strapped in front of them. The difficulty is taking the locomotive engineer off. He is at the front of the movement, he can see everything, and most of the time the locomotive engineer is the most experienced person on the crew. They want to take them off to save money, that is what this is about. They want to transfer the work over to the youngest people who do not have the experience and now they are being asked to do not only their own but the job of the locomotive engineer. This is with cars that could be loaded with crude oil, propane, gasoline, and for which CP wants no limits, they want to have no restrictions on the commodities. They want to have absolutely no restrictions on the size of the trains, the weight of the trains, the commodity that is on the train whether it is gas, oil or other dangerous commodities.

RCLS is currently operating inside the confines of designated switching yards and it has been there for 15-20 years. They are used to take small cuts of cars where they go around at a slow speed and assemble trains. Not very often do they take big cuts of cars as there have a been a lot of accidents. Now they want to go outside up to 30 miles out, and service customers like potash mines, coal mines, petroleum facilities, oil and gas operations. They want to take this technology out of the switching yards and they they want to cut jobs.

We are trying to stop the reduction of the locomotive engineers and if we can't stop it we are trying to get an arbitrator to implement conditions that will protect the safety of the workers and the public, put limitations on the size, weight and speed of the train, and also make sure it is experienced people who are operating them. This is potentially dangerous and could happen right across Canada. They want to do this everywhere and they want to do it more next year.

WF: What would you like to say in conclusion?

DF: We are hoping that the new Minister will give Transport Canada safety officers the support and the authority they need to do a good job at the railroad. The past government was just in the back pockets of the big business, that was just the reality from where the working person stands. The government has the ability to break open the vault and show us what the SMS is. They have the ability to make that public.

At CP Rail, we are experiencing a culture of fear that is being imposed by the upper management. It is essentially the same management team that created that culture of fear at CN that is now over at CP doing their magic there. People are being fired all the time for very minor little things. Workers with 35-36 years within several months of retirement are being fired for, we argue, they did nothing wrong. Instead of just getting a reprimand or some discipline they are actually firing this person, a worker with 36 years of service, of good service, a good and honest hard working person. They fire him, they take the career away from him seven months before pension.

Yet, at CP rail in 2015, they have not been able to defend any of the discharges that we have taken to arbitration. They cannot defend their decisions.

I want to say that the Teamsters on the railroad, we are a close group, our members are strong, the union is strong and we are going to keep on fighting because this is the right thing to do.

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