News and Media

Reported by Mark Gruenberg for People’s World. A fiery freight train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, involving hazardous materials in tank cars, was a direct result of Norfolk Southern cost-cutting which led to little maintenance and an undiscovered safety problem, the top organization for rank-and-file railroaders says. And corporate greed to satisfy Wall Street led…

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Reported by Bob Hennelly for Work-Bites.Com. Throughout the recent hazardous chemical freight train derailment in Ohio and the four-day ordeal that followed while the flaming wreck was stabilized, the one perspective that was consistently missing from the reporting was that of the union railroad workers. It didn’t matter if it was the New York Times,…

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Reported by Jake Johnson for Common Dreams. Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Tuesday that he will join rail workers later this week to launch a fresh push for at least seven days of paid sick leave, an effort that comes months after Congress and the Biden White House forced workers to accept a contract without a…

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Reported by Josh Funk for AP News. Several thousand workers at CSX will soon get one of the things that pushed the U.S. railroad industry to the brink of a strike last fall: paid sick time. CSX announced a deal Tuesday with two of its 12 unions, becoming the first major railroad to offer that…

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Reported by Progressive Railroading. Twelve rail labor unions late last week adopted a resolution that calls for the nation’s freight railroads to give all railroad workers paid sick leave. The resolution claims that the majority of rail workers don’t have paid sick leave and are all subject to discipline for work absences due to illness…

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Reported by John Gallagher for American Shipper. Transportation officials representing trucking, rail and seaports took aim at priorities touted by Democrats over the past two years — including the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) — at the opening hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Wednesday. They took their cue…

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Reported by People’s World. Using safety of workers and communities as their main argument, two top railroad unions and the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department strongly argued for mandatory two-person crews on all freight trains. TTD and unions carried their campaign to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) hearing on crews on Dec. 14, a day after…

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Reported by Joanna Marsh for Freightwaves. The Surface Transportation Board’s regulatory to-do list, train crew sizes and merger conditions related to Canadian Pacific’s acquisition of Kansas City Southern are just some of the big issues that rail industry stakeholders will be watching in 2023. One of the biggest issues that the U.S. freight industry will…

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Reported by Bill Stephens for Trains. Railroads were catapulted into national headlines in the fall as labor negotiations came down to the wire, raising the prospect of the first strike or lockout in three decades. After nearly three years of fruitless negotiations between a dozen labor unions and the railroads, the Biden Administration in July…

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