Jim Latowski is getting ready to start his night shift in a few hours, and just thinking about it throws him into a dour mood.
After years of working days, the railroad conductor hates working nights. So much can go wrong in a switching yard, he says, and it is hard to stay alert in the darkness over a 12-hour shift. He hates the added work and responsibility, working only with a brakeman when he used to have the help of at least another coworker.
What really ticks him off, he grumbles in his southwest suburban Frankfort home, is that after 24 years on the job, he is stuck on nights at the Joliet yard. Ownership changes at his railroad, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., have bounced around many veterans like him, and he does not have enough seniority for the day shift there.
“He comes home, and he is like on edge,” says Jean Latowski, staring over at her husband of 32 years, a muscular, sandy-haired man. “He relaxes just a little bit. He smokes more cigarettes. You know he tries to maintain a same level, but he seems to be hitting a brick wall.”
Survivors of relentless cutbacks, mergers and sweeping technological developments–changes that have whittled their ranks by 60 percent, from 640,000 in 1970 to 256,000 today–many railroad workers share Jim Latowski’s outlook: They don’t like their lot in the 1990s.
Despite good pay–about $50,000 in wages last year on average–and despite the guarantee of steady work with newly prosperous freight lines, they say there are too few of them to cope with the rebound in business. The stepped-up pace, they say, is stretching them dangerously thin, as well as exhausting them.
“The railroads are moving record volumes, but they are continuing with skeleton work forces,” says Ed Wytkind, head of the Transportation Trades Department for the AFL-CIO. He points to the warnings by the government’s Surface Transportation Board to the Union Pacific Corp. and CSX Corp. railroads that they have to improve safety-related conditions.
The current jam on the Union Pacific, the nation’s largest railroad, that has backed up dozens of trains has stirred howls from backlogged companies across the nation. It has been blamed by railroad officials on surging demand, unexpected crew shortages, maintenance problems and bad weather.
Union Pacific officials say they expect to have the problems under control soon. And so do officials of the nation’s other major railroads, who say they are trying to deal with the pressures on their workers with hiring and new programs to cope with job-related stress.
But they add that some of the unions’ complaints reflect a lingering resistance over the changes and cutbacks that the railroads needed to become competitive.
“You had a lot of overstaffing,” says Tom White, a spokesman for the Washington-based Association of American Railroads. “On a lot of railroads, you were running trains with four, five or six people, and they didn’t need that many people. We also had an army of clerks, and computerization has reduced the number of clerks who are needed.”
But many workers say the situation is bad and not getting better.
Money was the key issue in the recent showdown between the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees’ 2,300 Amtrak workers and the nation’s only intercity passenger railroad. One-time pit and shovel workers who now operate high-tech equipment, they wanted their wages to match the pay of their freight-railway brethren. They won a 16 percent pay hike over five years, and now Amtrak must persuade Congress to pay for the increases.
Amtrak workers also gripe about working conditions, but union leaders believed they couldn’t win on both pay and job issues. Workers might seem well-paid, but union officials say the reason that members make so much in overtime is that there are too few employees. The average union member made about $41,000 last year, about $6,000 over the base wage.
Amid the grumbling, some hope has surfaced, however.
As business has rebounded in the last three years, the railroads have been hiring. In industrywide bargaining for major railroads last year, the companies for the first time set up union-management panels to look at working conditions. In addition, several railroads have taken steps to help workers cope with their job demands.
Just last week the Union Pacific said it would begin a guaranteed time-off program for 3,500 train and engine workers in Texas to counter fatigue and stress. It said it would expand the program to its entire system in December.
Officials at Burlington Northern Sante Fe brag that they are the only company in the U.S. that lets workers nap. Last year, the Ft. Worth-based railroad, formed two years ago by the merger of Burlington Northern Inc. and Schaumburg-based Santa Fe Pacific Corp., began to let some workers take up to 45-minute naps to cut fatigue.
Jim Latowski’s bond with the industry began 24 years ago, when he walked into the Sante Fe freight office in Joliet and was hired on the spot. He was paid $39 a day.
Over the years, that has grown. He made about $65,000 last year, in part because of hefty overtime.
Despite long hours and being away on holidays and parents’ nights at school, he felt that working on the railroad was in his blood. No two days were alike.
Until six years ago, he commuted to a yard near Peoria. When his crew was reassigned to Ft. Madison, Iowa, he chose not to uproot his family. He took a job as a brakeman and continued traveling from the Joliet area.
Faced with another request for him to be reassigned to Ft. Madison or Galesburg, he again decided to stay. But his only choice last month was to go on the night shift at the switching yard.
“You would think after 25 years you could get the job you want,” he grumbles. But he will put up with it. He will do the work and retire on time, in 10 years.
“I hope I can make it,” he says flatly.
“You will,” he wife says quickly. “Your job is just part of your life.”
