A local railroad attorney, whose clients include some of the victims of the 2017 derailment of Amtrak Cascades train 501 in DuPont, says he’s hopeful the tentative contract agreement for freight rail workers will tackle an issue he says hasn’t had a great deal of attention: quality of life for those workers.
Pay raises are certainly an important facet of the new agreement, but attorney Jim Vucinovich says the workers are demanding a far better work-life balance than they have now. Vucinovich says policies of companies, like Burlington Northern Santa Fe, require workers to be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they have to report with two hours notice. He says they also have an attendance point system that can get them fired if they take too much time off if they’re sick or even for routine things we take for granted, like family events.
Vucinovich says it’s an unsustainable, Wall Street-driven policy he says is called “precision railroading”: “how to run the railroad at maximum profit, which means,” Vucinovich says, “you eliminate the workers, and then you take that smaller pool of workers, and you work them ‘round the clock.”
BNSF sent a statement to Northwest Newsradio, which reads:
“BNSF is pleased that the railroads have reached tentative agreements with the remaining unions. The final cooling-off period has been extended so that unions can ratify their agreements. BNSF team members drive our success, and we couldn’t deliver the nation’s goods without them. We appreciate their willingness to come to an agreement to avert the potential interruption of service and keep our rail network and our economy strong. BNSF will resume normal operations.”
