Rail labor groups are rallying around Surface Transportation Board Chairman Marty Oberman, saying calls to strip him of his position misdiagnose the basis explanation for the industry’s woes: operational challenges related to precision scheduled railroading (PSR).
“We firmly imagine that removing Chair Oberman or failing to reappoint him would undermine the numerous progress the Board has made during his tenure,” said Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department (TTD) of the AFL-CIO, in a Tuesday letter to President Joe Biden.
In May, three progressive groups wrote to Biden asking that he remove Oberman from his chairmanship of STB and replace him with fellow board member Robert Primus.
Revolving Door Project, RootsAction and FreedomBLOC said the chairman mishandled the merger between Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern. They argued that Oberman and fellow board members must have rejected the merger over antitrust concerns. The groups sought to interchange Oberman with Primus, the one board member who voted against the merger.
But two union groups — TTD and a coalition comprising 13 individual rail labor unions — each sent letters to Biden urging him to maintain Oberman on board as STB chair due to how he has handled rail shipper and labor concerns and scrutinized the railroads on their service records.
“Put bluntly, the position advanced by the three organizations is unsuitable. Chair Oberman has our full support, and he has earned the continued support of this administration. Removing him or failing to reappoint him would only undermine the progress made by the STB under his tenure,” said the letter from the 13 labor groups.
“Chair Oberman and the opposite members of the present STB have valued the opinions of rail unions and ensured that the voices and interests of rail employees are heard. Chair Oberman has aggressively questioned railroad representatives in STB proceedings when the assertions of the railroads appeared to be without evidentiary support or gave the impression to be premised on false assumptions,” the letter continued. “Chair Oberman and other Members of the present Board peppered the applicants within the recent merger cases with quite a few probing questions, challenged facile assertions made by the applicants, and encouraged applicants to accommodate the concerns of other interested parties as conditions for Board approval of those transactions.”
As a substitute of taking a look at the CP-KCS merger as representative of key issues throughout the freight rail industry, those searching for Oberman’s removal should take a look at the impact that PSR, a tool utilized by the Class I railroads to streamline operations, has had on the industry, labor representatives said.
“We agree with the three organizations’ concerns in regards to the state of the rail industry and the rampant problems that exist. But their ire is misplaced, and their views as to what ought to be done to treatment the issues fail to grasp how we got to the present state of affairs, and the way best to reply,” the 13 rail unions said. “The true problem with service and safety within the rail industry is just not the concentration within the industry, however the hijacking of the industry by hedge funds and so-called ‘activist investors.’”
The rail unions continued: “The trail to obligatory changes is a reinvigorated regulatory regime, each on the STB and Federal Railroad Administration. This doesn’t mean reinstating a regime that was created when there was no competition to rail by other modes of transportation; but, relatively, by creation of a regime that matches the industry that exists today, not the one which existed 40 years ago. We trust Chair Oberman to spearhead the regulatory effort in that regard. Chair Oberman deserves and has our full support in return for his work.”
The 13 groups that signed the one letter were Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way – Employes Division with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen; National Conference of Firemen and Oilers; International Association of Sheet Metal, Air and Transportation Employees – Mechanical and Engineering Division; International Brotherhood of Boilermakers; Transport Employees Union; Transportation Communications Union; American Train Dispatchers Association; Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen; International Association of Sheet Metal, Air and Transportation Employees – Transportation Division; Brotherhood of Railway Carmen; International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Employees; and International Brotherhood of Electrical Employees.
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