EXCLUSIVE — Freight railroad companies are pressuring the Biden administration to abandon a proposed rule they say could further complicate the country’s supply chain problems.
The Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration currently allows freight railroad companies to set their own crew requirements, but the Biden administration is seeking to implement a regulation first proposed in 2016 by the Obama administration that would permanently require all freight trains to operate with traditional engineer-conductor teams. Former President Barack Obama left office before the rule could be finalized.
BIDEN’S UNION ALLIES HAVE EXACERBATED THE SUPPLY CHAIN CRISIS
President Joe Biden, however, made a 2020 campaign promise to the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers that he would mandate the “Rule of Two.”
“It’s about time our government fought for you as hard as you’ve been fighting for our country,” Biden said in a virtual address to the union at the time. “I’m going to keep fighting for those crews, requiring two-person crews on freight trains, protecting transit workers from assault, making sure that everyone has what they need to safely do their job. Period.”
The crew mandate was originally included in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan, physical infrastructure proposal, but it was eventually stripped from the bill’s text. However, Amit Bose, Biden’s nominee to serve as FRA administrator, testified during his October Senate confirmation hearing that the agency is readying a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would resurrect the Obama-era rule. He claimed that a new federal regulation is needed to avoid a “patchwork of laws” on the subject because some states across the country have already implemented the measure on their own.
At the heart of the crew-size debate is a yearslong battle between labor and management on the subject of automation. Unions have long opposed freight railroads incorporating automated safety systems that would naturally reduce the size of operating crews over safety concerns. Freight railroads, on the other hand, claim that there isn’t definitive data suggesting that two-person crews are substantively safer than one-person crews. That line of argument prompted the FRA to abandon the rule in 2019.
Furthermore, freight railroads heavily implemented a Positive Train Control system in 2020, which industry experts say will not only allow companies to compete safely in an increasingly automated transportation industry but is also necessary to handle increased volume and address supply chain deficiencies exposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Freight railroads further argue that allowing them to begin now gradually implementing reduced crew sizes on a per-case basis will slow the workforce impact that automation will have on the roughly 40,000 union operators employed by private freight railroads.
It’s worth noting that freight railroad safety has increased dramatically over the past two decades. The train accident rate in 2019 had fallen 30% compared to 2000, while the employee injury rate and the grade crossing collision rate fell 46% and 32%, respectively, across the same period.
Association of American Railroads President and CEO Ian Jefferies will make the case against mandated two-person crews directly to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on Wednesday.
The Washington Examiner reviewed Jefferies’s prepared testimony ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, and he will call on Congress to “direct the FRA and other modal administrations at the Department of Transportation to be more forward-thinking in their rulemaking processes and approaches to the development, testing, and incorporation of new safety technologies.”
“Congress should ensure the FRA uses current data to establish the need for any new regulation and validates that safety benefits exceed the cost of its implementation,” Jefferies’s written testimony continues. “There are no data showing that a two person crew mandate would enhance safety. Moreover, this mandate could stifle the adoption of new technologies that would enhance the safety and efficiency of the rail network in the long-term.”
Jeffries will claim that, in opposing the rule, “railroads are not seeking the ability to utilize one-person crews haphazardly, but rather they want to work with rail labor under the existing collective bargaining framework — as they have for decades — to identify when conditions would allow for a reduction in the number of crewmembers without jeopardizing safety.”
Biden made a committed effort to alleviating supply chain issues upon entering office in January, but the administration has been forced to take a significantly more hands-on approach to address massive shipping delays plaguing consumers and retailers in recent months.
In particular, the Biden administration celebrated major commitments from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to unload cargo containers at the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach on a 24/7 basis as a major step toward easing those shipping bottlenecks.
Still, the ILWU’s own negotiated contracts and opposition to automation of any kind appear to have at least partially contributed to the port’s historic cargo backlogs.
“[The ILWU] contract limits the port to just three shifts in a day: two lasting eight hours and another lasting just five hours. All three go from Monday to Friday. These shifts overlap slightly, but they would still only total 21 hours even if they didn’t. Keeping the ports open for 24 hours would require the port to pay overtime every single day,” Competitive Enterprise Institute research fellow Sean Higgins said. “On top of that, the contract says that any work done on weekends or holidays is automatically time and a half, too. So even if the port could offer shifts with a five-day workweek that started on, say, Wednesday, it would have to pay those workers the equivalent of six days.”
The ILWU’s resistance to automation in any form has also landed the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach at 328th and 333rd, respectively, in the World Bank’s Port Performance Index.
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The White House and FRA did not respond to Washington Examiner’s inquiries by press time.
