An Editorial

We suddenly had supervisors who valued what people told them, instead of snarling, "If we want your opinion, we'll ask for it." They even got rid of, or reassigned a lot of managers who were abusive.

The UP paid valid time claims and arbitraries without a hassle. It was like someone said, "If we owe it, pay it." Now we have people whose sole excuse for being is to unilaterally rewrite and reinterpret our working agreements.

The UP at that time had a motto that said "We can Handle it." We did, too. Union Pacific treated its employees like grown men and women. They acted like they cared about us and our families. (Remember the Family Days we had with the train rides for everyone?)

Mike Walsh told us that everyone was on a first name basis. He told us that Locomotive Engineers and Conductors were "Third Level Management." Today, "Level Three" means something else -- something bad.

The rank and file really believed Mike Walsh when he told us what a good job we were doing and how important we were to the company's bottom line -- right up to the time he insulted us before Congress and the whole country and quickly resigned to take a job with an oil company.

In spite of that, morale remained quite high. We still believed Union Pacific was the world's best railroad -- and it was.

We all scoffed at the idea of becoming "a World Class railroad" because we knew we were already the best. To us, it was nothing but Harvard Business School hype. Nowadays, many employees say we're becoming "third-world class."

We were the best -- past tense -- I don't know who is best any more, but most employees tell you that it isn't us.

Payroll is apparently just like CMS and Harriman Dispatch Center. They're overworked and don't even have enough people left to answer the telephone.

We still have crews that are spending five and six hours on the train after their time has expired. The company knows when we are called. They aren't so stupid that they can't add one revolution to the clock dial to tell when our time will run out.

In addition to callers, they should have people familiar with the service units whose sole responsibility is to see that crews are relieved on time -- everytime.

And if there aren't enough vans, a taxi cab should be called, or one of the many new managers should be dispatched in a company vehicle to pick up the crew.

Again, some of the money our company is losing from not having rested crews, could be saved by spending a little of it to buy or lease some vans and put on some clerks to drive them.

Some railroads gave their employees access to their boards and pay records years ago. Union Pacific finally gave us access this past summer (very reluctantly, if not begrudgingly, it seemed) and then only to the boards and UPONLINE.

The information is NOT in the familiar TCS Format. The reason for this as seen by most employees is "the Company hopes to keeps us in the dark when we are mis-handled."

There are never enough terminals at the workplace so that a TE&Y employee can access his information while others need to use them to tie up on.

Employees needs home access to TCS. They need to be able to bring up their PS functions to view their pay records. They need to be able to print out General Orders and General Notices. They need to be able to call up Seniority Rosters, Job Bulletins and Working Boards as well as Assignment Boards.

It is my understanding that the UP-GRADE policy has changed, or at least the penalties have been brought more into line with reason.

Most of us thought the length of time required to work off the penalties was the major thing wrong with it -- except of course, for the dumb name. The name itself is a sick joke.

Oops, I almost forgot about the big fib, that UP-GRADE had been approved by the unions.

While other railroads arrange for their crew members to nap during long waits in siding, we still stick to the antediluvian idea that crewmen should stay awake and only read company material. Guess what. The guy that stayed marked all time got one of our infamous Level IIs for napping as his conductor did paperwork while waiting seven hours to get into the yard.

Our company wrings its hands as it devises more and more negative incentives and penalties for employees that try to do a good job.

Road crews are called and then spend one to three hours trying to get the paperwork for their train. When they try to call the dispatcher about it, it can be as long as two hours before anyone will answer the phone.

When they run out of time, they may wait five hours for a ride so they can get in, tie up, go home or to the motel, eat, bathe and get rested, to start the vicious cycle again.

If they make to a terminal, they may wait up to one and one half hours for a ride to their on duty point, because some of the van drivers have been let go.

If a crews somewhere on the system goes to sleep and runs by a meeting point, management's first answer is "do more testing." It is as if they actually believe Locomotive Engineers and Conductors are basically suicidal, or run by meeting points on purpose, and that "more testing" will keep them from falling asleep or deliberately crashing into the train they are supposed to meet. Duh...

Management other answer is to act confused as to why people fall asleep, and pay big bucks to hire a bunch of space cadets to find out why road and extra board engineers can't work 90 hours a week and stay awake.

Damnit, folks, this fatigue problem has been studied to studied to death for over a hundred years. In the 1890s, they called this having "the white eye". In the 1920's, they said it was "psychic epilepsy"

After Casey Jones' was killed in the tragic wreck in 1896, his fireman, Sim Webb, told investigators, "Mr. Casey had a white eye."

The book Casey Jones, by Fred J. Lee, c 1940, states on page 265: "Extreme fatigue of body and mind sometimes is responsible for the creation of the strangest mental and physical conditions. There is a degree of fatigue wherein all sense of weariness and effort is enexplicablely lifted up; wherein a feeling persists that one's endurance is boundless, and the brain seems to function with an alert, lightning-like vividness unknown to it in normal times. It is akin to the morbid mental state said to be induced by certain drugs. Yet the borderland between this acute state and fathomless sleep is defined by a hair's breath. At the very moment of supreme effort, when one seemingly is never so wide awake and capable, drowsiness may subconsciously descend with incredible swiftness to cloud the faculties, and a strong effort of will may be necessary to fight off lethargy. It is a condition familiar to trainmen who have been obliged to labor until, almost literally, they have dropped in their tracks. And they have a name for it. They call it 'white eye'".

Dennis Hogan of Dallas writes: "A few years ago I ran into a lady at a flea market selling original pages from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram dating back to the turn of the century. Many of the pages had interesting ads and news, including railroad news. One page was a full-page article on "psychic epilepsy", headlined "WHY ENGINEERS RUN PAST DANGER SIGNALS." The article recounted a few incidents and then offered opinions about this malady by doctors and psychologists. It seems "psychic epilepsy" was really their term for fatigue, stress, and the railroad equivalent of highway hypnosis.

The recommended cure: two days of rest each week...."

No one in government or the industry wants to seriously address the rest problem, but the employees are not altogether blameless here, either. There are many of us who would work ourselves into the ground for another few dollars each trip.