WINTER 2025
ISSUE 1
I Sleep and Breathe on That Train: Stories from Canadian Railroaders
JANE KOMORI
1 See “Member Update— Lockout/Strike Position,” Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, August 23, 2024, https://www.teamstersrail.ca/news-details/news/latest-news-updates/24083/92863.
2 Joe Burns, “The Right to Strike Is at Stake on the Railroads,” Labor Notes, September 14, 2022, https://www.labornotes.org/2022/09/right-strike-stake-railroads.
3 See, for just one example, Jonathan Mignault, “From small lodges to major ports, the railway labour dispute is affecting northern Ontario,” CBC News, August 22, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/rail-stoppage-northern-ontario-1.7301951.
4 For one example of this kind of coverage of the ILA strike, see Doyinsola Oladipo and David Shepardson, “US dockworkers strike, halting half the nation’s ocean shipping,” Reuters, October 1, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-east-coast-dockworkers-head-toward-strike-after-deal-deadline-passes-2024-10-01.
5 “CIRB Decision,” Teamsters Canada Rail Conference “Latest News and Updates,” August 9, 2024, https://teamstersrail.ca/news-details/news/latest-news-updates/24083/92054.
6 One such inflammatory article is from The Canadian Press, titled “Rail shutdown would be ‘devastating’ for small businesses: CFIB” and published by CBC News on August 19, 2024.
7 For descriptions of key issues for TCRC members by a TCRC leader, see the recording of Executive Board Member Laura Soutar-Hasulo’s speech at the Windsor District Labour Council’s Labour Day rally, posted to the TCRC Instagram account on September 3, 2024: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_d35rUMr_4.
8 “The Railroad Trilogy,” recorded 1966, side 2, track 5, The Way I Feel, Columbia Studio A, 1967.
9 A recent article by The Canadian Press, “Indigenous advisory council for CN resigns, says railway won’t accept responsibility,” reviews some of the history of CN and CP’s relationship to colonization, as narrated by members of CN’s Indigenous advisory board who resigned in protest of CN policies and lack of accountability (CBC News, December 11, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/cn-rail-indigenous-advisory-council-resigns-1.7055553). See also Gord Hill’s The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010), where he calls the trains “engines of colonization.” For a brief review of Chinese labor in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, see Leah Siegel, “Chinese Railway Workers,” Knowledge Network: BC’s Untold History, https://bcanuntoldhistory.knowledge.ca/1880/chinese-railway-workers.
10 On the Lac-Mégantic disaster, see Benoit Aquin, “Runaway Train,” The Walrus, July 1, 2014, https://thewalrus.ca/runaway-train/. On the Lytton fires, see Amanada Follett Hosgood, “Did a Train Start the Lytton Fire?” The Tyee, July 14, 2021, https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/07/14/Did-Train-Start-Lytton-Fire.
11 “Human error blamed in Prince George CN crash,” CBC News, August 7, 2007, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/human-error-blamed-in-prince-george-cn-crash-1.687145. For more railroaders’ commentary on the event, see snorting_gummybears, “Boychuk sucks. Look up Boychuk’s BBQ for more,” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/railroading/comments/z4phdr/boychuk_sucks_look_up_boychuks_bbq_for_more.
12 E. Hunter Harrison introduced precision scheduled railroading (PSR) to North American freight railroads in the 1990s. He was an executive of CN from 1998 to 2009. From 2012 to 2017, he was president and CEO of CP, before moving to CSX and dying shortly thereafter. CN was one of the first companies at which Harrison’s PSR – now widely employed across North American Class I railroads – was introduced. While PSR increased the speed and operating hours of CN, and later CP and other railways, it also increased the rates of lethal accidents, many with serious environmental impacts, and resulted in massive layoffs and seriously degraded working conditions. Ignore the blustering title and read Mitchell Thompson’s helpful review of Harrison’s interventions in Canadian and American rail in, “Blame Canada for US Rail Bosses’ Incredibly Dangerous Railroad Management,” Jacobin, December 12, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/12/rail-bosses-canada-dangerous-management-precision-scheduled-railroading-hunter-harrison.
And the driver’s whistling loud and long,
Our drag is still, still on time
Our drag is still on time
—Willie Dunn, “Rattling Along the Freight Train (To the Spirit Land)”
This summer, the Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) brought a strike of running trades workers at Canadian National Railway (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Limited (CPKC, or just “CP”) to an abrupt conclusion. In a moment of rare opportunity, Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (TCRC) contracts covering nearly 10,000 locomotive engineers, conductors, crew dispatchers, and rail traffic controllers at both companies had expired at the same time, in the fall of 2023. Throughout the months of negotiations that followed, CN and CP tried to chip away at the sections of the contract that govern scheduling and rest between shifts in a manner that workers, union leaders, and observers have suggested was coordinated. By Thursday, August 22, negotiations had broken down, with CN workers serving strike notice and both CN and CP announcing lock-outs. Within hours of the companies bolting their doors and workers putting up their picket lines, Canada’s Labour Minister, Steve MacKinnon, requested that the CIRB order the strikers back to work, impose binding arbitration, and extend existing collective agreements until the conclusion of arbitration.1 This move, reminiscent of the quashing of a potential US rail workers’ strike in 2022 through the invocation of the Railway Labor Act, put workers back on the job the very next day at CN, and the following week at CP.2
The stories collected here were shared by current and former engineers and conductors, as well as workers in other trades and unions at both CN and CP. They describe in detail the day-to-day work of a railway employee, and they reflect on the conditions on the job, within the TCRC, and with management and the federal government – the conditions that brought the heady few days in August, when it looked as though a historic strike was set to shut down the railways, to devastating effect.
The operation of CN and CP is crucial to Canada’s economy. Hysterics about the possibility of the labor dispute shuttering ports, leaving grain to rot in silos, and stranding remote communities and Indigenous reserves made for splashy national headlines.3 Like with labor actions in other logistics industries, such as the International Longshoremen’s Association’s brief strike of east coast ports this fall, sensationalist news stories rely on a commonsense narrative: that the railways and ports cannot stop, at any cost. That if they do, everything from factories to automobiles to grocery stores will stop running, too, and that this is a burden too great to ask any Canadian or American to bear.4
The truism is a double-edged sword for railroaders. This summer, the TCRC strike would have shut down much of the country’s freight traffic – a position of extraordinary leverage for workers. Yet, the importance of the railroads gives companies special recourse to government intervention, with the backing of bosses across industries who depend on rail for their own operations. And so, the railroader is widely understood as essential, even as the CIRB gave the green light for a running trades strike when it determined in early August that a labor stoppage would not cause “immediate and serious danger to the safety or health of the public,” per Section 87.4(1) of Canada’s Labour Code.5 This, of course, before executives at CN and CP hit the “government button,” to quote a former CN conductor, with the CIRB summarily ordering strikers back to work as soon as their picket lines went up.
What goes unreported in inflammatory articles about the coming of an economic apocalypse are the extraordinary conditions that pushed rank-and-file workers to strike – countless hours without sleep, seemingly interminable days away from home, constant violations of contracts and years of grievance backlogs.6 Even the TCRC’s official line about “grueling on-call schedules” and “fatigue-related accidents” fails to fully capture what it means to work for the railroad; that the nature of the essential work that the railroader performs dramatically reconstitutes their lives, families, and politics.7
These stories also challenge the symbolic meaning of the railroads. Canadians are taught that the establishment of the transcontinental railroad was the linchpin of confederation, and that the railway is, in some sense, a tie that continues to bind us all together. Iconized in special recordings by the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, who celebrated the railroad’s establishment for letting the country’s “lifeblood flow,” as well as in countless rail museums, conventions, and collectors’ items, the railroad seems as crucial to Canada’s national identity as our most painfully clichéd emblems.8 And while the railroad’s history has come under increasingly critical scrutiny – as an engine of Indigenous dispossession built by countless abused Chinese workers, among other outrages – links are rarely drawn between the brutal operations by which the railroad was built, and those by which it still runs today.9
As one CP engineer puts it, “the company has had 140 years of fighting these fights” against workers, yet the struggles of railroaders rarely figure in our understanding of the history or present of the railways and their role in the economy. Pulling us down from an idealized, distant view of the railroad as an autonomous infrastructure that holds together a broad geography, these stories are told from the cab of the locomotive, the bunk house, and the erratic hours snatched between shifts. They describe the contest between workers and train masters over how the railroads are run – an ongoing struggle as old as the lionized “last spike” driven at the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. As these stories highlight, the struggle is most explosive where management seeks to reduce workers’ control over their time, both on and off the job. This is evident in the proposed clawbacks of workers’ rights around scheduling and rest that CN and CP put forward in recent negotiations. But it is also evident in increased surveillance of workers on the job, and manipulations of the Transport Safety Board of Canada’s duty and rest period regulations. For workers, the stake in these struggles is the possibility of a dignified life in the face of a company that, to quote the same engineer, “can never be satisfied.”
These rank-and-file workers understand the TCRC as an important but beleaguered institution. The stories shared here emphasize the union’s crucial role as a kind of backstop – that without it, to quote a former CN conductor, the companies “would be fucking everyone left, right and center, worse than they already do.” But those I talked to did not withhold critical opinions of the union, especially as they face down the outcomes of the government’s binding arbitration – where it’s unlikely that anything significant will be gained, but much could be lost. Few union reform efforts seem to exist at CN or CP. However, the workers I talked to either participated in, or were aware of, informal networks and associations of workers, like text message threads, Facebook groups, and subreddits. These are spaces that parallel the workplace and the picket line, where workers can share frustrations and ideas, even casually calling for wildcat action in the wake of the government’s back-to-work order – a call that, unsupported by deeper levels of organization, didn’t catch on.
Some who I spoke to expressed optimism about rail as a greener mode of transportation, even while speaking with anger about the companies’ conspicuous lack of concern for the environment. Besides the stories below, they referenced episodes like the runaway train loaded with oil tank cars that derailed in the Québec city of Lac-Mégantic in 2013, causing a massive spill and an explosion that killed 46 people; the pollution of lakes, rivers, and other waterways through neglect and mismanagement; and even allegations that the railways caused the 2021 wildfires that destroyed the town of Lytton, British Columbia.10 Here, the concerns of workers – ordered to do dangerous work in violation of their contracts, or pushed towards accidents by the demands of their schedule – converge with the concerns of both environmentalist groups and the Indigenous and rural communities most at risk when things go wrong on the railway.
In spite of all this, as I spoke to railroaders about their work, they emphasized their love for it. Love for running the trains, the community of railroaders, and even sometimes for the history, aesthetics, and iconography of North America’s railways, with the various counter-cultures that have constellated around them over the last 100 years. Some were the third generation of their family to work on the railroad, or one among a set of siblings working for the same company. It’s a crucial part of their identity, their family, and their community. Those who quit, like the former CN conductor quoted above, who contributed the photographs that accompany this article, maintain an attachment – evident in the images – to the trains and the culture that surrounds them. Those who stayed emphasized the “fight” ahead, and hopefulness about the possibility that this, a good job, could be protected by worker initiative and struggle.
THE RULE BOOK
When you get hired, you go to the CN training school in Winnipeg and you get a rule book. Basically, it’s this huge booklet. The whole thing is just fucking rules. Rule this, rule that.
Like, don’t be on your phone. If you go on your phone and they catch you on your phone you’re fired. Which I kind of understand, even though it’s fucked up. You can’t be walking around on your phone in the rail yard. You get ran over. That’s why they say the rule book is written in blood.
Because every rule in that book… there’s so many stupid fucking rules in it. Don’t walk backwards. Don’t walk with your hand in your pocket. I’m serious. And then you’re like, “Why wouldn’t you be able to walk with your hand in your pocket? Oh, it’s because some guy tripped on something and hit his face on the ground with his hand in his pocket.” So they had to make a rule out of it. It’s like a smart way of them washing their hands of anything you do wrong.
“Oh, why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. Because I’m a human being.”
“Well, the rule book said you can’t do that. So why did you do it? We’re not responsible for that anymore.” So, that’s why the rule book is so fucking thick.
TYING UP YOUR TICKET
When you go to work, you get called. It’s a computer that calls you. And you’re actually referred to by a number. And you have two hours, or really an hour and 45 minutes or even an hour and 30, because you got to be there early to go on the computer. You pretty much log in on this old ass computer in this computer room that has DOS. You know DOS? Like literally the black screen with the green cursor. You know, I’m saying, like from fucking 1920.
And then you find out what your train is. There’s this huge database of everything about where the trains are, where they’re coming from, when they’re going to be there, roughly anyways. You download and print all of your paperwork. There’s tons of paperwork. You’re in the office for like, 30 minutes. Just doing logistics, getting ready for your trip.
Once it’s time to go, you get on and you call the rail traffic people and you get instructions to leave on the main line, and then you’re out on your trip and you essentially just follow the signals. That’s like your new boss, you could say. You don’t really need to talk to anyone. I mean, obviously things happen and they’ll call you and be like, “Oh, you’re going to sit here for an hour while these three trains go in the other direction.” Anyways, you just go eventually make your way from point A to point B.
And then you go back on the computer, you tie up your ticket. You get paid depending on what you’re doing for different things. I mean it all transfers to money at the end of the day, but you can get paid in time, miles, or just straight money. You put in all your info about what you did. If you had to do anything weird you get paid extra, but if you don’t put it in the system, they won’t pay you for it. So when you’re on the road, you have a notebook and you’re constantly writing down shit that you’re doing with exact times. “At 12:06 I had to get out of the train and fucking pull this car off the train and put it in the siding.”
And it’s really difficult, they don’t make it easy. It’s really difficult when you’re new because the claims have…. It’s like fucking lawyer shit. It’s so technical. A lot of times the engineer would have to help me tie up my ticket or else I’d get fucked out of like 150 bucks. Obviously, once you’ve been there for a few years, it gets easier, but all the claims have weird little names like RX, DX. But all the older dudes, they knew exactly what they all meant, and how much you get paid for it. Some of them are like whizzes about it. They’re able to find every little thing that they could get an extra 10 bucks out of. I think they can like, maybe not manipulate it, but maybe there was sometimes some gray area that they could take advantage of.
WORKING HOURS
Let’s say you wake up at 8:00 in the morning. You look at the board. You’re on call because your rest time is over. And you’re like, “OK, there’s five people ahead of me, so I’m gonna get called sixth.” I know there were older dudes that tried to create these algorithms to find out how to do it best, to accurately find out when you’re going to be at work.
Anyways, you look for like 10 minutes and try and decipher when you might get called and think, “I think I’ll get called mid-afternoon today.” So then you think, “Maybe I should go back to sleep for a little bit. Assuming I’m going to get called at 3:00pm, then I’m going to be awake for another 10 or 12 hours.” Whatever it might be. But then you get called 20 minutes later or you get called 12 hours later. It’s super unreliable.
So maybe you’re waiting to get called because you think it’s gonna be within an hour. So you’re waiting, waiting, waiting. Next thing you know, it’s 8:00pm and you’ve been awake all day. You still haven’t been called. But you’re running out of waking hours and then you get called at 9:00pm. So, you’ve been up for 13 hours, you’ve got to go to work in two hours. And then you’re going to be awake on shift anywhere from five to 12 hours. It’s pretty fucked up. I think that is the main thing that people really don’t like.
I remember one time I got called. We left the terminal, and we moved the train maybe eight miles. And it was such a mess out on the track. Tons of congestion and things were going wrong. We stopped the train, and we’re looking at the tail end of another train in front of us just sitting there too. And then we sat there for seven hours. Overnight, trying to stay awake, but I mean, I was kind of just sleeping.
And then after like seven hours, rail traffic called us and they’re like, “Uh, just tie your train down, put the brakes on it. We’re going to get you a taxi to Edson.” So sometimes you just sit there and then you get paid for the taxi. And then you would be like, “This is so fucking stupid. I’m like a 20 minute drive from my house. I just sat here for seven hours. But now you’re going to ship me to Edson.”
And that was difficult. Because you go to Edson and you make an educated guess on when you think you’re going to go back. It might be four hours, it might be eight hours, it might be two hours. You need to go get some food and then you go to this shitty hotel with this shitty bed.
And you’re like, “OK, I’m going to get called back in.” You looked at the board, probably you’re gonna be called in four hours. So you try and get four hours of sleep if you can. It might be 3:00pm. Maybe 3:00am. It could be fucking anything.
I think that’s really the big issue for the employees in the running trades. Sleep management is next to impossible. Like literally, it’s fucking impossible. I don’t think I ever had a job where I was as tired sometimes as that job.
“OH YEAH, I WANNA BE A CONDUCTOR”
Everybody’s like, “Oh yeah, I wanna be a conductor,” and I’m like, “Oh shit, no man, no way.” I would never want to be a conductor or engineer. No way. Yeah, they get paid a lot more, but, you know what? My life is worth more than that.
In other departments, you know your shift. Whereas the train crew, it’s like, oh, I’m getting called at 3:00pm. No, wait, it’s now 2:00am. No, wait, now it’s 9:00am. No, wait, it’s 9:00am. No, wait… It’s terrible.
The ongoing, truthful joke is, you know, a guy’s going through divorce, and he says, “Oh, yeah. Oh, it’s terrible. Yeah.”
And the other guy says, “Well, how many divorces you had?”
And the first guy says, “Oh, just the one.”
And the other guy starts laughing. He goes, “OK, come talk to me when you’ve been through three.”
ONE MAN CREWS
Maybe like 30 years ago they used to have a brakeman on the tail end, at the caboose. The caboose housed a bunch of gauges that the brakeman would look at to make sure that the brake pressure would be adequate throughout the whole length of the train. But they figured out some little device that you just hook on to the tail end of the last car. I think that was a huge deal back then, because it took away a third of the running trades jobs. Because every train had the engineer and the conductor in the front and then the brakeman in the back. But then they just replaced it with a computer, essentially.
Now the company wants to have one-man crews to save money, obviously. And in theory, anything that the conductor does, the engineer already knows how to do and has way more experience doing it, because they started as a conductor. Pretty much anything that you do, they can do better. But I think it’s a government regulation to have two people, which definitely makes sense in case the engineer has a fucking heart attack or something. You have to hit the emergency brake or some shit, right?
CHEWING THROUGH PEOPLE
Basically what CP offered us in this last contract is, they want to strip everything down to exactly what they have in the States, which is just that bare minimum of downtime. It’s like eight hours at the away-from-home terminal with a two hour call for 10 hours, and 10 hours with a two hour call for 12 hours at the home terminal. That’s it. As it stands now, when I come in from a trip, I can book up to 24 hours off, where they can’t call me during that time.
So this last contract had a lot to do with the new Transport Canada rest rules coming in, and the company wanting to strip everything else away, to only rely on those government rest rules. Which would be really life changing for us. It’s tough enough as it is, but strip away all that time with our families… For a lot of people that might be the breaking point where they go, “Well, I’m not doing this job anymore.”
If you give me less personal rest, then I’m going to be coming and going a lot quicker, therefore you need less bodies to run the railroad, therefore you can do it cheaper. That’s really the most simplistic way to look at it, is that if you give all of us 24 and even 48 hours of potential rest, not only does it create a lot of unpredictability for the company, where they don’t know when I’m gonna be available, but it just means more bodies. And not only are they having a hard time hiring right now, but they’re having a hard time with people wanting to work like this. Like we are chewing, just chewing through people that come in here. And they’re good, smart, safe people that I would be fine working with. And they get a taste of the place and they’re like, “Man, fuck this. I’m not fucking working like that. It’s crazy.” You know, on top of the inward-facing cameras and the microphones throughout the motors now, and just the company scrutiny with the management, the proficiency tests… This is a tough place to work and if you are not… I don’t know.
LUNCHABLES
Recently, I’m talking to a buddy that works at CP. He tells me, “They’re resetting guys at the away-from-home terminal now. Two day reset.”
And I said, “What do you mean?”
He says, “Reset due to the rest rules from Transport Canada.”
So, Transport Canada implemented new rest rules somewhere in the spring. Transport Canada is a separate entity from the union and the company, a regulatory thing.
This guy says, “Every week we’re required to have two days off and it’s supposed to be at home. But CP is being cunts and resetting us at the away-from-home terminal.”
Two days away from home. That’s actually bullshit. They’re supposed to give you your two days off, but they’re not. They’re fucking with the labor. They’re resetting them at their away-from-home terminal. Some people’s away-from-home terminal is Field. Have you ever been to Field? I mean, it’s beautiful or whatever, but there’s one fucking store there. What are you going to do for 48 hours in Field?
The guy says, “People are freaking out saying they have no food, so the train masters” – that’s the managers – “are sending Lunchables on trains up to Field for these guys.”
So the company is a bunch of assholes for sure. That’s really rude. You get your weekend off, but you’re at a work setting, away from home. You’re in Field eating Lunchables. With no bar or whatever you might want to do. You don’t have anything with you and you’re staying in a fucking bunkhouse.
THE BARBECUE
I was told by a guy years ago, back in 2007 or so, that there was a transportation supervisor in BC that figured he knew everything. Ignorant and arrogant. And then something happened that is commonly referred to as “the barbecue.”11
There’s lots of yards in Prince George, and there’s some big hills. So, this supervisor told his train crew to bring this train down the hill into the other yard.
And they said, “No, there’s a standing order that says 50 cars only.” And this train was 80 cars or something.
But he says, “No, no bring it down.”
The crew said, “No, we’re not going to. We’ll split it in half and bring it down.”
And he said, “Absolutely not, bring the whole train down, or you’re fired.
And they’re like, “Well, I guess we’re fired. See you later.”
So he fired them. And then he got another crew. And they were told to bring the train down and they said, “No, we are not. There’s a reason why we are not.”
So he fired them too. And then he says, “Fuck you, we’re going to bring it down ourselves.”
So he jumped on the train with another supervisor. They brought it down the hill, derailed it and dumped cars in the river with a big huge flame and smoke and everything. And they had to bring in water bombers to knock the flames down.
I’m not even joking. I’m not even exaggerating. And they wonder why CN has a bad image. Like there’s suddenly all these tank cars of gasoline that were on the train that burned up and got dumped in the river. But oh no, in the final report, it didn’t happen. “Ohh, there’s just a couple of lumber cars.” No, it’s tank cars.
WORKING EXTRA TIME
I remember I worked with an engineer that ran the union division or would organize the meetings or something. I don’t remember what happened, but I was so fucking over the union in this one moment. Basically we could have made an extra couple hundred bucks this one day. But I was with the big head union guy. The company was asking us to do something that wasn’t our job. And he defied them.
He’s like, “No, we’re not doing that.”
And the only thing I remember thinking was, “This guy’s been working here for 30 years and he probably has fucking all these savings and this and that and blah blah blah, and I’m poor and I want that 200 dollars.” But he defied it. And the company didn’t get what they wanted. I think it was something to do with working extra time.
He was like, “No, I don’t work extra time. I’ve been here forever. I don’t like it. I’m not doing that.”
And all I could think was like, “Bro. 200 bucks. Just fucking suck the dick, buddy.”
For me the union was… I mean, I’m not saying I’m different now, I guess, but I probably have more principles now than I did then. I wasn’t super interested and I didn’t care back then, but nowadays I totally understand the importance of it. Obviously it’s good there’s a union or else they would be fucking everyone left, right and center, worse than they already do. The company, that is.
Views from trains across North America,
taken by a former CN conductor.
TIGHTEN THE SCREWS
When all you want is more, you can never be satisfied. And that’s the thing with the railroad. It’s never enough. They will never get that balancing operating ratio, cost balance, whatever you want to call it. They’ll never get that to a satisfying point. There will always be room for more.
So it’s just like, “Tighten the screws, tighten the screws, more with less, max the train out, don’t fix the track, don’t fix the engines. Why is that guy booking so much rest? Get him back out here. Work, work, work.”
Like you know, sometimes people say to me, “Oh, overtime,” and stuff. Fuck that. First off, we’re not paid by the hour, a lot of the time. So, you know in terms of the amount of service… The big thing with this contract and this lockout is that they want to bust up a lot of the language.
Views from trains across North America, taken by a former CN conductor.
For example, I work as a road service employee. So I get called, I get assigned to a train, I get on that train, and I take it to the away-from-home terminal. When I get in, I’m done. That’s it. Like the train arrives, my shift is over. So, if that sometimes takes 12 hours, if that sometimes takes six hours or five hours, that’s it for me.
Now what they want to do is disrupt that language and put it to an hourly rate, which means that even if I get home in five hours, I’m not done. I’ve got seven hours left on that clock, which means I get off that train I just brought in, I go get on a set of yard engines and I switch and pull customers and I burn up to my 12 hour clock.
I don’t want to have anything to do with any of that, and I don’t care what you offer me for an hourly wage. You can offer me 200 dollars an hour for the last two hours of overtime. I don’t want it. I wanna go home. I’m done. Like I’ve been away from my family for 24 to 30 hours. I don’t want 200 more dollars to switch cars. I want to go home.
That was a really big part of this contract. By busting all that language up and switching it to an hourly rate, then it doesn’t really matter what I do during those 12 hours. I’m just on duty and they can do whatever they want with me. Send me here, turn me there, “Get on this train, go do that.” Right now it’s all bookmarked and kind of categorized as to what I can and cannot do. And they hate that.
This contract and this lockout, it’s really all about changing the entire language of the collective agreement and the shape of the job. And the flag that the company flies is like, “Well, we’re offering you guys this many hours.” Yeah, but I don’t want that. First off, I don’t even know if it’s going to be as much money as I make if you switch it to hourly. The conditions of the job is really where it’s gonna hurt more. It’s less to do with the money and more to do with the quality of the job and the hours away from home and all of that.
EIGHTY YEARS OF AGREEMENTS
So, what’s been happening is, for years the conductors and engineers have been talking about scheduling, complaining about it. Which is completely understandable. And some years ago, Hunter Harrison, an American, was up here.12 He made a whole bunch of money because he was able to make cuts – not that he built the business, but that he was able to cut. Anybody can sell off stuff and make money.
So, he butchered CN. Completely butchered it. And what he did with the train crew is he said, “Okay, this old agreement that you guys have is terrible and we want to pay you by the hour.” He basically wanted to rip up their old agreement and just go by the hour.
Now, the old agreement is still the one in effect now. You know, obviously it changes a little, but the agreement is basically from back when they had steam engines. Back then they had a fireman classification – you know, the guy who had to look after the boiler. And then you got a conductor, you got a brakeman, and you got an engineer all on board. So back then, the pay and regulations were all based on horsepower, it was based on the class of train, it was based on how many cars, it was based on the weight, it was based on dangerous goods, the whole thing. So that’s still kind of the way it is now. And if you stop on line somewhere, because you gotta switch your cars, or offload some gear, or if you start halfway on the subdivision, or if you get deadheading – which is when you hop in a taxi and get driven out there – that’s all in the agreement. So it’s just an incredibly convoluted disaster of an agreement that’s been building for 80 years.
You know, the idea of it is wonderful. But I think the main thing is, when Harrison was up here, the workers said, “Okay, So what happens when we’re three hours into a 12 hour shift and we come into the yard? Do we get to go home and we’re done?”
And the company said, “No, no, you have to work the next nine hours.”
Views from trains across North America, taken by a former CN conductor.
“Well, what are we gonna do for nine hours? Sit there? Why don’t I just go home?” That way I’m on the schedule. I know my schedule and it’s a done deal.
And Harrison said, “No, no, no.”
And then I guess it came to a head and the workers said, “No, we’re not doing it.”
And that’s it. Harrison walked. They dropped it.
But now it’s coming up again. And I think what they’ve managed to do is, they’ve kept that from the Harrison years and CN wants to reintroduce it, even though they’ve not really said anything about it up until now. And the union has been really complaining about the fatigue and the hours of work and whatever, which is completely understandable.
So, this is speculation on my part, but I think CN went to the government and said, “Well, yeah, we’re concerned about fatigue.” And so they got the government to put in new fatigue rest rules.
Well, then that allows for CN to go, “Ohh well, to do this we have to do a new agreement,” and, “Oh, look, let’s just pay you by the hour,” so it’s kind of a back door route. Of course, that’s complete speculation, but they do stuff like that. And then now, because the fatigue rest rules came in, but they’re still operating on the old agreement, they don’t match at all, so there’s huge amounts of penalty payments because CN is trying to stick with these fatigue rules, but yet at the same time they have to stick to the union agreement.
And so they’re trying to get things sorted out. But I think in the end, CN is going to win and they’re going to get the hourly rate. That’s what I think, and I think they just did it this way, instead of right up front in negotiations. I think they used the government to put in fatigue rest rules because then they can say, “We’re just doing this for the good of the employees.”
THIS CONTRACT
I’ve been there for 15 years. I’ve been there for five contracts. Each contract has basically gone the exact way that this last one did.
The railroad knew exactly how that was going to go, and they banked on that big time. This last one was kind of different from the previous ones because during the actual lockout, they didn’t even try and run any trains at CP, which was kind of surprising because for previous contracts, they’re always banging this big drum, like, “Ohh our managers are railroaders, we can pull all this off and run the railroad just fine without you guys.” And it’s, you know, it’s never that smooth. But this time they didn’t run anything to make it worse, so that it would end quicker.
I mean, if you think about how the flow of how that went this year, it’s like we were without a contract January 1st, we went all through the spring, we got into the summer. And then people like the Canadian Propane Association are complaining, so the government takes it upon itself to do something. The CIRB, that’s the Canadian Industrial Relations Board, gives themselves two months to do an inquest into whether or not this is essential work, you know, for the railroads. And after those two months they go, “Nope. You guys are not essential and you’re okay to strike.” We go on strike, we’re not even out for 18 hours, and the same government forced us back.
So what the fuck was the two months for? Like, you didn’t even let us go a full day. So clearly on the one hand the work is actually essential, but they don’t wanna deem us an essential service, and the company knows that full well and they just lean into that. So they’re never going to get into negotiation with us. They do make offers, but the offers are so outrageous, especially this last one. It’s insane what they’re offering.
IT’S ALWAYS A BIG FIGHT
It’s always a big fight. With this last one, weeks leading up to it, CN was leaning on the new regulations and policies hard, going, “Oh, well, you know what? We’re not going to accept any more dangerous goods from any of our customers until this labor situation is figured out because we don’t want to have anything in our yards that might be dangerous.” Like, come on. But they say, “Oh, no, no, no. We’re just following the policy.” That way they’re putting massive pressure on the union because the customers are like, “No, I need my shit dealt with and delivered.” But the company’s already saying no, even though there’s been no interruption. It’s two weeks before the conductors and engineers even think about walking out. There’s been no strike notice. But they say, “Oh well, we’re just going to stop right now.” So they kept scaling everything back prior to, to put more pressure on the union, and for the customers to lean on the union, and the government to come in and finally say, “No, no, just keep working.”
THAT’S IT
We got completely steamrolled. I mean I was on the picket line when the news came out. I mean, it was a fucking bummer. It was like, “What the fuck?”
“Great.” You know, we didn’t even get a weekend. You know, nothing. Like some guys, literally, under these new regulatory rests from the government – which is good, I’m not complaining – but it’s like sometimes you come in from these two consecutive nights that you have to have in bed now. Some guys didn’t even have that time elapse before we were back at work. Like some guys didn’t even miss a trip. That’s how short the strike was. That’s crazy.
We have a very junior workforce because we’ve been having such trouble hiring, so for a lot of younger people this was their very first strike. This was their very first time experiencing this. And for a lot of them, they were like, “Wow, that’s it?” And you’re like, “Yeah man, that’s it.”
DON’T ROCK THE BOAT
Basically what’s happening is that an arbitrator’s been appointed to the case. They’re usually a railroad-specific arbitrator. There’s only about eight or 10 of them. They get selected, they look over both sides’ cases, and it’s binding arbitration, so whatever they decide is it. And unfortunately the arbitrators don’t really do anything very aggressive, right? They’re kind of stuffy, right? They’ll give us a couple of weak raises. They might give us a little bit more on dental, but there’s not gonna be any radical change from them in terms of making my quality of life or working conditions any better. I mean, there’s small advances here and there. But generally speaking, any real substantial change is gonna have to come from Transport Canada, and they’re pretty limp as it is, you know. Like, Transport Canada, let’s be honest, that’s a good gig. It’s a government gig. They don’t want to rock the boat. I don’t want to really infer too much about who is really in bed with who. But I mean everybody’s kind of on board with the same plan, right? They don’t really wanna rock the boat too much. So it’s kind of sad, you know.
WILDCATS
Wildcats have happened in the past. In Revelstoke there was a wildcat at CP some years ago, and they brought massive fines against the union. There was even a threat of jail time. But, you know, society’s changed. It’s a different time. You’re gonna tell me in this day and age, the police are gonna come to my door for not returning to work? I fucking kind of doubt that. But that’s kind of the big boogeyman in the closet, right? It’s like, “Oh, look what happened 30 or 40 years ago. We don’t want that.” You know? So it’s like no one’s willing to rock the boat. I mean, there was a lot of people talking about, “Fuck that let’s all just book sick,” or, “Fuck that, let’s all just not go back.” But in this day and age, you got people living paycheck to paycheck, even with a good job like this. There are people who are worried about even being on strike for a week and losing that pay. We don’t have any strike pay at the railroad, that was given up a long time ago. So you’re sitting out on that picket line with no pay. You know, you’re leveraged to the tits. You got a fucking mortgage, you got a family you’re supposed to feed, some guys got a lot of ex-wives and kids on child support. They can’t afford to be out.
EIGHTEEN HOURS
If you ask 10 of us about the union, you’ll get 10 different answers. So I’ll give you my take on it. The union is a very necessary part of the job. We do need them, but they are from a different time. And the amount of power that they have is kind of neutered to some degree. When I started here I was like, “Ohh, Teamsters.” I thought, “Oh, this means something.” That doesn’t really mean shit. They’re powerless. But it’s just like, they’re from a different time. The company has had 140 years of fighting these fights. They know exactly how it’s going to go. They’re not dumb, they have a lot of big lawyers in their back pocket. They know exactly how to attack it. They know exactly what to do and exactly what they can get away with. They get away with a lot. You know, like really any effective change is gonna come from us, or it’s gonna come from Transport Canada. It’s not gonna come from the company. The company is never gonna make things any better for us, that is just not gonna happen. And the union doesn’t have any power to exact any change from them either, like, what are they really going to do? Tell us to walk off? That’s not gonna happen. Look at that, we were cued up for one of the strongest strikes you could ever have. It didn’t even go 18 hours.
DO THE JOB NOW, AND GRIEVE IT LATER
This is what I was specifically told when I was in management. If we had employees that didn’t agree with something – like, “Oh, no, we can’t do that,” or, “First this needs doing, or this job can’t be done” – we were told specifically to just tell them to do the job now, and grieve it later. We were told that.
Because it’s far, far cheaper to just pay the penalty. “Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. Whatever. We’ll just pay the penalty.” That’s far cheaper than it is to say, “OK, well, no, you’re right. We can’t do this job right now. We’re going to wait two weeks to get this and that done.” Instead they say, “Well, no, we’re getting it done right now and I don’t care. And we’ll pay for it later.” Or, “Oh, you don’t want to do it? Fine. We’ll get a contractor to do it.” Then the union will complain and say, “Well, wait a second. That was our work, and they gave it to a contractor.” The company just turns around and goes, “OK, well, here’s some money,” and pushes it away, and it’s done.
UNION DUES
I think it’s like 18 to 20 percent of my monthly dues go to the local to cover their time to book off to cover all the step one and step two grievances and things like that. But a lot of that money goes to the national. And I mean they’re flying around doing fucking conferences and shit, all this bullshit. I mean frankly, the whole thing could do with an overhaul.
If I’ve been here for five contracts, and they’ve all gone to arbitration, what are they really doing up there? Why don’t they just skip the whole process and go right to arbitration? There’s no sense in doing all this posturing bullshit, you know? And sometimes you ask, and they say “Well, we’re lobbying the government.” They’re lobbying the government? People think like, “Oh, Conservative will do this, Liberal do will do that.” Well, it doesn’t matter. The company outlives whatever four year span of government is in power.
I’M ON THERE
They don’t really want someone like me to be able to speak freely about the job, because you’re going to get a very filtered version of it from the union, the companies, the Railroad Association of Canada, Transport Canada. These people aren’t frontline employees. I sleep and breathe on that fucking train. You know what I mean? Like, I’m on there. I see how everything plays out first hand because I’m subject to it.
It’s frustrating because it is a good job, and when it is good it’s great. But the company is just such fucking assholes sometimes, its unbelievable. And they really just don’t care, like you are literally a number there. You get a call. Here’s your train. Follow the rules. And we pay you lots of money, so go.
QUITTING
When I had worked for maybe six or eight months, I qualified as a conductor. When you’re just training they can tack you on wherever they want, but as soon as you get qualified you go on to the spare boards. That’s when the seniority hits. You’re at the bottom of the barrel.
Maybe I had been a qualified conductor for like a month, or maybe a month and a half, finally making the good money. Because you don’t make the good money when you’re a trainee.
And I was on this retention board. And I’m looking at the lineup. I was the first person on the board. So, I was the next person to get called when they needed it.
And then I didn’t get called for a week. But I was first out on this board, so I’m pretty much on high alert.
Imagine trying to manage sleep for a week when you’re expecting a call at any second.
After a week, I was just drinking beers every night. I didn’t even… After like four days I was like “I don’t give a fuck.” I was like, “I’m gonna drink. I’m having some beers.” And then I was just throwing caution to the wind. Essentially I was like, I might get called when I’m six beers deep. And I’ll deal with it if that happens or I’ll just be like, “I’m sick” or whatever.
I remember I was just isolated and over it and just having beers by myself every night. And I was like, “Fuck this, I’m packing my shit up. And if I am not called by morning time, I’m leaving.”
And I woke up in the morning and all my shit was packed and I hadn’t been called. And I was like, “I guess I quit. I’m out of here.”
AN AGENDA
I have always been on a green agenda, for myself personally. Like, we don’t need all this crap. But I kind of look at it like, well, the goods are still going to move. And the railway is the fastest, most efficient method of moving goods.
It’s very efficient. It’s very effective. It’s green. You know you can run massive amounts of tonnage and that’s what keeps our North American economy going. The world economy. One train replaces 400 trucks on the road. And they’re running 24 hours a day. A lot of the scheduled stuff, they beat trucks from Vancouver to Toronto.
So in that sense it’s really good. I look at it like, essentially, without the railway, we don’t have a country. So, yeah. I enjoy my job. I like my job and I see so much benefit to it.
IT’S THE JOB
I like the people I work with. And it’s like half of the time on the trip I’m looking out the window and it’s fucking beautiful, you know. And I’m getting paid good money and I like running the train. I like operating the train, I enjoy doing that.
It’s just that you’ve got three elements in play. You’ve got the people, the machinery, and the company, you know, and unfortunately the company is like the shittiest part of that equation.
I mean, if they would just calm the fuck down and chill out. But they’re not going to. They’re not going to do that, because they’re so obsessed with those stocks and those shares. When it comes to negotiating and asking for stuff, they’re like, “Oh, man, come on, we’re hurting.” And then when they announce their quarterly profits, it’s like, “Ohh, got a record quarter.” They kind of talk out of both sides of their mouth, but that’s all companies nowadays. That’s just the world we live in.
What keeps me going? I’ve got a pension somewhere out on the horizon. I’m about halfway there. You know, I’m going to stick it out. I’ve got a lot of fight left in me. I’m getting better as each year goes by with learning how to conduct myself when the shit flares up, and I want to see it through.
And like I said, I enjoy running the train. I like the people I work with. When the job’s good, it’s kind of hard to beat. But you get some really tough nights out there. Nights where you’re falling asleep and the lineup fucking sucks and then you’re away from home for two days and you’re missing your family and it’s… But it’s the job, and I will balance it out by saying that they do tell you that. And that is kind of what you signed up for. But they have pushed it pretty far.
