(The following story by John D. Boyd appeared on the The Journal of Commerce website on June 2, 2009.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. If there is good news for rail labor in the latest report on job cuts, its that the decline of freight railroad employment slowed from mid-March to mid-April.
The seven Class I railroads said their U.S. operations employed 154,263 workers at the middle of April, down from 154,960 a month earlier and 156,997 at mid-February.
In a report to the Surface Transportation Board, the carriers listed their overall totals down 6.27 percent from mid-April 2008. But the cuts hit hardest at the train crews that make up the single largest employment group; engineer and conductor jobs were down 14.22 percent from a year earlier to 58,806.
The STB collects and reports the figures but does not verify them. The agency has not responded to Journal of Commerce requests for explanation of why it tracks employment at mid-month instead of reporting full-month job changes, or why it releases the data only about six weeks after the time covered by the reports.
The STB also compares the job totals on an index built around 1967 industry experience, a time when there were far more Class I railroads employing many more workers, and well before deregulation in the 1980s.
Under that index, the mid-April report shows railroads employing 25.3 percent of the 1967 average. That is the lowest since March 2004, when the Class Is reported 154,043 active workers but were already increasing employment as they came out of a slow-growth phase. This year, all indications are that the job cuts have not ended.
Railroad executives say many of the workers are furloughed under terms that either keep them drawing some benefits or at least preserve their union seniority for when they can be called back once business picks up again. However, in most cases the layoffs are unpaid and for indefinite periods, and some workers may reach an outright termination point so that they would have to reapply as new workers to get jobs on the railroad.
In the mid-April report, railroads said they boosted track and structural maintenance staff both from March and from the same 2008 month, to 35,377 workers. Transportation jobs other than train crews, including rail yard operators, shrank 1.6 percent from March but were still up 5.57 percent from a year earlier at 6,992.
The only other job category to increase from the previous month was executives and their assistants, which edged up 0.28 percent from mid-March to 10,041 though it fell about the same amount from a year earlier. Broader professional and administrative staff shrank nearly 2 percent in the past year to 13,432.
But with carriers laying up hundreds of thousands of their unneeded railcars in a severe traffic slump, and storing thousands of locomotives, they have shed 2.43 percent of their equipment maintenance workers since mid-April 2008 to 29,615.
