In late March, the BLET reached a tentative agreement for 600 locomotive engineers at the Canadian National/Wisconsin Central Railway. The agreement, which requires ratification by the membership, provides significant quality of life improvements and comes after several months of negotiations. BLET’s CN/WC members will vote on the tentative agreement over the next 30 days.
“This was a joint effort between CN and our General Committee of Adjustment to attract, retain, and offer a better overall quality of life to CN/WC locomotive engineers,” said BLET CN/WC General Chairman Eric Hau.
Some highlights of the tentative agreement include:
- Improvements to the traditional seniority system;
- Engineers would no longer be forced to locations more than 100 miles away to protect their engineer seniority;
- All extra board positions would become a standard 5 days on and 2 days off, with a 9.2 basic day biweekly guarantee, bid by seniority;
- Increased pay for extra board engineers to time and one half (over and above guarantee payments) for working on their rest days;
- Improved calling orders at Away From Home Terminals to reduce overall time away from home for all engineers; and
- All engineers would have the ability to achieve a maximum of 13 personal leave days (PLD) per year, whereas approximately half of the members are now capped at 5 days.
General Chairman Hau thanked CN for following through on its commitment to negotiate with BLET on these quality of life improvements for locomotive engineers, especially outside of the Section 6 process.
Photo courtesy: Cory Rusch, BLET Division 659