(Morris News Service circulated the following story by Gregory Richards on November 11.)
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Railroad giant CSX Corp. is embarking on a sweeping redesign of its management structure that will involve cutting between 800 to 1,000 non-union jobs, cuts that could include a couple of jobs in Athens.
Most of the cuts will occur in Jacksonville, Fla., where 60 percent of CSX’s 5,000 managerial employees are based. But all locations, including the 16-person CSX operation in Athens, could be touched, company spokesman Gary Sease said Tuesday.
According to Sease, the company has made no final plans on just who will be laid off. But he did say all layoffs will come from management ranks, and added that the Athens CSX operation includes just a couple of managers.
”The impact, by virtue of the number of management employees in Jacksonville, will be greater there,” he said. ”The impact won’t be enormous at other field locations.”
From Athens, CSX receives and sends trains to Atlanta and Greenwood, S.C., transporting freight to and from the area’s large companies, including Con-Agra and Gold Kist. Athens’ CSX workers are also responsible for track maintenance in the area, Sease said.
Elsewhere in Georgia, CSX operations include a Waycross railyard employing 1,000 people, both union and non-union.
The layoffs will take place over the next six months, with the first cuts likely beginning mid-December.
By trimming its workforce, Jacksonville-based CSX said its goal is to transform itself into a leaner company better able to meet the needs of its customers and hit corporate revenue and performance goals. The company will collapse management layers from 11 to no more than eight, and managers will also take on more responsibility.
CSX, which operates the country’s third largest railroad, has lost money for the past three quarters and is not running as smoothly as Chairman and CEO Michael Ward would prefer.
The management overhaul will essentially recreate how the 175-year-old company is run. Beginning at the top of the management hierarchy, the transformation requires each management layer to redesign the layer below it.
In this peer-review process, some positions will be eliminated, and some new jobs may be created. The process, which is estimated to take about four to six weeks per layer to complete, will then cascade down the organization.
Despite the changes at the company, it will likely have no impact on CSX’s potential role in a commuter rail system linking Athens and Atlanta, said E. H. Culpepper, vice chairman of the Georgia Rail Passenger Authority.
The GRPA was created by former governor Zell Miller with the goal of establishing passenger rail service throughout the state. Culpepper said the group is currently conducting studies with CSX to gauge how much capacity the rail system would require to make passenger rail a reality between Athens and Atlanta. He doesn’t see the layoffs affecting the authority’s relationship with CSX in any way.
”I don’t think it has any corollary to any ongoing negotiations with the railroad,” he said. ”These types of blips happen in the market all the time.”
CSX was not able to break out where specifically the 800 to 1,000 job cuts will fall because the peer-review process has not yet begun.
In a telephone interview Monday, Ward said the process will involve ”some tough work and some hard decisions” for CSX’s employees, but he considered it to be worth the potential payoff.
Since 1999, CSX has cut its workforce by about 3,000 jobs, roughly two-thirds from not filling positions and the other third from cuts.
Systemwide, CSX employs 34,000.
Staff writer Ronell Smith contributed to this report.