KANSAS CITY — Kansas City Southern Industries Inc. has reached new labor agreements with one of the railroad unions, the Kansas City Star reports.
The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees has ratified four-year contracts with Kansas City Southern and one of its subsidiaries, according to the National Mediation Board.
About 110 employees are represented by the union at the railroad, said Bill Galligan, a Kansas City Southern spokesman. He declined to discuss details about the new agreements.
A spokeswoman at the union’s Southfield, Mich., headquarters could not be reached for comment.
The National Mediation Board said it became involved in the negotiations last August.
In other labor developments in the rail industry, the major railroads last week won a court order to prevent their engineers union from striking over an industrywide plan to assign work to a rival union.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers said its contract was violated when the railroads selected the United Transportation Union to switch freight cars between trains by remote control.
The the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers has maintained “the position all along that locomotive engineers should run locomotives, whether they are in the cab or on the ground,” said the union’s International President Don M. Hahs.
“Engineers are the most qualified and highly trained members of an operating crew.”
The railroads disagreed.
“It was an industry decision,” said Galligan of Kansas City Southern. “Under existing labor contracts, the work of operating remote-control units properly falls under and is assigned to trainmen, and thus the UTU.”
The assignment of the remote-control work is the latest issue that has created conflict between the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and United Transportation Union. Last year, members of the engineers union rejected a proposal to merge with the United Transportation Union. The United Transportation Union has said it will try to merge the unions through elections on each railroad property.
Last week’s injunction issued by a federal district judge in Chicago allows railroads to proceed with pilot projects using remote control. Analysts estimated that the industry could save as much as $250 million a year using remote control, eliminating jobs and improving efficiency.
Kansas City Southern is among the first railroads to proceed with using remote controls for car switching. The company has bought 50 remote-control units, and training on them is expected to begin later this week, Galligan said.
“We hope to have the program fully implemented by September,” he said.
Galligan said the remote-control units will eliminate some jobs, but Kansas City Southern officials believe that will be done through attrition instead of layoffs.