(Reuters circulated the following story by Allan Dowd on April 13.)
VANCOUVER, B.C. — Pickets were up at a handful of Canadian National Railway freight yards on Thursday, but no negotiations were scheduled between Canada’s largest railway and the bitterly divided union that represents its striking train crews.
CN locked out members of the United Transportation Union at facilities where rotating strikes began Tuesday, but a company spokesman said the job action by conductors, brakemen and switch crews in Canada did not appear to have expanded.
“It’s quiet on that front today,” spokesman Mark Hallman said.
The union and railway have both said they are willing to restart negotiations, but neither has actually made a move toward the bargaining table.
The workers this week overwhelmingly rejected a tentative one-year contract deal that had ended a 15-day strike by all 2,800 of the UTU’s members in February. The February strike disrupted rail operations and brought the threat of government intervention.
Union leaders said on Thursday they will continue to rotating strikes despite the company lockouts. CN said it will continue to lock out union members until a contract settlement is reached.
UTU negotiators have said they have no immediate plans to repeat February’s wide-scale strike, and critics within the union say some locals might simply ignore an order to strike.
The February strike exposed bitter divisions within the UTU, which is also facing a raid on its members by a unit of the Teamsters Union, which already represents Canadian National’s locomotive engineers.
The UTU’s international headquarters in Cleveland sacked the negotiating team that launched the February strike, saying the walkout was part of an effort to switch the workers to the Teamsters.
A member of the fired negotiating team called for the union leaders on Thursday to end the strike immediately, and accused the union and CN of ignoring the workers’ demands.
“This dispute is not only about money, nor is it about treading water until we get our house in order. It is about our health and safety. It’s about pensions. It’s about CN’s lack of respect for us and our collective agreement,” former negotiator Sylvia LeBlanc wrote in an open letter.
The rejected contract deal included a 3 percent wage hike and a C$1,000 signing bonus. The company and workers have also been at odds over a variety of work-rule issues, such as the timing of rest and lunch breaks.
CN chief executive Hunter Harrison said in a letter this week he thinks the strike was sparked, in part, by anger among older workers over changes the company has undergone since it was denationalized by the Canadian government in 1995.
More than 50 percent of CN’s unionized workers will qualify for retirement within the next decade, he said.
“The fact that we’ve made CN a safer, more profitable business, though does not make any of the changes less controversial, especially when you look at our demographic make-up,” Harrison wrote.
Harrison, who came to CN through its acquisition of Illinois Central Railway in 1999, said the railway needs to adopt work rules that make employment at the company more attractive to younger workers.
The contract dispute does not involve CN’s train crews in the United States, many of which work under newer hourly-based wage systems rather than the traditional industry mileage-based systems used by crews in Canada.