(The following story by John D. Boyd appeared on The Journal of Commerce website on August 20, 2010.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — At a time when freight traffic was slowing and worries spreading about a slowdown in the U.S. economic recovery, the seven largest freight railroads added a net 1,519 workers from mid-June to mid-July and pushed their total employment to the highest level since April 2009.
That July workforce expansion is the third-largest labor addition this year for the Class I rail operations in the United States. It is also more than double the 612 workers they added from mid-May to mid-June, after the railroads made a small cut through first-half May as a new traffic slowdown first took hold.
Expansion of the railroad workforce is in line with leading economic indicators which point to a slow but sustained recovery.
The labor data for the middle of summer is also consistent with a recent pattern of renewed activity for major railroads that has continued well into August, as railroads set new year-to-date highs for intermodal traffic.
In reports filed to the Surface Transportation Board, the largest freight rail lines reported 153,046 workers on their payrolls as of mid-July – after the first full payroll period of the month – up from 151,527 in June.
The latest workforce additions came in train crews and professional/administration staff, while railroads trimmed their executive and maintenance staffs.
April 2009 had a higher total of 154,263, but that was a time when railroads were still idling workers waiting for business to come back. The Class Is kept cutting until they had 146,725 employees last December.
Since then, those carriers added 165 in January and 727 in February. Then, with freight demand starting to surge they took on 1,623 more workers in March and 1,848 in April, before trimming 173 in May.
The largest industry employers by U.S. workforce size are Union Pacific Railroad, BNSF Railway, CSX Transportation, Norfolk Southern Railway, Canadian National Railway’s U.S. operations, those of Canadian Pacific Railway, and Kansas City Southern Railway.
All except CP recorded higher labor counts in mid-July than a month earlier, and CP listed four fewer.