(Reuters circulated the following story by Nick Carey on July 8.)
CALUMET CITY, Ill. — E. F. Shirley recalled that when she started working on the railroad she ended up in fist fights with male co-workers who were offended by her presence.
“They had to learn that if you push me, I push back,” said Shirley with a playful grin, bunching her fists like a boxer.
After 14 years at U.S. railroad Norfolk Southern Corp., the slender, black engineer, who gave her age as “50-something,” said her treatment by male colleagues has greatly improved.
“When I started out most men here couldn’t handle my being here,” she said, readying a locomotive for a day’s work in this gritty suburb south of Chicago. “Now the men who object to me being here are a tiny minority.”
Shirley and fellow women crew members Germaine McCoy, a 36-year-old engineer, and Leslie Joslin, a 31-year-old conductor, were switching cars, which involves hooking up cars from different tracks and hauling them to another yard.
These women work hard, but never miss a chance to crack a joke and laugh in the hot summer sun. They said they love their jobs, plus “the pay isn’t bad either,” Joslin quipped.
Working on the U.S. railroads has long been seen as a job almost exclusively for white men. But the number of women railroad workers is growing fast as companies look to replace a major chunk of their work force nearing retirement.
Women like those in Shirley’s crew receive the same pay as men and good benefits – according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, conductors and engineers make around $60,000 annually, compared with the national average salary of $39,000 for all jobs – and they say competence matters much more than gender.
“As long as you can do the job, that’s all that counts,” said Germaine McCoy, a black woman who has worked for Norfolk Southern for more than a decade. “On the rare occasion a guy questions my ability, I say, ‘Show me something you can do that I can’t and I’ll leave.'”
Analysts and rail officials said that as railroads reach out to workers from a broader cross-section of society, it will be easier for them to recruit from diverse communities.
“It’s easier to hire people if they can relate to your company,” said Cindy Sanborn, vice president for railroad CSX Corp.’s northern region. “If everyone looks the same then it’s like something off a different planet.”
She added that the industry needs to improve its communication and advertise more as railroad jobs are not high-profile careers.
Karol Burchfield, a general superintendent at No. 1 U.S. railroad Union Pacific Corp., said she hopes that by attracting more women, problems such as providing day care for children will be tackled.
“In bigger cities there are day care services to choose from, but that’s not the case in rural areas,” she said.
HIRING CRUNCH
The last major U.S. railroad hiring spree was in the 1970s. But leading up to and after railroad deregulation in 1980, most railroads were in financial trouble and did minimal hiring.
In the past few years, however, U.S. commercial rails have experienced a reversal of fortune. Business has been boosted by the rising use of coal as utilities seek alternatives to more expensive natural gas and imports from developing nations such as China have jumped.
Even in the face of slowing U.S. economic growth, the major railroads are hiring in large numbers to counter attrition.
Union Pacific will hire 4,000 workers in 2007; Norfolk Southern plans to hire around 2,000 workers, while CSX will bring on more than 1,000.
“The railroads have gone from head count reduction to a growing industry,” said Tony Hatch, a railroad analyst at New York-based ABH Consulting. “To match their hiring needs it makes sense to reach beyond their traditional groups and attract more women and minorities.”
According to the U.S. Railroad Retirement Board, women made up 8.6 percent of the 263,460 people employed by the railroads in 2005, the last year for which data is available. That figure is up from 6.5 percent in 1975, but does not separate track workers from office staff, where women have more typically worked.
“To be fair to the railroads, the work force still reflects the last major wave of hiring in the 1970s,” CSX’s Sanborn said. “There weren’t many dual-income families back then and much of the railroad work force consisted of white men.”
“Our work force is changing fast and we’re working to make it change quicker,” she added.
Sanborn said for much of her 20 years with CSX she was the only woman at meetings, an experience similar to that of Union Pacific’s Burchfield. And both echoed Germaine McCoy’s words that competence counts here, not gender.
“I have had men working with me who have confessed they have never had a woman boss before and didn’t know what to do,” Burchfield said. “But we always work through that.”
With the current hiring crunch, the number of women on the railroads is likely to continue growing.
“The railroads want talented people,” said Tom White, spokesman for Washington-based lobby group the Association of American Railroads. “They can’t afford to be discriminatory.”