United Transportation Union

Wilner
Commentary

Labor lawyer Clint Miller: Requisat in pace

Clint Miller studied, recited and practiced railroad labor law with such determination, devotion and precision that his management adversaries often were converted to fans. Had cancer instead picked its fight with him in a courtroom, few would have expected his death last week at age 70.

BLET, SMART-UTU reject NJT contract

The members New Jersey Transit’s two largest unions, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) and SMART Transportation Division-United Transportation Union (UTU), have voted against the tentative agreement reached in March between NJ Transit and a coalition of its 16 railroad unions.

Commentary

A labor leader who understood economics

Dan Johnson died last week. He was 67. You probably neither knew him nor recognize his name. Yet if you are a railroader, he touched your life in meaningful ways.

Commentary

When you get a good deal, take it

Arbitrator Robert O. Harris told the United Transportation Union (UTU) and railroads in 1991, then unable to agree at the bargaining table, “Welcome to the oldest established craps game in Washington. Like the suckers in ‘Guys and Dolls,’ you are risking your futures on the roll of the dice [when you fail to make a voluntary agreement].”
Commentary

BNSF, SMART seek historic crew consist revision

A gutsy, proactive, and far-sighted collaboration between BNSF and a general committee of its largest labor union has produced a tentative agreement to allow freight trains equipped with Positive Train Control (PTC) to operate as early as next year with a lone engineer in the cab and no conventional on-board conductor between specific territories in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest.

UTU-SMART, BLET to take two-person crew laws to the state level

As part of their ongoing effort to secure a law mandating a minimum of two crew members in all locomotive cabs, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) and the United Transportation Union-Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (UTU-SMART) have provided their state legislative boards with model legislation to secure minimum crew size laws on the state level.
Commentary

Data drought haunts FRA crew-size mandate

By the Federal Railroad Administration’s own congressional testimony, the years 2012 and 2013 were among the railroads’ safest on record, while the relatively few train crashes were mostly the result of human error and track defects.