UTUSMART

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.
Commentary

Union boss may have LIRR in checkmate

This is about the Long Island Rail Road. It’s about a dispute over wages and benefits. It’s about politics that have a stereotypically anti-labor House Republican majority poised to line up on rail labor’s side to embarrass a Democratic governor. And it’s about a union boss named Anthony Simon, who should be teaching strategy to future battle commanders at the Army War College.

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.