Shareholders attending Warren Buffett’s first in-person Berkshire Hathaway Inc. meeting since 2019 will be greeted by a group of BNSF railroad workers protesting a lack of pay increases and safety issues.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen is using the gathering in Omaha, Nebraska, to call out alleged labor and safety issues at Berkshire’s BNSF and rival Union Pacific Corp. The union plans to gather and hand out flyers near the arena where billionaire Buffett will host his first non-virtual annual meeting since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The railroad workers have not had a contract raise since the middle of 2019, even as the union has met 14 different times, with four mediated bargaining sessions, to try to reach an agreement, according to Dennis Pierce, national president of the union. The group, which has placed ads in an Omaha newspaper formerly owned by Buffett, is also criticizing a new work-attendance policy that they say penalizes employees for taking time off and proposed cuts to health-care policies.
“Employees have worked through the pandemic for three years without a contract raise,” Piece said at a news conference Friday. “So the shareholders did well. The employees did not.”
BNSF’s new attendance policy is adding fuel to a firestorm of criticism over the large railroads’ poor service. Slow trains and delayed rail cars provoked the railroad regulator to hold public hearings earlier this week in which U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg chastised the railroads for an excessive reduction of their workforces.
BNSF, created by the 1995 merger of Burlington Northern Inc. and Santa Fe Pacific Corp., is the largest North American railroad by sales and has been part of Berkshire since 2010.
Alex Kosanda, whose husband has worked at BNSF for a decade, said the policy keeps her husband on call almost all the time now. The changes, which took effect Feb. 1, already put her family in a bind when both she and their child caught Covid-19 and her husband couldn’t take time off work to care for them.
“The new attendance policy has become so restrictive and demoralizing that it feels like my husband is not part of our lives,” Kosanda said in a letter submitted for hearings held by the Surface Transportation Board. “Railroads wonder why current employees, who had every intention of staying for 30 years, are leaving and there aren’t people lining up to take their place.”
‘Fair Resolution’
BNSF said in an emailed statement that the new attendance policy is intended to increase the consistency of workers available for shifts, which should help the railroad improve reliability for customers and transparency for crew members. The railroad says that it’s seen more planned vacation days taken since implementing the new policy.
“BNSF remains committed and eager to work toward a swift and fair resolution to the collective-bargaining process,” spokesperson Lena Kent said in the statement. “The sooner an agreement is reached, the sooner our union-represented employees get pay increases.”
The railroads have blamed service problems on the pandemic, which sidelined workers who caught Covid-19, and the supply-chain congestion that resulted from a surge of imports coupled with a lack of truck drivers and warehouse workers to unload trailers. And the U.S. labor shortage is making it harder to hire conductors and engineers, the railroads have said.
Eric Gruber, a BNSF engineer, said hundreds of workers have left since the attendance policy was put in place, and that he’s less happy now than at any time during his 15 years with the company. Workers are worn out, which could have safety consequences, he said in a letter submitted to the Surface Transportation Board.
“We are away from home for longer periods of time and now have little to no time off,” Gruber said of the new attendance policy. “This is a recipe for disaster.”
Gruber said that if he stays out sick for five weekdays, it would cost him 12 points on the new attendance scale. To earn back those points, he’d have to either work or be available during a month and a half straight, he said. “What job do you know works like that?” Gruber asked in the letter.
