Rail/Labor Coverage has been all over the place – Bloomberg just this week stated that rails couldn’t swallow the rate increase and that they were already running one-man trains. I tried to respond: “This is just misinformation – the 24% (22%) wage increase won't be hard to swallow for the rails, they have accrued for it and support the Presidential Emergency Board - PEB (publicly). If anyone objects will be the unions….” But you know how that goes. When did fake news become a freight thing?
Even labor has noticed the spread of bad or misinformation: The old rail prophet Frank Wilner noted that in RA – as the NRLC (National Railway Labor Conference) observes:
- During the first six months of 2022, each railroad’s voluntary “quit rate” was between 2% and 3.7%, just a fraction of the 13.1% quit rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the transportation, warehousing, and utility sector.
- Railroads have been outperforming the broader labor market in attracting new hires. For 2021, railroads reported more than 42 applicants for each open position, which is well above the 25 applicants per open position benchmark cited by workforce planning experts.
- Railroads have been reporting an even greater number of applicants per available job during the first six months of 2022. A caveat, volunteered by railroads, is that in some locations—especially those in remote areas—there are fewer applicants, but railroads have responded by offering relocation bonuses and other inducements.
- And the unions put some interesting, pro-PEB “myth-busting” slides such as PEB_250_Page_12-scaled.jpg (2560×1440) (smart-union.org) and PEB_250_Page_11-scaled.jpg (2560×1440) (smart-union.org) on who “won” the recommendations battle….
