How Unions Hold Back America’s Transportation System

‘T he economic disruption associated with the COVID-19 epidemic did not cause our supply-chain weaknesses — it only revealed them,” said NR in an October 18 editorial. One of those weaknesses is an organized labor movement that prevents the logistics industry from modernizing and keeping up with America’s global competitors. Our outdated labor policies are making this crisis worse, and “there is no way that a highly regimented, clock-punching labor force is going to be able to adequately cope with the next one.”

The Biden administration is in the process of making sure we won’t be able to adequately cope with the next one.

The administration’s sympathies with organized labor are not a secret, and union donation records indicate that the feeling is mutual. Organized labor has generally opposed technological developments in the transportation industry because better efficiency often translates to fewer union jobs. Longshoremen’s unions opposed containerized shipping and computers in port terminals decades ago, and they oppose automation in ports now. (For what it’s worth, many truck drivers, who are nonunion independent contractors paid per truckload, support automation. Faster ports mean more deliveries, and more deliveries mean more income for them.)

While our ports are hampered by decades-old labor practices, the unions want to bring the same to freight rail. The International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, Transportation Division (corporate consolidation is evil, union consolidation is fine, you’re not allowed to question this), known as SMART-TD, represents the train crews on freight railroads. The industry standard right now is a two-person crew in the locomotive. SMART-TD wants the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to mandate that forever.

The FRA initially tried to mandate two-person crews in 2016, during the Obama administration. The rulemaking process was still incomplete when President Obama left office, and in 2019 the proposed rule was withdrawn under President Trump. President Biden wants to bring back the rule to please his union backers and keep a campaign promise he made.

Freezing the current level of labor productivity on freight trains is exactly the kind of policy decision that makes the American transportation industry unable to adapt to changing circumstances. SMART-TD maintains that having two-person crews is a safety issue. A TV ad the union put out in September compares freight trains to airplanes, which are flown by a pilot and co-pilot, and first responders, who often work in pairs.

The more relevant comparison, as Reason Foundation’s Marc Scribner points out, is trucking. Trucks mostly have one person in the cab. Rail has become less competitive relative to trucking in the past few years, Scribner notes, because of other federal unfunded mandates that railroads have had to implement. Trucks pollute far more than trains, so “disadvantaging rail relative to trucking through a train crew-size mandate would increase the transportation sector’s emissions intensity,” he writes.

But SMART-TD’s safety claim has very little evidence supporting it in the first place. As the Association of American Railroads says, plenty of other trains operate just fine with only one person at the controls. In the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand, one-person crews are the norm, and even in the U.S., passenger trains are commonly driven by one person.

By any measure, freight trains are safer than they have ever been. In the past 20 years, the train accident rate has dropped by 33 percent, and the hazmat accident rate has dropped by 64 percent. The grade-crossing collision rate is down 46 percent.

One of the reasons for these safety improvements is positive train control (PTC) technology. As of December 2020, every major freight rail line in the U.S. has PTC, in compliance with a federal mandate passed by Congress in 2008. PTC does most of the work that the second person in the cab does, and it does it without human error, which is the primary cause of rail accidents. An analysis conducted in 2015, the last time the two-person mandate was forthcoming, found that with PTC, single-person crews were as safe as multiple-person crews.

When a different technology, automated track inspection (ATI), is at issue, it becomes obvious that safety is not the unions’ real concern. They have expressed unease over the technology since it replaces visual inspections by rail employees with an automated system mounted on a train car to inspect the tracks. The FRA has allowed railroads to use ATI on a testing basis, but Politico reports (subscribers-only link) that some of those programs have recently expired, and the FRA has been slow to renew them.

On October 29, a group of 23 Republican senators sent a letter to FRA deputy administrator Amit Bose inquiring about the ATI test programs. Recent testing, the letter notes, demonstrated that “the data-driven fusion of ATI and visual inspections is producing a superior safety outcome, with track employees’ hours being reallocated to verifying and remedying the greater number of defects detected by ATI rather than conducting redundant visual inspections.” Yet some programs have been allowed to expire. The senators want to know why, and they don’t buy the FRA’s explanations so far:

In one case, FRA declined to extend one railroad’s program because it found that continuing the test would not yield new, significant data. If this delay is due to FRA’s satisfaction with the ATI data collected to date, please indicate what next steps FRA is considering to further enable use of this safety technology, such as going through the rulemaking process to update the half-century-old track inspection regulations. If FRA seeks additional supporting data, please indicate when the Safety Board will return to its long practice of timely reviewing waiver and test program requests to allow the nation’s rail industry to advance.

President Biden promised to be a pro-union president, and his administration is taking the unions’ line by failing to allow ATI to expand, again freezing labor productivity at its current level and preventing improved efficiency in the transportation sector.

Instead of learning from past labor-policy decisions that have stultified our logistics industry and worsened our supply-chain crisis, the Biden administration is set to make the same mistakes again. The purpose of the transportation sector is to safely and efficiently move goods and people from one place to another. President Biden acts as though its purpose is to be a jobs program for members of organizations that donate to his political party.