“I have to say: this is the most convoluted, dysfunctional negotiating debacle situation I have ever seen, nothing even comes close.”
Mark Burrows, a retired rail worker who worked in the industry for 37 years and also served as the Organizer and Co-Chair for Railroad Workers United (RWU), is just one of many expressing their frustration with the current state of bargaining in the railroad industry.
“I started railroading in ’74… at [age] 18, and I started paying attention in ’79,” Burrows said during our interview with him and several other RWU members on the January 11 broadcast of The Valley Labor Report. While admitting he can’t speak officially for all of rail workers, Burrows’ total rail labor record of nearly four decades nevertheless gives him a good vantage point to observe the condition of the industry and how it has shifted over the years.
In it’s current form, rail labor unionization is divided across the workforce, with different unions representing different types of rail worker — conductors, engineers, trainmen, etc. The result is piecemeal bargaining. While the carriers themselves are pleased with this approach as it gives them more control, many rail workers are not so pleased as it has the effect of keeping the workforce divided, therefore removing their unified voice and hampering their collective bargaining power.
As this situation has only continued to devolve in recent years, there has been an increased push by RWU for a consolidation of all the divisions into a rail union coalition.
The bosses, however, are not too keen on the idea, and have been actively fighting to keep the workers divided.
“The carriers have always effortlessly played ‘Divide and Conquer,’” Burrows continued, “but this is just ‘Divide and Conquer’ on steroids!”

At one time, consolidation was the standard for the rail unions and the RWU has always encouraged a truly collective approach where all the divisions bargain in unison. However according to Hugh Sawyer, a locomotive engineer at Norfolk Southern who has just started his 37th year in the industry, the carriers intelligently (some would say deviously) approached the individual unions with Tentative Agreements (TA) tailored to be favorable to those particular unions. While on its head this may not seem like a problem, in reality it works against the unification of the workers by keeping them divided and therefore easier for the bosses to manage and manipulate.
“They immediately splintered and reacted as individual unions,” explained Sawyer. “So the carriers have effectively done away with coordinated bargaining.”
But setting the division problem aside for a moment, what about the individual Tentative Agreements themselves? Are they actually any good?
According to Sawyer, who emphasized that he is speaking as an individual, the answer is: no.
“I haven’t seen anything that gets me excited… keep in mind that the 2022 agreement that was forced on us through a PEB board (Presidential Emergency Board) did not address any issues, really, other than wages, maybe.”
These other issues according to Sawyer include work-life balance and insurance costs.
Relatedly, the RWU has been pushing for public negotiations, in firm opposition to the carriers’ insistence on secrecy and restricted engagement.
“That’s another principle of RWU,” said Sawyer. “We want these negotiations out in the open, and we want the membership involved, the rank-and-file. And it’s not happening.”
Sawyer, Burrows, and other RWU members who joined us for the interview had more to say, especially regarding the return of the Trump Administration and what that will mean for them. Watch the full interview below: