Washington, DC
The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and its successor agency, the Surface Transportation Board (STB), have approved since 1995 major mergers and acquisitions in the railroad industry, including the combination of the Burlington Northern with the Sante Fe and the Union Pacific with the Southern Pacific, and the carve-up of the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail) by CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern.
In addition to significant and widely reported service and safety problems, these transactions have created mega-railroad corporations with enormous power over railroad workers. In each of these transactions, the ICC and the STB have approved conditions that permitted these large railroad corporations to break, alter or modify existing private collective bargaining agreements -- causing harm to thousands of railroad workers. Over the strong objections of the rail unions and the entire labor movement, the ICC and the STB have regularly interpreted the Interstate Commerce Act in a manner which forces arbitrators to render final and binding opinions that break and/or modify employees' existing collective bargaining agreements, contravene the collective bargaining process, and pervert federal labor policy under the Railway Labor Act.
The AFL-CIO, along with its Transportation Trades Department and all of rail labor, opposes this anti-worker policy. The Executive Council condemns this injustice to railroad workers and calls on Congress and the Administration to enact legislation barring the STB from continuing this harmful policy.
The Executive Council also opposes the renomination of STB Chair Linda Morgan. For sixteen years, five of which have been during Morgan's tenure, the ICC and the STB have routinely used their claimed authority to break collective bargaining agreements with no regard for the rights and jobs of railroad employees. Chairwoman Morgan has presided over the above-cited mergers and acquisitions and has refused to change the anti-worker policies set in motion in 1983 by President Reagan's appointees to the ICC.