Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee.
I don't have any written notes to pass out. This is ad lib. I just want to talk to you about what it's like to be a railroad in Canada these days.
Let me start off by saying that I represent 99% of the operating crews in Canada: the locomotive engineers, the conductors, the yardmen, etc. We represent the main carriers: Canadian National, CP Rail, VIA Rail, Bombardier, the GO trains in Toronto, etc. We have a vested interest in the safety and the movement of goods.
A lot of people don't understand what it's like to be a railroad. I'm going to walk you through a trip so you really get the sense of what we deal with.
What we do is we leave from what's called a home terminal, where we live, and most of the time those trains are scheduled. In other words, we have an eight-hour window in which we know we're going to go to work, and we can prepare ourselves for that as far as rest is concerned. Thereafter, we're on that train in a cab that's 12 feet by 6 feet, for a minimum of 10 hours, and in most cases, 12 hours straight, with no breaks. You're not allowed to stop and have lunch; that train has to move.
When you get to the other end of the road, the terminal, which in some cases is as far as 300 miles away, what happens is that you go into an unassigned type of service. You do not know when you're coming back. For example, you go off duty in the morning at eight o'clock after working all night, and you don't get called right away.
You don't get called right away because of the way they operate their trains. You're not entitled to book rest except at that initial time, so even if you've booked rest, which is a maximum of eight hours, after eight hours you're subject to call. What takes place is that you might not get called for another eight hours. In other words, just when you're ready to go back to work, there are no trains, and you sit there for another eight hours. Then you get called to come back to work. You cannot refuse that. You must come back. Fatigue sets in. These crews coming back now have to work for 10, 11, or 12 hours, with no breaks, moving these trains.
When I hired on in 1973, these trains were roughly a mile long, maybe. Some of them were up to two and even three miles long. There used to be four-member crews. Now there are two-member crews. The management style of the major freight railways right now is very Machiavellian. What happens is that we work on what's called the Brown system of demerits. You get up to 60 demerits and you are discharged from the service of the company. That's what happens.
When you take a look at the Canadian railway operating rules, you can see that there's very little that can happen on the property where you can't point to an employee failure somewhere. That's the reality of the life in how we operate. The problem is that the companies.... For the discipline that is assessed, they don't want to have the employees discharged. They'd rather have you at up around 50 to 55 demerits. Why? You're more apt to do what you're told because you're subject to being discharged if you get 5 or 10 more demerits, which puts you over the 60. It's very Machiavellian in how we operate.
Then you take a look at the stress of the crews. I don't know if you know that within labour law we have what's called “do now, grieve later”. You cannot refuse. Other than for issues of safety, you can't refuse. You must go to work.
Right now, we have thousands and thousands of grievances against the company moving their way through an arbitration process. Just to let you know, there are two arbitrators who sit three days a month, 11 months out of the year. Three days a month, that's all they sit, and they hear virtually every case of every railway union and every railroad in the country. If you think you have a grievance and you think it's going to progress in your lifetime to arbitration to get a result, give your head a shake. It's not going to happen. This adds to the stress.
They've done a study. The railroads have done a study on retaining employees. If they can get an employee to be on the railroads for up to five years, they're locked in then, because they're vested within the railroad. They have mortgages and families and so on, so they're in a situation where they can't leave. But it's very hard to retain employees right now under this system. Just take a look at the moving of grain and the problems with moving grain. A lot of this is that you don't have the manpower to do it.
This is the environment we live in. When I see this type of committee where we can sit here and have our voice, I have to say that the first responders are the crews. They're the first responders, because when those trains derail—and I've been in derailments—I'm the one who has to go back and assess the damage.
I have no knowledge of SMS, the safety management system, no input. When I walk back to find out where the derailment has occurred in that two-mile train, I don't know what I'm coming to. I don't know if gases are going to be blowing my way. I have no idea what's on that train. The training in dangerous commodities for workers is superficial. It tell us where we have to locate those cars within a train.
The whole system is fatigued, not just the railcars. I would appreciate it being looked at very carefully.
Thank you very much.