Certainly. Thank you to all the members of the committee for inviting Unifor to discuss our union's perspective on the future of rail safety in Canada as it relates to remote-controlled devices, fatigue management, and safety management systems.
I am Jerry Dias. I'm the national president of Unifor, and with me today is Brian Stevens. He's our national rail director.
We represent close to 85,000 members who work in the federal sector in air, marine, road, telco. And for the purposes of this committee, just over 12,000 of our members work in the rail sector.
The bulk of our rail membership is involved in performing safety and maintenance inspections and repairs of all passenger and freight cars as well as locomotives in the class 1 railways, VIA Rail, and a number of regional carriers.
We also represent 65 locomotive engineers and conductors at CN Savage Alberta Railway, and another 40 at TTR, working in the Lower Mainland and the Port of Vancouver. Additionally, you will find that our members work in yard offices and crew call centres at CN, and in serving the travelling public at VIA Rail. We are clearly stakeholders in the future of rail safety.
Turning to remote control locomotive systems, our locomotive engineer members at both Savage Alberta Railway and at TTR do not at present conduct switching operations with RCLS. However, a large number of our members work in those very same rail yards where RCLS locomotives are operating, and we are concerned about the present and expanding use of this technology.
Our members working in rail yards and sidings rely on the positive protection of lockout, which is a personal lock applied to a switch at both ends of the track our members are working on, or under rail cars or locomotives. This protection has long been entrenched in our rail agreements and is most often referred to as the blue flag rule, which has three components. Number one is a blue flag or light to indicate to the locomotive engineer or conductor that mechanical employees are working around the tracks. Second, the switch is aligned in the opposite direction; and third, a personal lock is applied to prevent unintentional movement onto the track where our members are working.
Today the class 1 railways are in a quest to increase velocity and reduce roll time. The railways are suggesting that our members can simply rely on the administrative measures provided by a rail traffic controller advising the RCLS crew that our mechanical department employees are working on certain tracks.
Without clear lines of sight, the RCLS-operated locomotives present a greater hazard to our members working in between or under rail cars. When a locomotive engineer is at the operating stand, he or she can see that the switch is lined away or that a blue flag is erected between the tracks. The operator of the RCLS is not at all times in the same position as he or she would be when they are at the control stand.
For our members working in rail yards and sidings, blue flag and lockout is positive protection. It is our only protection. Administrative measures are not fail-safe, and the hazards grow significantly with the introduction and expansion of RCLS. SMS risk assessments do not eliminate any hazards; our members remain exposed.
The railway will present to you that they are required to and will conduct risk assessments when their operations change or there is an introduction of technology, such as RCLS.
To be clear, our members are covered by the Canada Labour Code and its OH and S regulations. SMS is, in our view, just another administrative measure that is not designed to protect workers. It is designed to allow corporations to maximize their profits in light of the workplace risks. What is worrisome is the increasing reliance and belief by the industry that risk assessments and risk control processes are reliable and protect workers. In our view, SMS risk assessments are nothing more than a lens that corporations are forced to look through when they are contemplating changes to their operations.
The industry also operates on the premise that SMS risk assessment is an appropriate substitute for occupational health and safety hierarchy of controls, section 19.5 of the regulations. It is not. To be clear, the occupational health and safety approach is much different in that it is anchored on hazard elimination. It is about prevention.
Regarding fatigue management, our members for the most part work on a schedule that falls in line with part III of the Canada Labour Code. That is not to say that our members do not on occasion experience fatigue—for instance, when working on a derailment site or when operational changes have them working multiple shifts. The reality is that for our members working under part III of the Canada Labour Code, the tours of duty are prescribed, and there is both an internal enforcement mechanism—the collective agreement—and an external enforcement mechanism—the labour code—to protect the health and safety of the worker.
For our members working in the cabs of locomotives, much like our sisters and brothers in the Teamsters, Transport Canada is the overseer of fatigue management. As this committee well knows, yet another working group has failed to develop regulations that would protect the health and safety of this group of workers.
Safe railway operations must mean just that, safe. Recognizing hazards and eliminating hazards must be first and foremost, not introducing technology such as RCLS and developing administrative measures as a way to operate with the risks.
We would be happy to take your questions and thank you for your time.