Thank you very much.
This is a topic I'm passionate about. I could talk on it for hours, for days even, without a note. I don't need notes to know what's on my mind and in my heart.
No matter what system you put in place, no matter what regulation you put in place, it all comes down to one thing—decisions, the decisions people make. In the case of rest, this is one of the most important factors as to whether a person is rested or not. We all know this in our personal life. We know that there are laws against driving while you're tired. We know that it's wrong to do it. But if we're honest, we'd all admit to having been on the highway and our heads have bobbed. We know that sometimes somebody else should be making that decision for us.
We've analyzed and looked at all the things that were the “myths” of work and rest in the railway and we tried to understand them on a level of detail that nobody in this industry—or in any industry—has attempted to do before. We're sharing this methodology with other railways.
We've looked at the old narrative, that the days were long, that there was no opportunity for rest, and that the days were unpredictable. When we got our information and we put everything...we didn't do a sample size and we didn't do averages. The truth gets lost in averages. You have to look at every piece of data. We looked at all 426,956 runs that were done in a year, and every person who went to work. That's how many person-days there were of people on the road. We looked at it and the average day, from the moment a person's foot hits our property to the moment that foot leaves the property, was six to seven hours. That's the typical day. The next typical longest day was seven to eight hours. The next typical longest day was four to five hours.
What you find out in the railway industry is that because of the improvement in railway speed, and because of the improvement in railways, the days aren't as long as they used to be. The typical person is working about a seven-hour day, or a six- to seven-hour day. That's the distribution. If you go to the next page you can see the exact numbers. Every once in a while, though, you'll hear a horror story, usually from a long time ago, about somebody who worked 24 hours. I can tell you that last year we had two people who were paid for 24 hours. Nobody works 24 hours, or 18 hours, or 17 hours. They might be paid for that but they don't work it.
If you look at the distribution, you'll see two. Who are those people? They are two people who were on a train, going down the track. There was a detection and they got out and found some trees. Well, they couldn't back the train up all that distance, so we had to send somebody out to, first, clear the trees and, second, get them and bring them back. It wasn't some place you could just drive up to, so we had to get a high-rail vehicle and it took a long time. So they sat on the train, slept, and did whatever they wanted until we came to get them and took them home. That's the way we operate and that's the world we live in. There will always be trees that fall, there will always be landslides, and there will always be snow. Sometimes someone will get stuck on a train and they will have to stay there until we can come and get them.
Now, does that happen a lot? Out of the 426,956, it happened to two people.
First we talked about long days. The next one we talked about was opportunities for rest. We put together a piece here that is about a third of a person's schedule. This person was someone the union picked some time ago and said that we should look them because they were overworked. We didn't choose the person. The little red arrows here indicate every time this person could have taken more rest and decided not to. This is only a fraction of that month. In that month, on 21 separate occasions, the person said, “I can take more rest and I don't want it”.
Since the last negotiations and the negotiations before that, there are even more opportunities for rest. We've listed 10 opportunities for rest. When you go out and you're at the away-from-home terminal—if you go from Montreal to Smiths Falls—you can take 10 hours off, eight plus two. Then when you get back, you can take 26 hours off, 24 plus two. Do that enough times and you get 48, and then in the middle of the month you can book up to 72. Then in the next one you can do the 10 and 26, 10 and 26, and your 48, and then if you waive off a lot of rest, you can take the end of the month off.