Like Social Security, the Railroad Retirement is funded by employees and employers through a payroll tax. Railroad Retirement costs non-railroad employees nothing. Yet, fears from railroad workers that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by the richest man on earth, Elon Musk, is looking to cut such benefits to pay for the tax cuts to billionaires. The quasi-government body has announced already to discontinue the lease of 7 buildings around the country for the RRBs to execute its mission to improve “efficiency.”

Railroaders are familiar with claims of improved “efficiency” through making cuts while increasing “throughput to customers.”  Precision Schedule Railroading, the corporate railroad method that has led to countless railroad disasters, exploitive work conditions, and less service to customers is vehemently unsupported by railroad workers unions. DOGE and Elon Musk are trying to disseminate government bodies like the Railroad Retirement Board much like what Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR) has done to the railroads in order to give the railroad workers less.

The Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, in a statement posted on its website on March 7, 2025, listed three reasons how the underfunding would affect the department:

1. The RRB’s chronic underfunding has led to severe service delays, which directly impact the railroad workers and retirees who rely on the agency. If funding remains inadequate: The average wait time for occupational disability claim adjudication will remain at 450 days — meaning retirees and beneficiaries will wait well over a year for their claims to be processed.
2. The average phone hold times are already at 4 hours, leaving members struggling to get assistance.
3. With the current executive orders and government overreach, the RRB can only hire one employee for every four who leave, making it impossible to keep up with demand and worsening service backlogs.

The bottom line is that Railroad companies do not want to pay their employees the benefits they earned. Defunding railroaders’ benefits will lead to more exploitation of an already overly exerted industry of workers. Fighting for more public power for our railroads, freight, and passengers and not less is crucial to achieving a more secure Railroad Retirement. The goal of the railroad bosses is to underfund the services to make them unreliable and faulty to make it easier to dismantle them altogether.

Support the Public Rail Now campaign if you want to protect Railroad Retirement as stated on their website “There is reason to believe that public ownership of the railroads would bode well for the Railroad Retirement System because, as outlined, increased freight traffic, electrification, infrastructure expansion, a return of passenger service, shorter and safer trains, and an emphasis on service rather than profit and job cutbacks would necessarily translate into more railroad jobs and more payers into the Railroad Retirement System.”

Support for Public Rail Now will give railroaders more security for their retirement plans but it also helps protect Social Security due to the closely tied services of both programs for benefactors. An attack on either service, Social Security or Railroad Retirement hurts all Americans. LUEL calls on the American people to support and defend Railroad Retirement through support of the Public Rail Now Campaign.

The post DOGE Attacks Already Overburdened Railroad Retirement Board appeared first on Labor Today.

It was during the 2022 battle between railroad workers and the major railroad corporations that much of the U.S. public was first exposed to the reality of what it is like to be a railroad worker.

Since then, public interest in the railroads and railroad workers has apparently waned. This is unfortunate, as the problems highlighted by the mainstream media during the 2022 battle have, for the most part, not been resolved.

For this reason, Public Rail Now, a coalition of railroad workers, labor organizers, trackside community advocates, environmental justice activists, and others demanding public ownership and operation of the U.S. rail system, launched a questionnaire and interview project to elevate the voices of railroad workers and bring the railroad industry back into the light. Over the two-month period of November and December 2024, we received over 130 questionnaire responses from railroad workers across the U.S. which were as enlightening as they were alarming. The follow-up interviews only reinforced our view that the problems in the railroad industry require bold action on the part of the federal government.

Excessive working hours, draconian attendance policies, dangerous conditions, and hostile managers, among other features, constitute a harrowing industrial situation which has not much improved since the Biden administration forced a highly unpopular contract down the railroad workers’ throats.

All the Livelong Day

According to one CSX conductor, using personal leave today is “like buying concert tickets . . . nine times out of ten, I’m either sleeping or working, so I can’t call off when I need to.” The workers in his subdivision have to compete to use leave, and with about 100 workers to compete with, it is nearly impossible for many workers to get the time off when they need it. “You’re competing with 100 other guys for that personal day,” he said. “If it’s a summertime weekend, good luck.”

The long working hours demanded by the rail corporations, reinforced by oppressive attendance policies, make it difficult for railroad workers to spend time with their loved ones. “We used to be able to take off,” a BNSF conductor told us. “Not anymore. I am seeing my family less.” To compensate for the hours spent away from spouses and children, railroad workers often eschew a full night’s rest. An already fatigued workforce is further exhausted.

It is important to note that while railroad workers are unable to spend time with their families, even on holidays, this is not the case for management. According to an engineer at UP, “Every day now is a Monday. No holidays whatsoever. Management does not work on holidays . . . They don’t have limited time off. It’s demoralizing as hell having to put up with that mentality. You’re expected to be at work and they’re spending time with their families.”

Many railroad workers, particularly those with children, are the sole wage-earners in their homes, as the severity of their work schedules complicates employment for their spouses and makes childcare difficult. “It’s hard for a spouse to get a job when you’ve got this job,” a UP conductor explained. “You never know when you’ll need a babysitter, or if your wife gets sick . . . especially with the attendance policy, it’s difficult to have a spouse working and having young kids.”

This household dynamic is one of the reasons railroad workers oftentimes stay on the job though they would prefer not to. “I need the job, my wife doesn’t work, I’ve got four kids,” a BNSF conductor said. “I haven’t been home this entire week. I’m home 12-12.5 hours at a time. Fatigued all the time. You hope to get a few hours of sleep before you go back out.”

“Orwellian Nightmare”

With few exceptions, workers – regardless of collar color – deal at some point or other with employer surveillance. On the railroads, surveillance of the workforce reaches well beyond necessary safety measures to the point of incredulity. “I’ll be honest, I saw the survey and I was nervous to fill it out,” a conductor told us. “They’ve got the eye in the sky; they’re always watching you.”

According to an engineer at UP, managers “hide in bushes, on hillsides with binoculars. We had a manager who parked his rig a mile away and he’d walk in the dark in the middle of the night and sneak up on you.” Recalling an incident that could not help but elicit a chuckle, a CSX maintenance of way worker said one day on the job “something came walking up to us out of the woods – it was a manager in a ghillie suit. I’ll put my hand on a bible for that one.”

A CSX engineer told us one of his past managers “would climb a tree – he bought night vision goggles and a radio for watching crews … he’d sit in that tree and watch you for hours.”

In addition to guerilla-style stalking, railroad managers have embraced the use of drones – sometimes to disastrous results – in their surveillance of workers. “I’ve seen the drones,” a CN engineer said. “They’ve flown them right at the conductor’s window. These managers want to make a name for themselves. They don’t care who they [expletive].”

“I know a couple of instances where a manager crashed a drone,” a CSX conductor said. “I know they got in trouble flying the drones by airports and near a chemical plant.”

A UP switchman who was injured at work expressed his frustration with the fact that cameras are often used not for worker safety, but for discipline. There were seven cameras in the area where the injury took place, but “somehow there was no footage of when it happened. Any shred of evidence of the conditions we’re working in, even the GPS data, none of that is ever available to us. It’s used against us.”

“Two words,” he said, “Orwellian nightmare.”

“You’re just a Number”

A sentiment that emerged time and again throughout the interviews is that working on the railroads is not what it used to be. “I’m a third-generation railroader,” a UP engineer said. “It’s not the railroad I remember, when I would go to work with my dad as a kid.” He added, “I refused to help my nephews get rail jobs – they asked me and I said absolutely not.”

“It used to be the job to have,” a BNSF conductor explained. “Good benefits, a good blue-collar job, but now they can’t keep anybody. I got hired on because I knew somebody.”

The quality of railroad work has diminished since many of the “old heads” (longtime railroad workers) were hired, not just in terms of work-life balance, but also material conditions. Several railroad workers described the shoddy equipment and furnishings they encounter on the job which management often refuses to repair, leaving the workers to do it themselves. “I have zip-ties and duct tape,” a conductor said, “you’d be amazed how often I have to use them.”

Considering the critical importance of the railroad industry in the U.S. economy, these statements – only a fraction of what we gathered in our questionnaire and follow-up interviews – are all the more astonishing. The question presents itself: how can such a crucial and profitable industry care so little for its workforce? One would think that workers with such a tremendous responsibility – keeping the U.S. economy running – would enjoy at least a modicum of respect and appreciation from their employers. This, however, is not the case.

“You’re just a number – they don’t care if you die,” a UP engineer said, “they’ll get another dancing chicken out there to do the job.”

To learn more about the campaign for a public rail system, please visit publicrailnow.org

The post Every Day is a Monday: Railroad Workers Describe Life on the Tracks appeared first on Labor Today.