OMAHA, Neb. – Union Pacific has implemented engineer scheduling at nearly three quarters of its crew hubs.
The agreements, reached between the railroad and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, put engineers on a schedule that includes 11 days on and four days off. They previously were on call up to 24 hours per day, seven days per week.
Under a tentative agreement reached in May 2023, UP and the union expected to roll out the 11/4 scheduling systemwide by July 1, 2024. When the deadline came and went without full implementation, the BLET filed a lawsuit.
At the time, UP said the number of starts per engineer had fallen, rather than remained stable as the railroad and union had hoped. The union argued that UP unilaterally modified the agreement by placing engineers returning from rest days at the top of the call list, rather than at the bottom.
Now engineer scheduling is in place at 20 of UP’s 28 crew hubs, executives said on the railroad’s earnings call last week.
One of the goals, CEO Jim Vena says, is to ensure that all engineers have the same number of starts per month as they did before adoption of the 11/4 schedule. “We’re close but not perfect,” he said in an interview. “And that’s the stuff that we have to work through.”
Keeping the number of work days level is important for both the union and the railroad. For engineers, it means stable income after the shift to scheduled work. For UP, it means the railroad doesn’t have to hire more engineers to handle the same amount of traffic.
Vena, who worked as a conductor and engineer early in his career at Canadian National, says he understands how important it is for engineers to be able to know when they’ll be working and when they’ll have days off.
“We’re a better railroad when we get to a place that we can maximize the number of people that know what their schedule is,” he says.
Vena says he has spoken with engineers who want to maximize their income and therefore don’t like the scheduling system. But he says the majority support working 11/4.
UP has not been able to reach a scheduling agreement with the SMART-TD union that represents conductors. SMART-TD has five separate regional contracts with UP, which Vena says complicates negotiations.
“I think there’s a deal to be made with SMART,” Vena says. “So far they’ve decided that we’re not on the same page, but we’ll go through that and get to the right place.”
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