In the coming year or so, the Surface Transportation Board will determine whether to approve or block Union Pacific’s $85-billion acquisition of Norfolk Southern. This signals an attempt by Wall Street to squeeze yet more from this critical infrastructure in order to maximize returns for shareholders.
In 2023, Surface Transportation Board (STB) member Robert Primus was the sole board member to vote against the merger of Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern to form Canadian Pacific Kansas City. President Trump’s recent illegal firing of board member Primus further weakens the STB and corrupts its adjudicatory mandate. The absence of a key critical voice from the Board raises the pressure on concerned workers, shippers, competing railroads, and the public to make their voices heard. Unless Primus is reinstated, the approval of this Wall Street railroad merger is a near done deal.
Railroad workers, in particular, find themselves in a difficult situation. Being divided into several different unions, workers and their union leaders are often forced to choose between accepting concessions for their own particular craft and holding out in the name of industry-wide solidarity. A UP-NS merger involves even higher stakes, as it could very well result in significant cuts to the workforce resulting from the elimination of redundancies between the newly-combined railroads.
To better understand the dilemmas faced by workers in the fight ahead, and to help us pick apart the smokescreens that UP and NS are promulgating in an effort to charm workers into submission, we got in touch with Ron Kaminkow. Ron is a longtime ally and collaborator of Solutionary Rail’s. He is also a co-founder, former general secretary, and current trustee of Railroad Workers United (RWU), a cross-union caucus of railroad workers that aims to build industry-wide solidarity to more effectively stand up to Wall Street’s railroads.
Last month, RWU, passed a resolution unequivocally opposing all future Class One railroad mergers. (Read the press release here.)
Although this conversation between Ron and Reconnect America Host Bill Moyer took place before Robert Primus was fired from the Surface Transportation Board, RWU has also released a statement condemning the move and demanding Primus’ immediate reinstatement. Solutionary Rail will be addressing this in the coming weeks as well.
Ron and Bill’s discussion ranged from this resolution and the stakes involved in the merger for workers, to the service meltdowns that Ron witnessed as a railroad worker during the last merger wave in the 1990s, to the larger question of whether the coast-to-coast transcontinental railroad that UP and NS are proposing to form might not be a better idea if it were owned and overseen by the public.
Reconnect America is hosted by Bill Moyer, co-author of the book Solutionary Rail: A People-powered Campaign to Electrify America’s Railroads and Open Corridors to a Clean Energy Future. Check out the essays and supplemental posts that complement this podcast HERE.
