I've Been Working on the Railroad Part 8

The 1980s

The early 1980’s brought some changes to working on the Burlington Northern Railroad in the Twin Ports area. The economic downturn found the railroad with an excess of clerks. Most of the lower seniority clerks had not worked regular shifts for many weeks. Rumor had it we were going to merge with another railroad and morale was at an all-time low with the uncertainty.

In 1980 the ICC approved the merger of the Burlington Northern and the St Louis and San Francisco Railway. After the dust settled, we found how it would affect our employment. Our Extra board would now become a Guaranteed Rotating Extra Board. (GREB) Each clerical employee was assigned a guaranteed wage based on the job he or she held at the merger. Mine was fairly high as at the time I was a keypunch operator.  The rotating extra board would no longer start at the seniority top each call period but at the next person out. When you worked, you were placed at the bottom of the board in the order of when your shift ended. They would call when you got to the top of the board again. If you didn’t work 5 days during the week, you would file guarantee claim for the days not worked and it was paid at your guarantee rate. If you worked a job with a pay scale lower than your guarantee rate, you would put in for the difference of pay.

Even though this was a union negotiated agreement, the railroad did not like paying for work not done. They tried a few things to get some of the excess employees to quit their jobs by offering them very skimpy severance packages. When that didn’t produce the results they wanted, they chose to offer the clerks a job cutting and scrapping railroad cars. I was fortunate I didn’t get involved in that program as I was pregnant at the time. The clerks that did work as car cutters often complained about the lack of training for the job they were required to do. There were a lot of injuries and soon that program itself was scrapped. The next plan was the rubber room. Not sure what it was officially called but employees were required to show up and sit in a room with supervision. Not allowed to talk, read or do anything but sit there for 8 hours. Days were long in the rubber room, and a few more clerks took a severance package.  Eventually the supervision in the rubber room was relaxed, and the clerks were allowed to spend their time freely as long as they were on the property. Most of the remaining clerks stayed with the hopes of getting a bulletined position soon. Even the GREB positions were now bulletined.

Other changes were also being made. A new rail yard was being built above 28^th St along with a new yard office.  From the outside, the yard office looked like a metal sided pole building and I suppose in many ways it was. Entering from the east parking lot, the large room was the new home for the clerks. Yard office employees were to the right while freight office employees were to the left. The outside walls were lined with offices so there were no windows in the room. The Superintendent’s office was the North East corner; next was the clerical supervisor office. On the other side of the door were the claims offices.  The room was carpeted. Noticeably missing were the keypunch machines, and cards. Desks had a CRT and a keyboard. Many of the jobs that were at 17^th St, were eliminated in the move as we moved from the COMPASS computer system to YMS or the yard management system which was a cardless system.  There was a counter leading to a door to the other side of the building which housed the trainmaster’s offices, the crew office and the train and switch crews lunch room. Restrooms were accessible from both sides of the building. There was also a small conference room on the clerical side of the building. From the switch crew’s lunch room, there was a stairway to the yardmaster’s tower. With Windows on 3 sides, the yardmaster had a good view of both the 28^th St yards and the 17^th St yard.

It wasn’t long after the move to 28^th St that management decided clerks would be more productive if they worked in cubicles. The tall gray carpeted panels were brought in and each workstation was separated from the next. I failed to see how it was more productive because if the work wasn’t there, no work could be done. Supposedly it cut down on visiting. Morale became worse as more jobs were cut, or being threatened to be eliminated. Still we did our best. Sometimes it was impossible to complete during our shift but we always knew there was always another shift.

The jobs at Duluth were not immune to the cuts. With the advent of YMS, the clerk jobs in Duluth were consolidated. The Duluth Freight office job duties were added to the Superior jobs.

The YMS system allowed for us to do the same types of reporting that we had done in COMPASS but it was all done on screen. Gone were the racks with their decks of cards, a clerk still ran the yard for the yardmaster but there was less chance of failure as there were no cards to drop. Inbound and outbound manifest clerks were combined, there were yard checkers to verify trains and transport crews. Added to the clerical jobs were crew haulers who would be sent to pickup a deadhead crew and transport a new crew to the train. Crew Haulers could be called out any time of the day but could not be penalized for not being available outside of call times. Many nights I was not available as the distance driving didn’t agree with me. While recently it had become law that smoking was no longer allowed in the workplace, many did not extend that to include the vans. Days when I was called upon for crewhauling or yard clerk, I knew I would go home with a massive headache from the second hand smoke. Yard clerks spent most of the shift in the vans waiting for trains to verify or crews to transport.

Taconite by this time had taken over the shipments of raw ore so the digital scales at the Allouez scalehouse was dismantled and stood for years as a ghost of times past. The jobs came off the dock as the new conveyor system allowed for ease of loading taconite onto the ships. Reporting was done from a small office in the Allouez yard by one clerk. Most of the small ore jimmies were scrapped and replaced by newer taconite cars.

Still, for the most part though morale was low, we did our jobs and tried to stay out of trouble. The largest shipper during this time were the coal trains coming into ORTRAN (now called Midwest Energy). Grain trains had fallen off drastically and never recovered from the strike of the late 1970’s. There were the interchanges with the other railroads but not to the degree of the 1970’s. Times for the railroad were changing in the Twin Ports.