As most of you know the provisions of the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (RSIA) are scheduled go into effect on July 16th. This office is receiving calls indicating that there is a sufficient amount of misinformation on this subject to warrant some correction.

After months of negotiations with BNSF attempting to come to an agreement on a product that would help both the UTU and BNSF implement RSIA, the Carrier gave us what was portrayed as their final, take-it-or-leave-it offer. The Carrier’s final proposal contained some benign provisions, but also some provisions that were simply untenable to this Committee. They also advised that this was a package deal that had to all be accepted and that it would not be available on a location by location basis. In other words, the entire package must be accepted by the entire General Committee. Also attached to the final offer was a cancellation schedule of all 215 existing rest cycle Agreements across the system (except for existing 5/2 arrangements.) There was then a subsequent offer from BNSF to defer the scheduled cancellation date for any General Committee that was attempting to ratify the Carrier’s proposal, but only until their ratification process was complete and the Carrier had the programming in place to operate the new rest cycle arrangements. Based on the unanimous negative feedback we’ve received from the Local Chairpersons, this General Committee will not attempt to ratify the Carrier’s proposal, as doing so would seem to be an exercise in futility. Therefore, we do not qualify for the Carrier’s deferment offer and they appear to be going forward with the cancellations. That’s where things stand today.