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To look at this from a slightly different perspective:

In order to avoid having to hire ~12% more workers, they are requiring all their workers to be on call effectively constantly, allowing zero paid sick days, and just generally treating the workers they have as if they are machines, to an extent that even the games industry would look at and say "man, that's cruel".

And these people who are massively overworked, constantly overtired, coming to work sick and injured, are the ones who are—sometimes alone—responsible for ensuring that thousands and thousands of tons of metal go speeding along rails that go through some of our biggest cities, sometimes carrying toxic chemicals or fuel oil.

The results of a policy very much like this were on full display nine years ago in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec [0], when half the downtown was destroyed in a terrifying massive fire caused by the derailment of a train carrying crude oil.

This is corporate greed, plain and simple, privatizing profits and socializing costs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-Mégantic_rail_disaster

It absolutely is corporate greed rearing its head here (Railways are some of the most profitable industries in the US). Railways should carry more of the financial weight that will cut into the profits.

It should also be easier to hire people who want to work in these positions and staff beyond so that there is slack in the schedule and allow people to call in sick.

However note that in industry where there is slack and a relaxing of licensure, this represents an attack on the protectionism of jobs that is built into existing contracts to make it harder to fire people.

If you don't require licensure or as deep of training in spots, or have slack in the workforce, it becomes easier to fire people and that is something that is difficult for many union contracts to accept.

> Parts of this industry are licensed - you can't just go hire people off the street to fill those spots. They need between three months and year of on the job training and then some spots are under the licensure of the Federal Railroad Administration.

This is the part that I am really wondering about. Even for someone like BNSF I have to suspect that a 4% increase in a rather small labor cost is pretty palatable. It's literally not having workers to move trains that would be worse.

Im surprised they haven't loosed restrictions or threatened the union with more AI driving implementations. I have no idea how it works but for a majority of the route I could imagine that theyre "self-driving" in some places.

The unions were already complaining about the elimination of support personnel on the train due to safely.

They can't loosen the requirements for licensure or implement AI driving any more than you could do that for an airline today.

Would you be ok with having having people who haven't been licensed as pilots flying? Or only having one pilot flying ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33937973 )?

With a 'self driving' train that's a mile long... what happens when you have a train derailment that doesn't sever the cords and things go wrong? https://youtu.be/YQMZPB_rVJ0

There is positive train control ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control ) but that represents a significant investment in rails that are owned by companies... but it doesn't remove the responsibility of a human - it just reduces the spots where human error can cause problems.

Self driving freight trains are basically impossible given the rails they run on

About 99 out of every 100 train cars are self-driving. Removing the last one driver per train just isn't cost effective.

Aside: https://www.aar.org/article/freight-rail-crew-size-regulatio...

> Efforts to require at least two-person crews, including via regulation, lack a safety justification; ignore the decades of safe and successful use of single-person crews at some U.S. freight railroads and in passenger and freight rail systems throughout the world; upend meaningful collective bargaining, and undermine the rail industry’s ability to compete against less climate-friendly forms of transportation.

> Freight Rail Policy Stance: The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) should not impose minimum crew size mandates on railroad operations. A mandate is unsupported by any clear safety justification.

> Existing FRA regulations do not mandate minimum crew staffing requirements. For Class I railroads, recent industry practice has been to have two-person crews (a certified locomotive engineer and a certified conductor) in the locomotive cab for most over-the-road mainline operations. However, some non-Class I railroads have long operated with just one person in the locomotive cab, and thousands of Amtrak and commuter passenger trains, carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers, operate every day with just one person in the locomotive cab. And as an Oliver Wyman study found, these railroads’ safety records are comparable to two-person operations.

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And the most recent proposal on the subject: https://railroads.dot.gov/newsroom/press-releases/fra-issues...

(there is a fair bit of material out there on the subject)