Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 13, 1991 TAG: 9104130028
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES/ BUSINESS WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Very short.
"If the rail shuts down, it would drastically affect our business," said Jones, manager of Roanoke Feed Mills. "We only can keep a surplus for about three or four days. It will have an effect on us, a big effect."
The Vinton mill, owned by Richmond-based Southern States Cooperative Mills Inc., receives tons of soybean meal, wheat middlings and whole corn each day in rail cars - some 60 percent of the local mill's ingredients for animal feeds.
"We're one of the more rail-dependent places in our system, so if the rail stops our dependence has to change to trucks," Jones said. "But there aren't a lot of trucks sitting around waiting for a rail strike."
Still, no one seems to be panicking. H.A. Schirmer, executive vice president for Blue Ridge Transfer Co. Inc., has yet to receive any desperate calls from businesses afraid they'll be hurt should the rails quit running. That could happen anytime after 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, when a federally mandated extended cooling-off period between the unions and railroads expires.
"If there is a rail strike, I'm sure there will be some opportunities for us," he said.
Dick Lawson, president of H.L. Lawson & Son Inc., a public warehouse, said: "Anybody that's got product they can't afford to tie up is aware of this situation and is more than likely planning on going to trucks.
"I don't foresee [it]shutting down the country. There will be some disruptions," said Lawson, who saw about 50 percent of his in-bound freight come by rail last year.
Although nearly 85 percent of the newsprint used by the Roanoke Times & World-News each year arrives by rail, the newspaper's officials said they're not concerned that a strike would endanger their supply.
"We keep an inventory on hand for strikes in the [paper] mill that pop up every couple of years," said Dennis Woodford, pressroom manager. "In an emergency, we can bring it in by tractor-trailer."
Union leaders say their rail company counterparts are betting that economic disruptions amid a recession will prod Congress to intervene in the 3-year-old labor dispute. But they fear Congress will impose a solution that proves more advantageous to the companies than labor.
"My preference would be to fight," said Joe Pugh, general chairman for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees' Norfolk and Western System Federation. "As long as the carriers think Congress will step in, they have no incentive to bargain."
The sticking points sound familiar: wages, work rules and health benefits. Some 235,000 rail union members across the country have gone without pay raises since Jan. 1, 1988, as negotiators strove to fashion a new six-year contract.
Once an impasse was reached last year, a presidential emergency board was named to study union and company concerns and then recommend a compromise. The result, issued in January, was derided by unions as devastating and criticized by carriers as not going far enough.
But consider the gulf the board was trying to bridge:
Railroads - saying rail workers are the highest paid of any in the transportation industry - sought a wage freeze for many craft workers, pay cuts for what they say are superfluous conductors and brakemen and wage restructuring for clerks. Unions countered, calling for a 5 percent base pay increase, retroactive to January 1988, plus semi-annual cost-of-living adjustments.
Pinched by the skyrocketing cost of health care, the carriers called for a "managed care" plan where possible. The remaining workers would split the cost of care, with 80 percent paid by the plan and 20 percent covered by the workers. Unions balked, eventually offering a modified proposal to a health package that was designed in the mid-1950s.
"I don't want to negotiate my insurance away," said one area union leader. "I want to go to the doctor I want to go to."
Railroads sought a 48 percent mileage increase in the definition of a "basic day" for train crews - from 108 miles to 160 miles, phased in over four years. Faster, more efficient trains have made the union wages too expensive, rail officials say. For example, they say a through train could complete its basic day in four hours so an eight-hour shift would cost two days' wages.
Further, carriers called for a reduction in the size of train crews, saying that the current size - usually an engineer, conductor and one or more brakemen - simply preserves union jobs. United Transportation Union officials say the carriers agreed in 1984 not to further reduce crew size without union agreement up front.
"The money issue, the crew . . . issues are completely unacceptable," said L.P. King Jr., general chairman of the UTU's conductors' committee. "It appears we have no alternative but to strike. Our backs are against the wall."
Yet, union leaders and rail officials keep hoping a costly strike can be averted.
by CNB