(NewsNation) — The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWED), a union representing railway workers, says Norfolk Southern is offering to give union members paid sick time if they drop their objection to the expanded use of automated track inspection devices, which may reduce the use of visual inspections by rail employees.
Track inspections are currently conducted by human track inspectors. Letters from Norfolk Southern, obtained by NewsNation, allege that Norfolk Southern wants to use automated track inspections instead and offered BMWED union workers four paid sick days in exchange for their support.
Peter Kennedy, the director of strategic coordination and research for BMWED national division, and Jonathan Long, the general chairman for American Rail System Federation of the BMWED, discussed the offer during an interview with “On Balance” host Leland Vittert.
Kennedy said the offer did not come as a surprise to him.
“I’d like to say that I was shocked but given the status of the industry for the last five to seven years, with the focus on cost cutting and eliminating any sort of reasonable safety precautions, it was not that surprising,” Kennedy told Vittert.
In a statement to NewsNation, Norfolk Southern said they have already reached agreements with three unions expanding paid sick leave. The conditions of those deals were not revealed.
“As part of our negotiation with BMWED, we asked them to reconsider their opposition to the expansion of our Automated Train Inspection Program (ATIP), an advanced technology that has great potential to increase the safety of rail operations,” Norfolk Southern said.
According to Kennedy and Long, they are not completely opposed to using the Automated Train Inspection Program (ATIP) in some way, but they want actual rail employees to perform certain inspections as they feel ATIP cannot detect as much.
“We still want our members to perform those visual and other types of inspections that the ATI equipment can’t detect such as the surroundings of the track. Yes, it can pick up defects on the track, things such as that, but there’s so many other things that the equipment cannot detect,” Long said.
Norfolk Southern has a different story.
“ATIP technology can detect track defects with significantly higher accuracy than a human inspector, and because ATIP is mounted on locomotives, it conducts an inspection every time a locomotive traverses a track — a much greater frequency than what is possible with a human performing a manual inspection,” Norfolk Southern said.
In wake of the East Palestine train derailment, Kennedy says he hasn’t seen a change in how rail companies are approaching how they deal with hazardous materials or safety issues. His priority is keeping union workers safe.
“We want our folks treated very respectfully, and we want to know that they’re safe. They want to know that they’re safe. These guys work at the derailment site. They are really worried, they’re very concerned, their families are concerned that what they’re being exposed to, if there are going to be any long-term effects,” Kennedy said.
Due to Wall Street and political influence, Kennedy does not believe railroads will change until they have to pay a price.
“I don’t believe it’ll change until Wall Street and these hedge fund managers are taken out of the industry,” he said. “They’ve had way too much influence. They’ve harmed the industry. … The industry is upside down right now and we’ve got to get back on the tracks.”
NewsNation correspondent Kellie Meyer and digital producer Stephanie Whiteside contributed to this report.