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Voting ended Tuesday for a new tentative agreement (TA) for train engineers at Class I carrier CSX. The contract, touted by both management and the officials of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen as a breakthrough, in reality continues a decades-long decline in working conditions, paves the way for automation-driven job cuts and further cements the partnership between unions and management to suppress rank-and-file opposition.

However the vote goes—the results will be tabulated by June 11—the contract is the outcome of an illegitimate process. The union bureaucrats, eager to avoid the type of rebellion which nearly led to a national strike in 2022, are splitting off workers by craft and by railroad into formally separate contracts (albeit with virtually identical terms on wages and other key issues) in order to isolate them.

It is clear that officials in the 12 major rail unions are trying to isolate train crews from the rest of the workforce. This is the only engineers’ contract which has been announced for engineers of any of the Class I carriers. Additionally, they are isolating workers at Union Pacific, where only one small contract has been ratified, where management is demanding major concessions.

Canadian Pacific Kansas City is also bargaining separately on wages and work rules. For its workforce in Canada, who had struck nationwide last year, a government arbitrator has just imposed a pro-company deal with 3 percent annual wages increases.

Workers must plan for the battles ahead through the building of rank-and-file committees, as they did in 2022, to organize against the union-management-government collaboration, overthrow the bureaucratic dictatorship in the unions and prepare the ground for a broader fight uniting with workers across the US and the world against mass layoffs and dictatorship, accelerating greatly under Trump.

What’s in the tentative agreement

Key details of the contract include:

• The agreement provides a 17.5 percent wage increase over five years. This is even less than the 24 percent under the current deal, which was imposed by an act of Congress after workers rejected it. By contrast, other recent pattern agreements in the industry have secured 18.8 percent over five years. 

  Over the past three years alone, cumulative inflation has eroded workers’ real purchasing power by more than 9 percent. Moreover, prices are already beginning to rise as a consequence of growing trade war measures. This means that a 17.5 percent wage increase over five years will almost certainly fail to keep up with inflation.

• The TA grants five paid sick days per year, with the option to convert two personal leave days. This is a slight improvement over the previous absence of sick leave, but still woefully inadequate.

  The Congress-imposed contract included zero sick days per year, but CSX and other carriers threw workers a handful of sick days afterwards as a public relations maneuver. Moreover, what is given is easily taken away. Last year, Union Pacific revoked a new scheduling policy giving workers four days off for every 11 days worked, citing “labor shortages” created by management itself.

• The agreement is vague on vacation accrual for new hires, raising concerns that younger workers will remain locked into inferior conditions compared to their senior colleagues. A $200 per month health insurance “opt-out” incentive, an increase from the previous contract, encourages younger workers to forgo health company coverage entirely, seeking insurance either from family plans or the open market, leaving the possibility open of being severely underinsured.

• The monthly premiums for the high-deductible health plan (HDHP) are set to increase again this year, further squeezing already vulnerable workers’ take-home pay. While the TA highlights tout expanded dental and vision coverage, these benefits are meaningless for workers who can’t afford to use them.

  With high-deductible health plans getting even more expensive and out-of-pocket costs rising, the reality is that most engineers already struggle to get time off to see a doctor at all. It goes without saying they will also struggle to go to the dentist or optometrist instead. For thousands of lower-tiered workers, these so-called “improvements” will do next to nothing to actually address their health needs or financial strain.

• The contract offers an insulting annual boot allowance, as well as travel pay, but these minor concessions ignore the central issues of fatigue, safety and work-life balance. They are emblematic of the union’s bargaining strategy of offering small perks to distract from the fact that the fundamental problems remain untouched.

• Worst of all, the contract continues the hated Precision Scheduled Railroading system. Developed by executive E. Hunter Harrison, PSR replaces traditional practices like unit trains and hub-and-spoke operations with a focus on moving individual railcars on fixed schedules across simplified networks.

  The stated goal is to improve efficiency and lower costs. The practical impact has been the implementation of brutal attendance policies, longer trains, fewer crew changes, and a relentless drive to “do more with less.”

  While PSR has delivered substantial financial gains for shareholders by reducing operating ratios, its effects have been devastating on railroad workers. To enforce these leaner operations, railroads have implemented harsh attendance policies which penalize workers for taking time off and exacerbate fatigue and work-life imbalance.

Bureaucrats isolating engineers from conductors

The BLET has gone ahead with the engineers’ vote even as negotiations for CSX conductors, who are members of the Sheet Metal, Air and Rail and Transportation Workers - Transportation Division (SMART-TD) union, have broken down. The key issues around which talks have stalled include provisions in the new BLET agreement.

The central conflict is CSX’s push to dismantle local seniority districts and consolidate them into larger regions, a move that would force workers to cover wider territories, endure longer shifts and face fewer crew changes. This restructuring, presented as a bid for “flexibility,” is nothing more than a strategy to eliminate jobs and intensify workloads—an approach that has already resulted in the loss of at least 67 positions being eliminated through attrition, even as management denies outright layoffs.

The ongoing deadlock over Articles V, VI and VII in the SMART-TD contract is a stark demonstration that the core issues of rest and scheduling remain unresolved. These articles—covering scheduled off days, automated bid scheduling, and the restructuring of pools and extra boards (a reserve, on-call type labor pool)—strike at the heart of workers’ demands for predictable time off, humane work schedules, and protection from arbitrary assignment changes. The 2025 TA is not a break with the past, but its continuation.

The isolation of the conductors is all the more criminal given that the railroads are renewing their push for one-man crews, eliminating the conductor position entirely and running trains—which have gotten so long they often stretch for two miles—with only one engineer.

Both the BLET and the SMART-TD bureaucrats are responsible for this. Already, conductors have rejected a deal at BNSF paving the way for one-man crews by creating a ground-based “facilitator” position. In a recent video, one SMART-TD official berated workers, claiming that job losses to automation were inevitable and that conductors had to fight over what few jobs remained.

Likewise, CSX’s restructuring is aimed at further reducing crew sizes and replacing human labor with technology, under the guise of “operational flexibility.” While industry executives claim that automation will support rather than replace workers, in reality they have eliminated tens of thousands of jobs over the last decade and they will use the technology to accelerate this.

The rail unions are trying to fool workers into wasting their time appealing to Congress. The BLET has thrown its support behind Democratic politicians like Sherrod Brown and Andy Kim, both of whom voted to ban a strike and enforce the 2022 contract settlement.

The crisis in rail labor cannot be separated from the broader political and economic context. As the industry braces for renewed threats of economic warfare and global military conflict under the second Trump administration, railroads are “streamlining” operations to weather economic shocks. With $200 billion in cross-border rail trade at stake, every move toward “flexibility” and restructuring is aimed at shifting the burden of global instability onto workers’ backs.

Union officials, far from resisting this agenda, have embraced a fraudulent “national unity” narrative. The BLET officials are promoting Trump’s right-wing “America First” nationalism and attacks on immigrants, blaming Mexican engineers for job losses which they themselves arae responsible for.

Worse, the unions have lent support to the bipartisan war drive and anti-China policies, which demand even greater sacrifices from rail workers in the name of “national security” and “economic competitiveness.”

The lesson of recent years is clear: a real fight will not come at a bargaining table in which bureaucrats and executives conspire against workers behind closed doors. This must be opposed by the collective power of workers organizing a rebellion against this conspiracy, through the Railroad Workers Rank-and-File Committee. The accelerating global economic crisis and the threat of war only heighten the urgency: railroaders cannot afford to wait for salvation from above.

Regardless of the result of the vote, railroaders must build their own rank-and-file networks in the US and internationally, and prepare for strikes and actions that are controlled by workers themselves.