All The Livelong Day — E8

When the boss wants you gone, it’s only a matter of time, and this rolls out extra nastily on the railroad. In this episode, the story of Nickie Jackson, and how she was hounded by the railroad. Danelle digs deeper and Ruby tells her about a miracle.

Want to see Nickie? Check out @flipturnpods. Have a tip? Danelle’s gathering worker stories for a reporting series. Leave us a voicemail – our number’s in the credits.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
When I go in, it's doctor. He's standing there and
he says, okay, we need you to do so many squats. Okay,
So I do the squats. Then he goes, okay, we
need you to be able to stand here. And they
brought in a male nurse and they go he needs
to try to knock you down. Most times, when you

(00:31):
get your back to work physical, the nurse takes your
blood pressure and wait, but that's not what it's like
working for the railroad. I'm standing and I'm almost like
in a sumu position. I'm standing there. He grabbed me
by my arms to try to move him. So I
just grabbed him and sling to the side, and so
he comes back at me again. I throw him the

(00:51):
other way, and so he's trying to wrestle with me.
But I'm still throwing him all load the place, and
it's doctor's like she's not moving, and the nurses like
she's strong were than me. Nicky was a Union Pacific
freight conductor trying to get clear to go back to work,
but this physical was testing her in ways that had
nothing to do with her job. It was a setup.
Usually when you get your physical, the doctor isn't expecting

(01:13):
you to fail. So the doctor's looking at me, yo
as well, you're beating all my tests and you're knocking
my nurse all around. What happened? They said you couldn't band,
you couldn't squad, you couldn't do anything. I said, you
saw a fact girl and figured you can knock me down.
But you got to realize I do this job every

(01:34):
day and if you look at me, I'm the delicious,
you know. The doctor asked Nikki why the railroad was
putting her through this, So I tell her, well, I
had a superintendent. He said some things. I said some things,
and he was mad. He said I embarrassed him, and
so he goes. So he's trying to burn you, I said, basically.

(01:57):
So he wrote a nice note. But even with a
doctor's note, Nikki still hadn't heard the end of it.
Everybody knows when you piss off a manager or a superintendent,
they come after you. It's the way at a railroad,
you always know. When I went to Colton, a hobo
capital city, I wanted to see the risk Ruby took

(02:20):
living on the outside. But hanging around Colton, I found
another story, one about the people who keep the city
of the rails in motion, the story of the people
who drive the trains. We've been raised to think of
engineers and conductors as these jolly figures. Throw away that
childhood cartoon of Thomas the tank engine. For workers, the
locomotive is the battleground where when the employees get hurt,

(02:42):
they say, the railroad finds ways to blame them for
their injuries so it doesn't have to pay. Plus Now,
after the East Palestine derailment in February, the issue of
how the trains run and who runs them seems more
important than ever, and the perfect place to examine this
age old conflict is a case made by one thicklicious
train conductor, settle In for Niki Jackson versus Union Pacific,

(03:05):
a tale of train yard bullying. You'll not soon forget.
I'm did Alm Morton and this is City of the
rail After hanging around Roseville meeting Jonathan and Robert, I

(03:49):
understood working for the railroad wasn't exactly a regular way
to make a living. The hours are crazy, and the
workplace is a world of its own, separate from the
one that most of us live in. In the last
five years, it's gotten even rougher while the railroads cut
nearly a third of their workforce, and the workers haven't
been quiet about that. When you cut things to the bone,
those left have to work harder to get the job done.

(04:11):
This forces the people in the city of the Rails
to form bonds that feel like family wearing on the rails.
Nikki used to rely on her railroad family, but one
incident in August twenty seventeen kick Nikki out of that family,
and through her story, I saw how the railroad breaks
you down. I met Nikki at her house in Morino Valley, California,

(04:31):
a little desert town a couple of miles due south
of Colton. Nikki welcomes me into the great room of
her suburban ranch house with a big screen TV over
the fireplace. She's dressed simply in sweats, but the one
thing I noticed right away are her colorful nails reaching
an inch past her fingertips. A little bit of femininity
she maintained the whole fifteen years she worked as a

(04:52):
conductor for Union Pacific. There's not too many women on
the rails, only six percent of that workforce's female. But
to Nikki, getting a job on the railroad was like
winning the working class lottery. She was a single mom
working three jobs to support her four kids, and the
schedule was insane. I worked at DMV in the mornings,

(05:12):
I worked at Walmart at night, and then on the
weekends I worked at factory. To you, two hours sleep
a day. Working three jobs with four kids, even if
she was home, it was tough to get to sleep.
So when Nikki heard about the railroad's benefits, she wanted
that job. At the railroad, there's great healthcare and a
retirement system separate from and much better than Social Security.

(05:36):
And as a conductor, Nikki would still have to work
long hours, but she'd have much better money and federally
guaranteed sleep. Congress governs railroad workers hours and mandates they
get ten hours rest between shifts. And here it is now.
You guys are gonna give me ten hours at least
you got me. This is a big step up. Sure,

(05:58):
this would be a hard job, but getting hired onto
the railroad was a lifeline for her family, and the
salary would be enough to move them directly into the
middle class. And I made more money. They said I
would only start with sixty still made ninety and over time,
I made a hundred thousand, but it was a challenge

(06:18):
from the start. The railroad waste no time explaining what
work will be like. Early in the screening process to
become a conductor, the teachers describe how much time you'll
be away from home. Then the teacher gives the prospective
employees half an hour to call their families and advises
that if their partners don't support this demanding schedule, they
shouldn't come back. Most times, fewer than half the class returns.

(06:44):
Rigid Tokuna a retired yardmaster, and Colton told me what
he used to say when he greeted new employees. Whenever
we have I have a new guy with me, and
when I was on the ground, I'd always tell him,
you know, we welcome to the family. They're going to
see me as much as you're going to see your family.
You may see me more. And they look at you

(07:04):
and they say, nah, oh yeah, you see him five
or ten years later, look at me. And I still
remember that, Richard, I still remember that. When I heard
about this, I thought about how hobo's and the people
who work on the railroad are walled off from the
rest of the world. In the city of the rails.
Even though workers get paid well, their lives are dominated

(07:27):
by the rails. Taking this job cuts them off from
the rhythms of daily life and bonds them to each other,
just like hobos and their road families. So Nikki knew
what bargain she was making when she decided to join
the railroad family. But this was only the beginning. Those
who make it through that initial shock stay in a
hotel for several weeks to get trained and to take

(07:47):
a test to qualify to start working in the yard.
But during those three weeks, Nikki endured a lot of
petty harassing. I get to the hotel to get my
rule and my hotel reservation has been canceled. Someone stole
her training manuals. They give us our books and everything.
Come back, I don't have anybody. They even gave her
broken equipment to train with. These annoyances were meant to
drive her away. Think that typical girl. I said, I'm

(08:10):
not a pushover, never have been, I never will be.
So Nikki kept cool like railroad women before her. Nikki
had a high heels to combat boots moment in committing
to a life on the rails. Nikki's came when an
instructor went after her for something very precious and highly personal.

(08:30):
He goes, well, you can't work here because you have fingernails.
So I reached him my purse, pulled out my clippers
and I cut them off. I said, these are minds love.
They will grow back. So everybody's like, oh, the rails
take a lot from you. But Nicky wanted this job,

(08:50):
and she decided she'd tough it out. After a few
months on the job, Nicki made friends with her coworkers.
It's twelve hours. You're just sitting there in darkness looking
at the stars. So you have to stay away. You

(09:10):
hope you have an engineer that you can get along with,
and you guys just talking and talking. Basically, I'm sitting
there and I'm calling out signals for the most part,
So you sit there green signal, yellow signal, red signal,
just make sure he stopped, and he's away. During these

(09:36):
long nights in the cab, she found out which of
her co workers would be her railroad family. The guys,
you know, once you got to know them, you got
to know their families. You got to hang out with them.
Our kids are growing up together. We got to do
things together. From day one, Nikki was living her life
on railroad time. Most days, Nikki worked a twelve hour shift,

(09:57):
and sometimes those routes had her staying overnight in a
hotel far from home. One thing I found interesting the
railroaders don't call their work a shift. They call it
a tour of duty, like the military, because a lot
of the culture of the railroad comes from its beginnings
when it was one of the first corporations formed after
the Civil War. Officers and troops from both sides of
the conflict got hired on the railroad and shape the

(10:19):
culture and the hierarchy. This is the kind of thing
new hires find out when they start to work, that
the rails have a strict command to control structure that
demands employees follow orders and doesn't really tolerate sassing back.
Working her tour of duty in the cab of the engine,
Nikki also learned by word of mouth that if you
get injured, it's best not to tell the bosses if
you can tough it out. She heard plenty of examples

(10:42):
of her co workers getting fired for reporting an injury,
and the practice of covering those up is a tradition
as long as the rails themselves. But when Nikki got
injured in the train yard a few years after she'd
been hired, there was no way she could just tough
this one out. Nikki was in southern California, next to
the Port of Long Beach, in the dolorous yard, and

(11:03):
it was right before Christmas New Year's and so we're all, oh,
Merry Christmas, see you next year, hugs and kisses. I
get to the rear step out, so I'm standing there
and I'm waving goodbye, and the ground starts to shake.
And as it's shaking, it's collapsing and it was like
quicksand and I started to spin and I'm going down

(11:25):
and I'm screaming, Well, I got stuck and wind up
hitting it at my butt. That's how deep in yere
you're like two feet Briefly, well, still never felt the bottom.
My right leg was stuck and I couldn't move it,
and my other leg is dangling, and the driver had
called management and he's screaming the conductors down and we're

(11:47):
all panicking. Satan tried to take me alive, but he
underestimated I got a big button. Nikki thinks it's funny now,
but it was a serious injury. The manager came to
extract Nikki from the hole, but he didn't call an ambulance.
The manager he just threw me in his truck and
he drove me to the hospital. So Nikki's ankle was

(12:10):
swollen and bleeding. She torn a ligament at the top
of her foot, and she couldn't stand. Her manager was panicking,
and up was vulnerable to a very expensive lawsuit. So
the system to suppress injuries kicked in. The injured worker
is supposed to report the injury, and the manager carried
those forms with him, but instead of letting Nikki fill

(12:30):
it out, he got a pen and started to write
it for her. While we were there at the hospital.
They wrote the statements for meat, and when the boss
writes the report, it sounds different than if the employee
had written it. Everyone in this yard in La knew
the ground was weak where Nikki was standing, and somehow
that didn't make it into the report, at least not
into the manager's version. They knew about that hole. You

(12:52):
was just the one that stood on it, and he
gave away. Jeff Dingwall, Nikki's attorney, handles a lot of
these cases. The Railroad would send out, you know, some
manager to maybe even going to the treatment room with
them guiding the employee on what to say to the doctor.
They would take additional statements from the employee while they
were in the emergency room, sometimes under pain medication, and

(13:15):
then what they would try to do is get these
statements to not match up. Imagine that you get injured
on the job and the manager comes with you to
the hospital. Richard Akunya, who was also the union president
in Colton, told me the second he heard one of
his workers had been injured, he rushed to the hospital
to make sure that Union Pacific managers weren't telling the

(13:35):
doctors what to do. When Nickie hinted she might not
sue Union Pacific change their tune, they did all they
could to keep her happy. They had someone take her
to her physical therapy appointments, get her groceries, and hand
delivered her an enhanced paycheck. You have permanent damage on
your foot, so you have a case to sue that

(13:55):
I did. Well, I did have a case I did.
They just kept paying because they would pay me more.
They was paying me way more than what I was making,
and you know, I was comfortable they made sure I
was comfortable, specially say don't sue us. No, no, They

(14:16):
just says, are you going to get an attorney? And
I said, why are you gonna treat me nice? If
you're gonna keep treating me like this? Why and how
long were you off? For? Nine months? For those nine months,
Nikki got chauffeured around by the railroad, which was motivated
to take good care of her. But years later Nikki
was going to be dragged right back to that sinkhole.

(14:38):
He said, I embarrassed him, and he embarrassed. He embarrassed himself.
I was just making him aware after the break how
Union Pacific got rid of Nikki After Nicki's foot injury.

(15:07):
The next ten years were uneventful as she performed her
duties as a conductor with a spotless record. The railroad
is nice when you play their game, and Nicky played
that game when she chose not to sue after being injured.
But this changed for Nikki. In August twenty seventeen, Nikki
was on a route from Colton to Yuma, Arizona, when

(15:28):
her engineer saw an unexpected red flag I had on
the tracks and it's like, it's that a flag slow
to train down. We got to stop before we get
to that flag. Mind you, Yuma is just desert saying
nothing there, you know. And I'm looking out in this
field and I see three vehicles. Why huh? And then

(15:51):
they turn and they're coming towards us, and I said,
we're being tested. The new superintendent for Mara, Barba, and
two subordinates, boarded Nikki's train. Since he got the job,
Barbara had imposed some new practices and aggressively promoted Union
Pacific's new slogan to keep employees on their toes, the
Courage to Care. Nikki described what that slogan was supposed

(16:14):
to mean for workers. If you see something happening, stop
the line, make sure this person is black. No, don't
do it that way. Do it this way, safer, this way.
And he says he has this open door policy. You
can speak to him about anything. Lots of big companies
take up these kinds of slogans when they tell you,

(16:34):
if you see something, say something, they're making the dangers
of the workplace the employee's responsibility. After Nikki and her
engineer passed the field test, Barbara asked Nikki if she
had a brakestick a long stick used to apply the
brakes instead of climbing the ladder to turn the wheel
at the top of the car. Nikki hates breaksticks and
any conductor can do the job without one, but Barbara

(16:56):
told her she had to use one. He was making
them mandatory. Said, well, let's talk about it. Do you
realize that thing is heavy. I'm holding it up over
my head, I'm turning it over time. It's gonna ruin
our rotator cups. When your shoulders hurt, you can't sleep well.
So now their shoulders hurt and they have to climb

(17:18):
up on this car, You're gonna either hurt yourself or
you can possibly kill yourself. So he goes, oh, well, huh,
why would you say that? So I'm saying, okay, So
what I'm hearing from you because during the course of

(17:38):
my career, I didn't lost my ankle because I fell
in a sinkle. I lost my reproductive system from climbing
up on cars. And now Nikki had to have an
emergency hyster directed me where she was rushed to the
hospital right after work. She believes that this injury was
work related. All she can see with this courage to

(17:59):
care thing was another injury. So frustrated, Nikki threw the
slogan right back at Barba, I say, so you really
don't have the courage to care. Well he leaves. Everybody's like, wow,
he's pissed. Okay, you know, sorry, but we go on.

(18:22):
The railroad has lots of tough guys. So and Nikki
stood up to Barba. She didn't think much of it,
but Union Pacific emails about the incident described Nikki as loud, confrontational,
and dissolving into tears. Meanwhile, Nikki's engineer, Mark Sylvester, who
witnessed the exchange, wrote an email that supported her version
of events. He described this as a regular professional conversation

(18:45):
that kind you'd have with managers, president and inspection. Why
do these two stories sound so different? Nikki's mom, Rosalind Jackson,
had an answer, That's why she has such trouble because
Niki is that person that a challenge of man. She
don't have a problem, but make it a man, feel
like you ain't a man. Just finally, Nikki didn't think

(19:08):
much about that exchange with Barbara as she and Marked
made their way back to Calton, So she was surprised
by what was waiting for her when she got off
the train. So we get back to Colton and I
get a message saying I have a safety meeting with
the director in the morning. At the meeting, the manager
demanded Nikki report her ankle injury and her hysterect to me,
even though the ankle injury definitely had been reported and

(19:31):
she had been cleared to return to work after the
hysterrect to me. Nikki's head was spinning. He says, you
said you hurt your ankle. I said, you guys knew
about that. I said, you paid me nicely to be
quiet and not to sue you. I failed out injury report.
You even had your managers taken me to the doctor.

(19:51):
So did this injury happen or not? I checked the
Federal Railway Administration database of rail employee injuries. It's just
a slip fell stumbled injury due to an uneven surface.
On December twentieth, two thousand and six, the day Nikki
almost got swallowed into a sinkhole. This injury happened in
Los Angeles County, the county with the Dolores Yard is located.

(20:12):
The victim's age was Nikki's age at that time. Thirty four,
but that wasn't what they wanted to acknowledge. In twenty seventeen,
there in the office, the manager demanded Nicky write out
new injury reports. This is one of the ways the
railroad lays a trap for you. Her co workers knew
what was coming for Nikki. An engineer, Sidney Williams, recommended

(20:33):
a lawyer, Jeff Dingwall. He'd seen this playbook a hundred times.
And they'll say, we needed you to write this injury
report out. And typically it'll be in somebody's office where
it's just you and the manager, or it's in somebody's
truck on the side of a railroad somewhere on the
middle of nowhere, where it's you and the manager. Sometimes
the managers would write out the report themselves and make

(20:55):
the employee sign it. Sometimes they would make the employee
fill it out, look at it, crumple it up, throw
it away if they didn't like what it said, and
have him write another one. And these are examples I'm
giving you from cases I've had. So this isn't like
I'm just making stuff up. These have all happened. And
so you know the pressure and the intimidation. There is
inherent in the process, and that's certainly what happened to Nikki.

(21:20):
I heard lots of stories like the wind that Jeff
described of the manager standing over the employee in a
conference room as he writes out of statement, ordering him
to start again and again until he gets it right.
So Nikki wrote those new reports, and the next day

(21:43):
in Pacific removed her from service without pay or benefits,
citing health problems, the one she dealt with years before.
Then her supervisor ordered her to submit medical records to
prove she'd even been injured in the first place. But
Nikki's attorney, Jeff, told me that really everything they were
asking for from Nikki was all part of the trap.

(22:05):
What was messed up about it? If all of these
injuries had been known to the railroad for a long time,
she had reported to them, she'd been treated for them,
she had been cleared to return back to work, and
now for them to say we didn't know about these things,
and we're going to yank you out of work and
making jump through all these hoops and do these things
to get your job back is not uncommon for what
they do. But that's kind of what led to her

(22:28):
lawsuit being filed. This time, Nikki was off work for
four months, and those months were nothing like the last time.
She was not being delivered groceries or paid extra by
the railroad. She wasn't being paid at all. Well, Nicky
was out of work. It was her railroad family that
took care of her. Those same railroaders she had vacationed with.

(22:49):
They started coming by to check in on Nikki. I
mean it was. It was like a bliss feeling because
a lot of them came and they gave me money
to pay my bills. Soon it was like I got friends,
you know. They came by all the time, and so
I was there for lonely I was. They were upset.

(23:09):
They would take me ould it. I appreciate it. But
after four months home getting deeper in debt, Nikki was
eager to get back on the job. After persuading her
doctor to turn over all her records, Nikki returned to
work in January twenty eighteen, but from that moment forward,
her work life was hell. Before she was allowed to

(23:30):
start her first shift, she had to complete that ridiculous
physical where she found herself sumo wrestling a nurse. Fitness
for duty tests they will send them off to their
own kind of hand selected doctor and have them do
a physical exam. In this case, she passed with flying colors.
That physical wasn't the end of it for Nikki. In

(23:50):
February twenty eighteen, Jeff Dingwall fold the whistleblower complaint with OSHA,
citing the unsafe conditions in the yard and harassment. And
after that plant was filed, Nikki started getting tested a
lot more. He had managers testing me all day every day.
Any day I went to work, I got tested. Nikki's
friend Sidney Williams, now a retired engineer, remembered when Nikki

(24:13):
had a target on her back, and he remembers Ramero Barba.
She was on their radar. More than likely she got
tested more. Nikki carries herself in a way that they
don't like, the alpha male, black or female. He went
beyond the call of duty to do what they demanded

(24:34):
that he do, to go after certain people. They didn't
like it. They didn't like Nikki. Every time Nikki got tested,
it slowed down the train leaving or getting home. It
got to the point a lot of people didn't want
to work with me because they're like, we're gonna be tested.
I don't feel like dealing with this today, and you
know so people would be nervous to ride with me.

(24:57):
I mean, of course, you want the railroad workers to
be tested to make sure they're doing everything according to
the rules of safety. They're driving these huge beasts, and
a lot can go wrong. Like carry Westcott said, you
can't be distracted working on the railroad, and you can't
be nodding off driving the train. But that wasn't what
happened to Nikki. They were scrutinizing her extra hard, trying

(25:19):
to catch her making even the tiniest mistake. They tested
her arm strength. They asked her to tide the brakes,
but gave her a broken brakestick. They even made her
run on the treadmill. We're not allowed to run because
we are on ballasts. The ballast is big rocks, so
you're gonna fall, and you don't want to fall under
a moving train or on the train. If they catch

(25:40):
you running, you get rolled up. So I'm like, I'm
not supposed to run, and they go you have to
run for nine minutes. All I can see was myself
flying off of this treadmill into the wall. Nikki passed
that test, But wow, this testing was something else. The
crazy thing is it's not unique to Nikki. Labor organizer
and read engineer Ron cam and Cow listed some of

(26:02):
the things that railroad managers could get you on. There's
a million things. So you weren't wearing earplugs, you didn't
have your safety glasses on. Your boot, didn't have a
three quarter inch heel, this wasn't tucked in. You were
wearing a tank top instead of as a shirt with sleeves.
You didn't have lace up boots, you had slip on
boots like motorcycle boots. I'm just going through a lot

(26:23):
of things in my brain over the last twenty five
years that I or others have been accused of, and
so it's very very easy to fire almost anybody on
the railroad. That's one of the additional stresses that we
put up with. But of all of these tests, she endured.
The story that's stuck with me most is when they

(26:45):
made Nikki walk a mile on the ballast in the desert.
It was a hundred degrees. The bosses were walking on
the road watching Nikki, who had to walk on the
unsteady rocks by the tracks, so I'm like, how many
times do I have to prove myself? And the whole
time Nikki was walking, the managers were taunting her, trying
to tempt her to stop just for a moment so

(27:07):
she would fail. And then one of the managers Nikki,
would you like a water? I just look at him
as I'm walking. Are you serious? You already told me
if I stopped for any reason, I am disqualified. Why
would you do that? And well you look thirsty? Right? Okay?

(27:28):
When we finished a mile, have my water ready? This
is a scene I couldn't get over when I thought
about it later. Here these hostile managers have trumped up
this test that they make sure it takes place in
scorching heat so they can mock her and try to
make her fail. So I sped up and I walked faster.

(27:52):
I finished my miles, and I'm standing there waiting on them.
Day after day, Nikki passed all their tests, but she
knew this wasn't the end. Like her mom said, every
time she entered the yard, they were watching her. Every
time you turn around, this guy was study following her.
You know, get her in trouble. Are people that's around her?

(28:15):
Get them in trouble. If she seemed like she was
being too nice to somebody's inn, that person became a target.
But Nickie was determined to stick it out to the
bitter end, be an exemplary employee and the hope that
she wouldn't get fired. She loved her job and she
was good at it, but as her mom said, there
was something more to it. She took more than I

(28:37):
would have took. I tell you that. But she needed
her job, you know, she was basically a single parent.
After more than a year of constant surprise testing, drug testing,
and scrutinizing her paperwork, Nikki did what the bosses had
been waiting for ever since. She tunted Barbara about his
courage to care. Nikki made a mistake, one that wasn't

(28:58):
uncommon on the railroad and sometimes results in a suspension.
She was setting out a car railroad terminology for separating
a car from the rest of the train for their customer.
When the car got loose and smashed into the wall
of a factory. It was like, look, this car just
got away. What do you want us to do? The
managers that came me and are the managers that's targeting

(29:20):
me with the superintendent. I'm like, great, well, I guess
I'm a vacation. Nikki assumed she'd be pulled off work
for a few weeks, but it wasn't a vacation. Nikki
got fired. Jeff Dangwall still remembers Nikki calling to tell
him he was astonished that the railroad would take it
this far. I called her and she told me what

(29:44):
was happening. And from a legal perspective, you know too,
I'm just thinking to myself, who's a whole the idiot
lawyers at the company that are like signing off on this.
So I'm getting picked off at my own profession. Somebody's
got to like have a level head and do the
right thing here. And so I fired off an email
to their lawyer and I said, this is a bad idea. Oh,
you don't want to fire somebody who's already got a

(30:06):
retaliation suit against you. And the response is essentially like, Yep,
this is what we're doing. We're going forward with it.
And it was just like that matter of fact, and
that's simple. In response, Nikki sued Union Pacific for wrongful
termination and harassment, a case that took two years. So

(30:27):
all of a sudden, the upside of Richard Kunia's statement
circles back to Nikki. They were her family. They were
the only people who could understand what she was going through,
and they showed up to support her. But that railroad
family would have to put their jobs at risk to
testify and supportive Nikki. They need to take a day
off work without pay and talk about how brutal and
vengeful their bosses were, then go back to work under

(30:50):
those same bosses. And it was like, I gotta be sneaky,
I gotta ask my friends put their jobs on the line.
And it just got to the point of like, these
people don't need to sacrifice like I did it, you know,
so if I had to stop, you know, it was
like fine, I'll settle with you. You know, I'll settle.

(31:11):
You wanted me, I'm gone, I will agree, pay me
this amount and we're fine. And that's what we did.
It was like, I'll walk away. They ground Niggy down
and she settled for lessons she thought the case was
worth because she didn't want to put her friends, her

(31:32):
railroad family through this trial. So in the end, the
railroad one, like it always does, they paid her something
and now she's gone that's the system and it still works.
We reached out to Union Pacific for comment. They replied, well,
we disagree with miss Jackson's rendition of the facts of
the case. Union Pacific does not comment unsettled cases due

(31:56):
to the confidential nature of the settlements. So after fifteen
years on the railroad, he took the settlement. But she's
still trying to find work so she can get her
full railroad pension. To do this, she's traveled to Oregon
and to Mississippi, taking three months shifts working for smaller railroads,
bit by bit, trying to stitch together enough months to
build up the five years she needs. This meant being

(32:19):
away from home for stretches of time, but she and
as it turned out, a lot of other former railroad
employees are on the same circuit. Oregon, it was the
same as anywhere else. I got along with the guys
with my crew, and on our days off we still
hung out. We went to the rivers and we went hiking,
and being that all of us had came from Union Pacific,

(32:42):
we really bonded. Oh, so these were a lot of
other guys who were taking these three months to gigs. Yes,
it's a lot of us, and everywhere you go. I
ran into the people that came out of Colton. The
thing is, like Jeff said, these stories are far from
after the break. What that means for the rest of us.

(33:19):
There was such good luck to meet Nikki, because without her,
I'd never have seen the conditions in the yard. I
was searching to understand their life. My daughter chose when
she dropped into this world. But I didn't see the
other people in the city of the rails, the ones
who keep the place running and the price they pay.
The railroads are something we see but don't see. They're
big and noisy, and those qualities blot out everything else.

(33:42):
But after last year's threat of a railroad strike, many
eyes took a look at the railroads for the first time,
and many more in the last month as news spread
of the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Both events reminded the public how crucial trains are. Most
people didn't know that if the railroads came to a stop,
it would be a massive blow to the supply chain,

(34:04):
a loss of two billion dollars a day to the
American economy. So let's start with a rail strike, because
of what I'd learned from workers like Nikki, I knew
it wasn't about money. During contract negotiations with the railroad unions,
the railroads offered workers an astonishing twenty five percent pay
increase retroactively, meaning back pay of five thousand dollars. But

(34:26):
it wasn't a surprise to me that more than half
the union members turned that down. They wanted a more
decent workplace, and most of all, they wanted paid sick days.
And how could the railroads say no to that. Their
employees work through the pandemic to keep the country stocked
with toilet paper and the tanks full of gasoline, but
couldn't get a paid day off if they got sick,
and the railroads wouldn't budge on that. They say, here,

(34:49):
take this pile of money, but you gotta work sick.
A lot of railroad workers were quitting. All they want
sick pay, dude, sick pay for the railworkers strike. Do it?
Like I say, is you better give these people what
they want, because if you shut the railroad down, it
shuts down our whole country. Among the rail workers quitting

(35:09):
in droves was Robert Hudson from back in episode two,
I quit because honestly the nature of the work had
gotten so stressful that it just wasn't worth it to
me anymore. If you ever wanted to have a life,
you have to sort of kiss it goodbye and just
work on the railroad. You can't plan anything, you can't
schedule anything. Whenever you try to have like a doctor's appointment,

(35:31):
you have to tell the doctor, yeah, I don't know
if I'll be able to make it, but I'm going
to try it for this date or that date. I
was on call for the vast majority of like the
fourteen and fifteen years that I was here at the railroads,
twenty four seven, every single day of the year, especially holidays.
The work was too stressful, the schedule was too unpredictable.
Good reasons for anyone to look for a new job.

(35:51):
But these aren't run of the mill work complaints. That
was clear when I spoke with JP Wright too. Between
the hours, the conditions, and the management wearing on the
railroad was killing him. You could speak to my co
workers and they would tell you I had a nervous
breakdown while I was working. In the last several months,
I just was completely insanely pissed off and just miserable.

(36:11):
And that's when I finally said to my wife, so
it could kill me. This isn't an issue if I'm
tired and it's someone who go work anymore. It's either
I'm going to go to work and they're going to
bring me home ins box. It's not just JP and
Robert who feel that way. It used to be that
this was a job handed from one generation to the next,
but no longer because the railroad takes too much away.

(36:31):
When I hired in, nobody quit the railroad. When I
hired out in Chicago, I worked with a lot of
young men who were the sons and grandsons and great
grandsons of railroad workers. You see less and less and
less of that. Now. You can hear railroad workers say
this today. I don't want my son railroading. This is

(36:55):
not a good sign. So what's the story here. The
railroads are one of the most difficult and dangerous jobs
in America. Everyone knows that going in, and that's why
the people who work on the railroad get paid so well.
But despite these good salaries, even people close to retirement
or quitting, what happened to this once great working class
job precisions scheduled railroading PSR means doing a lot more

(37:19):
with a lot less. It's capitalism gone crazy. But as
a management style it might sound depressingly familiar no matter
where you work under PSR. In the last five years,
railroads have cut their workforce by nearly a third, gotten
rid of a quarter of their locomotives and forty percent
of their box cars, and started running longer and longer trains.

(37:40):
So precision scheduled railroading is also the reason that recently
Congress started hearing from businesses demanding action. Apart from the workers,
manufacturers couldn't get their goods to market because rail service
was so unreliable, as I very often see as get
called to Washington. So it's a big deal when Transportation
and Infrastructure Committee Chair Congress and Peter de Fazio got

(38:01):
to lay into the CEOs of big railroads in his
opening remarks, we are at a point of crisis. Freight
service in the United States of America, which used to
have the best in the world, is abysmal. The freight
railroad ceo say, poor service. It's not had nothing to
do with us. Oh no, no, it's COVID supply chain.

(38:23):
Oh that their workforce. Oh, by the way, you laid
off one hell of a lot of your workforce, and
a lot of them are coming back to you because
they've been They have been disrespected, mistreated, and you've made
it more dangerous for your workers with these cuts. At
this twenty twenty two hearing, DeFazio delivered a no bullshit

(38:43):
rebuke to the men responsible for driving JP to a
nervous breakdown. You're not looking to change. I'm talking on
the CEOs now. You're not looking to change. You're just
ranking in record profits were more different ends for shareholders
and oh, hey, by the way, my salary also goes
up and my stock goes up. Isn't that great while
the country suffers. Defasio has been speaking in Congress about

(39:08):
the decline of the railroads for the past twenty years,
and he's got a lot to say about PSR. I've
been talking about this for a long time, and people say, oh,
that's just Defasio of carrying on. Well, now it's Defasio
joined with some very unlikely allies. That would be the

(39:28):
chemical industry, the energy industry, the agriculture industry, who are
bemoaning what has been done. The destruction that has been
wrought on freight rail in America, so called precision scheduled railroading.
This slashing burn management style transformed America's largest railroads from

(39:49):
a fussial technology into a profit generating machine. They now
make profits on a par with the world's richest technology companies,
in part by driving down conditions for the workers. As
regional monopolies, rail registers outrageous fees and deliver cars when
it's convenient for them, not necessarily the customer, and were
then making more money than they've ever made before. They've

(40:11):
got no incentive to change, and no government bodies to
demand that they do so. And when workers tried to strike,
the government wouldn't let them so. Just in case you
were wondering, you know, if we were if the supply
chain is shoes, we're going to get any better. They're not.
He's a chair right now. President Biden is asking Congress
to intervene to avert a potential rail strike before Christmas.
Raordinary level of corporate greed in America. There is no

(40:34):
better example than what is taking place in the rail
industry today, most of it. Twenty twenty two, there was
a rumble about a coming rail strike. The railroads and
the fourteen unions were at a stalemate. Ten of those
unions ratified the contract by thin margins, but the four
largest unions rejected it. Those four unions threatened to strike.

(40:55):
If they did, the others wouldn't cross the picket line,
meaning the whole rail network would come to us stand still.
More good stalled at port, grain growing musty, and silos
chemicals piling up at refineries. That's when Congress stepped in
to force the workers to accept a contract and it's
illegal for them to strike. Even President Biden, who famously

(41:15):
commuted to the Senate daily on an Amtrak train and
reminds everyone of his support of the unions, back the
legislation to make the strike illegal. As his press secretary
Karine Jean Pierre said, President of course supports he supports
paid sickly for all Americans and for including rail workers.
But he does not support any bill or amendment that

(41:37):
will delay bill that's getting to his desk by Saturay.
Those who give up so much to work on the railroad,
give up holidays with their kids, push through injuries and
hazardous conditions, deal with tests upon tests from their superiors,
those people were not even worth considering when a profit
was to be made, and Biden would be dragged by
business and political opponents if the railroads went on a

(41:58):
STRIKEE So I guess six days can wait, at least
for the employees who drive the train. In the last
few weeks, many of the big railroads have agreed to
offer six days to the craft unions like the workers
who inspect the cars or lay the traps. By cutting
back the staff so dramatically, the railroads need to hire
a lot of people, and Union Pacific offering a thirty
five thousand dollars hiring bonus as started to work. The

(42:22):
number of people working on the railroad increased by six
percent in January. But they still have to deal with
the fact that working for the railroad now has a
terrible reputation. Go take a look at glass Door. It
gave up a two point one employer rating. As one
railroader road pros ray pay, fun and exciting cons management

(42:42):
is cutthroat, looking for a reason to fire anyone. I
promise I did not get Ron camin Cow to write
that review. He's the veteran railroader who characterizes the worker
management relationship with those three little words. They hate us.
Nobody treats other human beings in the way that we

(43:02):
are being treated unless they actually hate us. They really
do hate us. They're spying on us, they're harassing us,
they're threatening us, they're disciplining us, they're talking down to us,
they're being condescending that they're like a malicious overlord who
lacks any sort of basic respect for us as a

(43:26):
worker and as a human being. And combine that atmosphere
with this constant work, constant fatigue, constantly being away from home.
Throw in the attendance policy where you can't even get
away from this to get some respite and some rest
and some time off the job, and you can quickly

(43:49):
understand how this is becoming an untenable situation for numerous
engineers and conductors in this country. Of course, this is
much bigger than the real roads. Like Robert Hudson said,
they're the pulse of the economy. They keep the country moving.
They've been doing it for two hundred years. But what
happens when that force begins to buckle under the weight

(44:10):
of its own greed, you know, and you have to
have people run the railroad in this country. The wheels
of industry could grind to a halt and we could
have a national crisis on our hands. Trains are the
most fuel efficient means of transportation, no innic humanity. Every
American should really be concerned about this. Not just railroad workers,
but a lot of railroad workers are past caring. They're out,

(44:34):
and so are a lot of other people. In the
last few years, during the pandemic and past its peak,
the country has experienced with the media calls the big
quit people like JP and Robert voluntarily quitting their jobs
saying I'm working too hard, working too long hours. It's
not going to get any better, and I've had it.
Sort of sounds like Mike Brody in our first episode

(44:55):
when he told me we're all just going around in circles.
Could it be that the young Obos were onto something?
What does your work mean to you? For many of
the people working on the railroad, the trains mean a
lot more than a paycheck. Talking to Nikki, I saw
how the rails transformed her. They gave her a lifeline,
a new kind of family, and boosted her to the
middle class. But when we look at a train, we're

(45:18):
not thinking about the workers. We're not thinking about the
risk they take. We're not thinking about the power of
the train holds. We're not thinking about the power of
the railroads. The reason Union Pacific can offer these huge
hiring bonuses is that they're swimming in cash seven billion
net last year, and they didn't spend that on the workers,
but on buying back their own stock six point three

(45:40):
billion dollars worth. That's a lot more than the four
point six billion spent on the employees pay and benefits.
The workers tried to strike, Who's in the news for
a few weeks when we were all worried about how
our Christmas presents wouldn't get to us for the Congress
forced the contract on the workers, and most of us
forgot about it, which is how these companies get away
with it. That's being railroaded. People walk away from the

(46:10):
railroad to take control of their lives again. Robert works
at a cemetery now, JP moved to Austria. Travelers walk
away too. Sometimes they're done for good, like Morgan, and
sometimes they're back on the tracks after a stint, like
Mike Brodie. Would Ruby be home for good when she
landed back here. It was in this context that I
got the good news that Ruby was nearly home. Ruby

(46:34):
and her boyfriend made it north to New York and
visited her brother Ben. I'd heard from them when they
were in Minneapolis, which has a big train hopping community.
They spent a pleasant week there, then hop the high Line,
the transcontinental route that goes right past cc riders trailer
on their way to spoken. I was so happy to
know about her progress, but I was also a little

(46:55):
anxious in a way. It was worse knowing what train
she'd hopped. When I was ignorant of I thought less
about it, But now I couldn't get her out of
my mind, wondering if something might go wrong on her
way home. Then one Sunday, Ruby called ecstatic. They were
hitchhiking from Suakan to Washington with their dogs and got
picked up by a pet loving worshipper of Our Savior,

(47:15):
Jesus Christ, who was moved to give Ruby her car.
She took them to the DMV and turned over her
registration to Ruby, who called me as they were just
about to hit the road in the Jesus Mobile and
head south to San Francisco. The car was a nineteen
eighty five geometro covered in Jesus stickers. Ruby described putting
her hair in pigtails and donning a dress so she'd

(47:37):
looked innocent if they got stopped by the cops. But
the problem was her boyfriend, a rough guy covered in tattoos.
Oh well, God might just be on their side. Jesus
take the wheel. After all my worrying, wondering if one
day I'd be going down some back alley or train
yard to retrieve Ruby. I was just delighted by this

(47:58):
image of her cruising back into the city with her
two dogs and her hobo boyfriend, and in the Jesus
metro that woman. I wish I could kiss her for me.
This was a miracle. I knew I wasn't going to
be Ruby's first stop back in town either. Likely i'd
get another call when she got back asking me to
get coffee. I was looking forward to that. I also

(48:20):
recognized by now I wouldn't be expected to offer an
opinion about anything else unless asked. My approval was not
part of the equation. And of course my life had
changed too. I'd pulled off Christmas at our home by
the lake, but now here at the barn. I'd given
away a lot of our old belongings. But she was
coming home, and Ruby was already off the rails, So naturally,

(48:44):
I thought my time in this world was coming to
a close until we heard the news. Cadaver dog searches
the remains of an abandoned New Orleans warehouse where a
fire killed eight homeless people. We talked to two victims
that escape before the fire got today. News of a
fire in New Orleans spread quickly through the traveling community.
A popular squad in the Ninth Ward had burned to

(49:04):
the ground. Eight young riders had been lost in the
flames in a warehouse right beside the railroad tracks, and
while major outlets had picked up the story, it was
only to mention that some homeless people had died in
the fire. I knew there was a lot more to
it than that. I wanted to tell the stories of
the people who died in the fire, And there was
still a lot that Ruby didn't want to tell me

(49:25):
about the time she'd been away. Maybe in New Orleans
I could get those answers. There was a big room
in the middle and had these huge doors that we'd
all hang out on, and it was like right by
the train yards, so it was like perfect to hear
the trains in the background, So I'm like, are you
on a train? No? Mom? Stop asking this big party

(49:46):
where like sixty or seventy people came because we were leaving.
It was awesome. But then at that party, that's the thing.
There's a lot of shadows in New Orleans, you know,
it's a shadow town. That's part of its romance is
around the bride, lights and carnival of the French corner.
On all sides of it are the shadows, dark streets,

(50:09):
empty buildings, open fields, and the train yards. Of course,
that's next episode on City of the Rails s the

(50:33):
Montica Samatica Doster fourteen as well be Drinking Gasoline. City
of the Rails is hosted by me Daniel Morton and
developed in partnership between Flip Turn Studios and iHeart Podcasts.

(50:55):
Want to give us a piece of your mind? Want
to tip us off? You only have two episodes last
get those messages in. The number is seven oh seven
six five three three three nine. We just might use
it in the show. And if you're a worker with
a story to tell, please give me a call. I'm
working on a series of stories about the railroads in
the workplace and I want to hear from you. And

(51:17):
if you want to follow Alan, find us on Instagram
at flip turn Pods. One day I'll start posting at
Danelle Ryder too. At iHeart. Our team is executive producer
and sherwinner Julian Weller. Our executive producer at Flip Turn
is Mark Healy, Senior producer and editing master Abu Zafar
and of course our Lady squad Shehina Ozaki and Zoe Dankla.

(51:37):
Plus we have new recruits. Thank you to Tricia Mukherjee,
Jackie Huntington and Jessica Krinchich for stepping into these last
few weeks with production support from Marcy to Pinat. Original
music every episode by Aaron Kaufman. Our theme music is
Wayfaring Stranger, performed by Profane Sass thanks to Scott Mischad
at Flail Records. Thanks Alex French, who pitched in while

(51:59):
finishing up a show of his own. Let's start a coup.
You can hear it wherever we're listening to this. Our
logo is by Lucy King Tinia and uses a photograph
by Mike Brodie and At iHeart, thanks to Nikki Etour
and Bethan maca Luso, and in this episode, Jason English too.
We'll be back next week in New Orleans on City
of the Rails.