A Rail Strike?

If it happens it would be a disaster for people like you

Hey there,

I was just minding my own business scrolling through Twitter and I came across this tweet about a railroad strike and I came across this tweet thread earlier this week:

Lauren Kaori Gurley @LaurenKGurley

For folks asking: why is a railroad strike looming that would shut down much of the major transportation infrastructure in the US (.... & impact nearly every part of the economy from food to energy to retail)? A little context: It all boils down to sick leave policies.

The chemical industry is completely reliant on four major modes of transportation for moving chemicals. The first is pipelines, the second is freight including bulk and packaged goods, the third is barges (drought can complicate this as we see with the Rhine), and the final is railroad via bulk railcars. The Texas freeze showed us what happens when non-weatherized natural gas infrastructure gets frozen and if a railroad labor strike occurs it’s going to make that look like a tea party for the economy.

The crux of the story which has been published in The Washington Post with reporting from Hamza Shaban, Lauren Kaori Gurley and Jaclyn Peiser:

“All we’re asking is folks to be able to go to routine doctor’s visits without pay, but they have refused to accept our proposals,” said Dennis Pierce, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET). “The average American would not know that we get fired for going to the doctor. This one thing has our members most enraged. We have guys who were punished for taking time off for a heart attack and covid. It’s inhumane.”

Whenever I think about my time in the chemical industry there are echoes here with the Railroad Workers. These companies are often “lean” for the front-line employees salaries and benefits and “lean” on doing the minimal amount of preventative maintenance. There are often barely enough employees to cover shifts, ever decreasing benefits, and when your coworker calls in sick you might be operating really dangerous and massive pieces of equipment alone.

I thought it couldn’t get worse, but I guess I didn’t know the situation with railroads. The full story is worth a read and I wont rehash it all here, but a lot of commodity chemicals get transported by railcar including acrylics (used in coatings), phenol, sulfuric acid, isocyanates, polyols, and too many to list here. The chemical industry is still mostly reliant on just in time shipping, minimal raw material inventory, and barely paying their vendors on time. Any disruption to this delicate ballet of just-in-time hurts everyone a lot.

If a rail strike did occur then the chemical industry comes to a halt in about a week. Raw materials would cease to move where they need to go and there would be an attempt to push those materials to freight and the companies willing to pay a premium might get a bit of volume moved, but it wouldn’t be enough.

The next thing that would happen if the strike continued past a few days (I suspect Congress would intervene at this point) would be force majeure letters going out and we would experience the worst supply chain crisis the country has seen in the last 30 years. Per reporting in The Post story the last rail strike (30 years ago) resulted in Congress taking action within a few days.

Rail is a specialized job that requires intensive training and it can be really dangerous. You cannot just import new workers to take these jobs to break the strike. The jobs are more complex and dangerous than a typical manufacturing job and failure in the job can have huge consequences. Mistakes can happen when you have just pulled your 4th night shift that spans 12 hours and you haven’t been sleeping well. This is why we don’t work alone in labs and manufacturing facilities.

Ultimately, I’m not surprised reading the story, but rather I feel for those rail workers. I suspect the rail transport business has become less profitable overtime due to numerous reasons and the employees of these companies have also taken that reduction in profitability, but I suspect the distribution of pain has not been even. In talking with some people I’m alarmed at how little holds together the domestic manufacturing grid on some critical components. If you wanted to look at national security issues then domestic manufacturing reliability and supply chain transport should be in the top 3 and we are our own worst enemy.

While writing this story for the newsletter it looks like there is a tentative agreement that has been reached on September 15th. Per reporting from the New York Times by Jim Tankersley:

Freight rail companies and unions representing tens of thousands of workers reached a tentative agreement to avoid what would have been an economically damaging strike, a relief for American businesses and consumers and a win for President Biden, whose administration helped broker the deal.

….

The agreement now heads to union members for a ratification vote, which is a standard procedure in labor talks. While the vote is tallied, workers have agreed not to strike.

The deal was praised by both freight companies and union leadership, reflecting a key compromise on issues of improved working conditions for rail workers, which had been the biggest sticking point in the talks.

As of the publishing of this newsletter it appears that there will not be a strike, but if the deal is/was not ratified then things could change. I suspect that we will narrowly avoid this disaster. I’m honestly surprised we don’t see more disasters, but perhaps it is the people that make the difference and keep things from falling apart. We should treat people better.

Tony

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Community

I am trying to help this audience connect with one another and a reader of the newsletter recently reached out to me about needing some additional presenters for the Microfab Conference. I know there are a bunch of synthetic polymer chemistry applications for lithography and chip development so if you are interested then consider replying to this email or reaching out to me on Twitter @tpolymerist.

I can help get you in touch with the conference organizer and if you have the time it might be worth going to just network and see what is on the cutting edge of chip fabrication.

If you have an event you are trying to promote and it’s related to this newsletter in some way please drop me a line on how I can help and if you think it would be helpful to the audience.

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Hey, you made it to the end. Rail transport and chemicals have had a long history and an “almost disaster” with the transport of molten phenol via rail was the basis for the movie Unstoppable starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. Here is a clip where they decide how to figure out how to stop the runaway train with no one on board and it doesn’t sound easy. In this movie it is the people who work for the railroad company who save the day. You should note that this movie is based on true events and is a fictional story.