Andrew Sandberg: Hello everyone. My name is Andrew Sandberg. I’m the president of the IAM Machinist Union that represents machinists on the railroads across the United States. We represent the mechanics that work on the locomotives. We have been actively telling Congress and everybody that would listen that something like this was going to happen. And we are here to stand in solidarity with the people of East Palestine and the other labor unions to see what we could do to help. Thank you.
Speaker: Can you talk about what’s happened
Andrew Sandberg: So you would think it has gotten as bad as it could be, but after having derailments similar to this, sometimes twice a week, the railroads still think that they should cut workers away from the work that they do to prevent things like this from happening. It’s not just, but we work in the shops. We work on the trains and parts of trains. We work on locomotives, but our brothers work on the tracks. And you could see that there have been track failures that have been causing derailments and deaths. Really, this is the worst thing that has happened in the United States in a very long time. What happened here, and again, we’ve tried and tried and tried to caution over this, but my brother had said that the corporate greed is really what has taken over here. They cannot make enough money. So they’re starting to, in the last five years, they’ve probably furloughed about 2,000 to 3,000 of just machinists that work on the railroads across the class one railroads, Norfolk Southern CSX, BNSF, and the UP.
And it never seems to be enough. They just keep cutting and cutting away from their maintenance that they used to do. And like I said, this is the result. Things that happened here are the result of the lack of maintenance that the railroads refuse to do. They refuse to do the required maintenance and therefore this is what we end up with. Not only that, but they would rather assign workers that aren’t trained to do the work of inspecting locomotives and they’d rather have them look at locomotives so that they can miss what we call FRA defects. And we’ve made a mountain of information to give to the FRA and explain to the FRA. FRA is the Federal Railroad Administration. They’re a part of the Department of Transportation. Nothing has really changed. You can see we put together some signs. The Rail Safety Act is something that we believe can help with this situation of putting trains that are going to explode eventually on the tracks and prevent them from being used and make sure that they are being repaired beforehand. Thank you.