Daily News | SEPTA and Regional Rail union are fighting over pay and managers filling in as engineers
Contract negotiations between SEPTA and the union representing the engineers who drive Regional Rail trains are at an impasse over wages and the authority’s decades-old practice of using management employees as fill-in engineers, union leaders say.
The engineers’ contract expired March 2 but, by federal law, railroad employees stay on the job and begin talks with a mediator on a new one. If the sides can’t agree, the matter can ultimately be decided by an emergency board appointed by President Joe Biden — as happened with a dispute between freight railroads and unions last year.“We are committed to good-faith negotiations on a new contract” for the engineers and other unions, said SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch.
Managers in SEPTA’s rail division with locomotive-engineer licenses have been scheduled to be on-call to run trains on weekends and holidays through January 2024 when union crews are not available, according to a roster emailed to employees in February by the senior director of railroad operations. The union believes that SEPTA has lost at least 35 engineers out of 213 in the past several years. SEPTA says 27 engineers from a roster of 205 left between January 2020 and March of this year.
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