The unAmerican way to run a railroad

We know the American way.

Fast Eddie Burkhardt nickle-and-dimed his workers half to death his entire career. Even after the horror of Lac Megantic, Burkhardt was arguing that single operator trains are safer because there are "fewer distractions."

E. Hunter Harrison got a $50 million signing bonus courtesy of Bill Ackman to work his slash-and-burn magic at Canadian Pacific. Does anyone dare question if there is a connection between Harrison's goal of slashing a quarter of the workforce and the fact the rate of accidents at CPR has gone up by 26%?  

    

Believe it or not, there's another way to treat employees. Here's an excerpt from the website of German rail operator DeutscheBahn:

What we do for our employees

For a secure future – and a lifetime career

We accept responsibility for our employees. It begins with first-class training and continuous education, followed by fair wages based on collective bargaining agreements, down to comprehensive social benefits.

What the hell is wrong with those people?

Burkhardt and Harrison would die laughing!

Security?

A lifetime career?

Training?

Comprehensive benefits?

Get outta here!

Disaster profiteering in full bloom at Lac-Megantic?

Here's a fascinating story from CBC about the clean-up after the Lac-Megantic train derailment.

The Mayor of the town claims that Ed Burkhardt, the CEO of the company that owned the train that exploded the town, has stopped paying the clean-up crews.

Furthermore, she tells us that the town has now stepped in and forwarded $4 million to the clean-up crews to keep them going.

Let's do some math. If the clean-up crews were on the scene within 24 hours (which they weren't) they would by the time of the Mayor's press conference have had 384 hours to clean up the wreckage, assuming they worked around the clock.

A big power shovel or mobile crane runs about $250/hour. Let's assume there are at least six on the site, which is more than we've seen in any photos of the clean-up. Let's assume those six machines have been running 24/7.

Let's assume there are another half-dozen small loaders or trucks taking away debris at roughly $125/hr.

We'll assume they have been working 24/7 for the past 22 days as well.

Let's assume that the boots-on-the-ground number a hundred people, which they don't, and each one is being paid $40/hr, which they're not, and they work 24/7 too.

That adds up to $2,400,000 cost to date for the clean-up.

So why was the Mayor forced to fork over $4 million to keep the clean-up crews on the job?

Federal officials working overtime to cover their butts on train disaster

Edward Burkhardt isn't the only one doing the 'tain't-my-fault boogie in the wake of the Lac Megantic disaster.

Have a look at the regulators who gave the thumbs up every time Burkhardt found another corner to cut.

Oh golly, now they are concerned about his insurance coverage?

And oh my goodness, you don't mean that there is a remote ever-so-tiny possibility that the TAXPAYER could end up on the hook?

While the sentiments expressed are cleverly engineered to arouse contempt for the railway and sympathy for the regulators, the fact is, this is how it usually works in Canada.

The highly efficient private sector rapes the land/forests/waters what have you, and when the plundering is done and the efficient private sector is long gone, the tax-payer moves in to clean up the mess.

Who remembers Peggy Witte and the Royal Oak Mines saga?

There was a time when you couldn't open a business paper in Canada without reading some obsequious testimonial to the woman who had fought her way to the top in the macho world 'o mining.

She was the "woman of the year" here and the "miner of the year" there and by God you couldn't turn around without bumping into a half dozen stories about what a genius Peggy Witte was.

Peggy is long long gone but the Canadian taxpayer is still cleaning up her mess.

It's actually worse than that; if you read the story through you realize that for a billion dollars of taxpayer money, we're not actually cleaning up the mess, but merely deferring the cleanup.

So don't be taken in by the self-serving cries of alarm coming from the regulators.

The taxpayer always foots the bill after the efficient private sector geniuses have skipped town.

The terrorism of unregulated capitalist enterprise

While we don't want to read too much into the Quebec train explosion at this early hour, there is one thing we know for sure.

Back in the day, a train such as that would never have been left unattended.

There would have been a caboose and that's where the crew would have stayed for a layover.

But that extra crew and that caboose are easy pickings for the efficiency experts who want rail traffic to be lean and mean.

We now have one incident which by far has caused more mayhem than all of the terror attacks in the history of Canadian terror attacks.

If we can spend billions avoiding the latter, why can we not spend some loose change preventing the former?