I do not want to start an argument, I am just telling you what I saw.
-
My salary and the salary of an employee I personally know went down. We lost our railroad retirement board benefits. We also lost the job security of working for the company, instead of bidding on projects for the company.
-
Health insurance and retirement benefits are worse, in our case, than UPRR's.
-
Now, we will have to account for every single half hour of work. No longer salaried employees, we can make more sometimes with overtime, but the stress is far greater and the pressure to just put something out there higher.
-
I don't even know how this is legal, but in consulting, you are often told upfront that you will work a minimum of 10 hours overtime before you start getting paid time and half.
The MIPPs, who were not all degreed engineers, may somehow have it better. I don't know any personally, but I can see that. No longer pushed around by the militaristic railroad chain of command, they now get paid by the hour, make overtime, and essentially choose when they work.
Long term though, by outsourcing the little of what was left of its engineering department, UPRR has obliterated any future prospects for having a strong bench of talent in its engineering department. Long term, this will undoubtedly hurt the company, especially when you consider that 100 engineers are only 0.25% of the company's workforce but have an outsize role to play.
Also, long term, the pain will get worse and worse. Right now, and for the next 10 years or so, UP can rely on the people they fired to keep working for them from a vendor. Once those people retire, move on, get hit with a recession, etc... there won't be any more ex-UP MIPPS, there won't be any more ex-UP project managers. Eventually, it will just be a bunch of fresh graduate engineers, working for an outside vendor, that have zero loyalty to, and very little understanding of what makes UP tick. That will lead to ever higher consulting fees and inefficiency.
The cherry on top is that by doing all this, UP has also lost any real power at the American Railroad Engineering and Maintenance of Way Association (AREMA), i.e. the folks who write the design codes for the railroad. Now, when those committees meet to make new rules, do you think they're going to listen to someone from UP who they know doesn't have much of a clue concerning the technical details in the manual? The consultants will have even greater power, so there won't be any incentive to keep things nice and simple; the more complicated they make that manual...the more you have to rely on them.
Felt this was a insightful post. Originally posted by @Xrvlsiz-4slj .