Rail union leader retires to clear way for upstart who won

OMAHA, Neb. — The longtime head of the second-largest rail union announced Friday that he will clear the way for the upstart candidate who beat him by retiring instead of fighting to keep his office in a second election.

Eddie Hall received 509 more votes than Dennis Pierce in the election that reflects how frustrated engineers are with the contract they received this fall after three years of bargaining that doesn’t resolve all their quality-of-life concerns about demanding schedules, the lack of paid sick leave and the way they are treated by the freight railroads.

Pierce, who has led Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen since 2010, said he will step down at the end of the year. Concerns about violations of internal election rules during the campaign prompted a union committee to recommend that the election be rerun, but Pierce said he didn’t want to put the union through that divisive exercise.

Instead, he urged members to unify against the freight railroads in the fight to improve working conditions and abandon divisive rhetoric.

“If President-Elect Hall and the Advisory Board that he will preside over are to have any chance at success, the hateful rhetoric, division and infighting fostered by social media and egged on by outside non-member forces must end,” Pierce said. “The membership must stand united in the fight against the rail carriers, and stop blaming their union and its officers for the actions of those carriers.”

Hall learned about Pierce’s decision while sitting in a railroad hotel on the road during his required downtime after driving a train out of Tucson, Arizona. As a vice local chairman of a regional union division, Hall was a longshot initially but his campaign gained steam with his focus on a need for new leadership.

Hall said his first priority will be working “to get our membership united and engaged in the union.” Then he can turn his attention to trying to persuade the railroads to reform the lean operating model they adopted that led to more than 45,000 job cuts across the industry over the past six years.

“People don’t coming to go to work anymore. I think these railroads — I think these CEOs — can get that back. They just got to change their plan,” Hall said.

The five-year contract that rail workers wound up with does include 24% raises and $5,000 in bonuses and the engineers narrowly approved that deal even though it didn’t include any paid sick time other than three…