■ From the Field

A Place Called “System”

The Board ordered the merger's job numbers onto the public record. The applicants filed them on deadline, the same afternoon they announced something else entirely.

Every job on a railroad has an address. That is not sentiment, it is administration: you cannot call a man to work without knowing which board he stands on.

On 22 July the Surface Transportation Board ordered Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern to make the merger's employee-impact exhibits public, classifications and locations both. Seven labor organizations spent three weeks prying them loose. The railroads complied on the twenty-seventh, exactly as ordered. That same afternoon the applicants announced four new customer commitments. The release does not mention the exhibits.

So I read them. A hundred and seven pages, some seven thousand rows. Twice.

The union-jobs claim holds. Appendix A nets a gain of 1,199 craft positions against a promise of roughly twelve hundred, and anyone who called that number fiction owes the record a correction. Appendix B was filed the same day, in the same PDF, by the same counsel. It covers management: 1,138 reduced, zero created. Add them, and 1,199 becomes 61.

They did not misstate the number. They chose the denominator.

And the largest single line in the craft appendix is a location called SYSTEM.