The Ballad of the Lone Engineer? Downbound Train? The song writes itself. Yes, Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway had but one man in charge of a train full of crude oil from North Dakota, a train that had run through Toronto, a man who parked the train when his shift ended and went off to sleep in a hotel. That’s the trouble with a staff of one. At some point they need to rest their heads on a pillow.
At this point I’m wondering why he didn’t sleep on a berth the way long-distance truckers do. But this misses the main point, which is that in Canada, as much as the U.S., we worship the god of cheap. A staff of one is dirt cheap.
We want cheap oil, we won’t pay higher taxes for government regulation, we fear the loss of our own jobs, we trade ready cash for safety, and what it all boils down to is an engineer climbing down alone from a train of thin-skinned tankers holding oil that was salvation for a company desperate for freight after the economic collapse reduced demand for the lumber it usually hauled.
This fascinates me. I am always desperate to point out the dollar stamped on our everyday landscape. You should care about finance, you should care about the destruction being wrought in the EU by the ideology of austerity wrought by clueless economists. For someday it will come down to you.
Here is proof: You were never much interested in Wall Street, in decisions made in Ottawa, even in voting. But if you were told that the 2008 crash — built out of deregulation and pure greed — would push over domino after domino until one day you would read about fellow Canadians being burned to death, you would care more.
I will say it again. The god of cheap is the wrong god to worship.
“Movement of hazardous material by rail not only can be, but is being handled safely in the vast majority of instances,” droned CN spokesman Mark Hallman, who decades ago was a journalist. But safety isn’t about the irrelevant majority, it’s about guarding against the tiny number of moments when towns are levelled. Ottawa is cutting funding for Transport Canada by nearly a third.
Most jobs aren’t done well solo. It’s unsafe for clerks to work the night shift alone. Pilots, train engineers, air traffic controllers, care home staff and tree planters should work in teams, as surgeons do.
But the trend is to pare teams to the minimum to save money on salaries.
Many people work alone now, including those who shouldn’t. I bought a Miele dishwasher for its alleged excellence but was appalled to see it hauled and installed by one man, which is how Miele saves money As nursing staff is pared down, you need a relative to speak up for you in hospital. Rural airports are neglected. Airlines cut flight staff, which works until a crash and then passengers escape while hauling their carry-on baggage, as happened in the San Francisco catastrophe.
One worker is not enough. “If we’d had five guys on that train, I think the results would have been the same,” the owner of Rail World, the holding company that owns the Montreal, Maine railway, told the Globe and Mail. Really? Why? Presumably they wouldn’t all have left the five-locomotive, 72-car train at the same time, would have been there to ensure the brakes were on and functioning.
Every stage of profit is shaved to the bone now in our effort to compete with a Chinese level of efficiency. But Canada doesn’t have a peasant army moving to cities to work for dimes and live in dormitories. If we did, worshipping the god of cheap — shopping at Walmart, working alone, expecting subways without paying the taxes to fund them, living a Mayor Ford way of life — would be plausible.
Instead we clean up the muck. It’s composed of oil, human bodies and black rubble. The god of cheap accepts our offerings and rejoices.
Heather Mallick: Toronto Star 10 July 2013
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