Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern filed corrections to their merger job projections on the day the Board made their employee data public
Forty-nine positions. That is how much came off one of the merger's projected job gains when the applicants corrected their own arithmetic.
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern filed an errata on Monday in the Surface Transportation Board proceeding on their proposed combination, docket FD 36873. The letter, signed by Michael L. Rosenthal of Covington and Burling for Union Pacific, says most of the corrections stem from a spreadsheet error affecting truck-to-rail diversions. The applicants describe the impact of that error as small, and give the size of it: the number of diverted intermodal units falls from 1.58 million to 1.55 million. They then say the correction produces changes across the application and the workpapers, and that a further calculation issue, combined with the diversion error, affected employment projections.
The employment corrections are set out line by line in an errata table, alongside corrections to intermodal lift capacity at Council Bluffs, Sharonville, Ayer, Toledo and McCalla. Three of them restate passages in the verified statement of the witness Turner. At paragraph 267, the sentence that read that the applicants project they will need to fill 1,229 additional craft jobs now reads 1,173. At paragraph 270, a projected net gain of 770 new positions becomes 721, with the 928 positions abolished through optimization unchanged and the positions created through growth falling from 1,698 to 1,649. At paragraph 272, a projected net gain of 503 becomes 496, again with the abolished figure of 148 unchanged and the created figure falling from 651 to 644.
The pattern is the same in both. Fewer jobs created, the same jobs abolished.
Monday was the date the Board had set. In its decision of May 28 the Board accepted the revised merger application for consideration, held the proceeding in abeyance, and ordered the applicants to submit supplemental information by July 27. In a second decision on July 22, announced as release No. 26-18, the Board granted a joint motion filed on July 2 by several labor unions and ordered the applicants to redesignate as public the employee impact exhibits that had been filed as highly confidential. The Board said the type of information in those exhibits has been publicly disclosed in prior Board proceedings and does not appear to be commercially or competitively sensitive, and set the same July 27 date for the public versions.
Those versions were filed. Filing 311854 encloses the Employee Impact Exhibits redesignated as public under Decision No. 28, and the craft appendix in it is a location-by-location table drawn from a workpaper named Craft Employee Impact Report, listing positions abolished, created and transferred in each of the first three years and the destination for transferred jobs. Atlanta, to take one row, shows three, six and two positions abolished across the three years, no positions created, and 68 and then 118 positions designated as transferred to Omaha.
Two other filings landed the same day. One resubmits the full set of application workpapers under Decision No. 21, with a master index identifying the confidentiality designation and the upstream and downstream links of every file, and a change log covering everything altered since May 20. The other, signed by Raymond A. Atkins of Sidley Austin, is a notice that John F. Orr is no longer employed by Norfolk Southern and that Brian Barr, appointed chief operating officer of Norfolk Southern Railway, adopts the operating plan Orr had jointly sponsored as Exhibit 13 to the April 30 application.
The proceeding remains in abeyance. Nothing filed on Monday changes that, and the Board has not said when it will lift it.
