Rising railway labour dispute hangs over Prairie harvest

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/08/2024 (433 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a dark cloud hanging over Prairie farmers as harvest gets underway and it has nothing to do with the rains that fell this week.

Those rains, however inconvenient their timing, were welcome.

As of July 31, 87 per cent of the Prairies were back under varying degrees of drought, according to the latest update from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s drought monitor.

“Following good precipitation and tremendous drought improvement for much of the Prairie region throughout the spring and early summer, in July conditions took a step back with expansion of dry and drought regions,” the monitor says.

Extremely low precipitation combined with record-setting heat has nixed earlier talk of a bumper crop and is pushing farmers towards an early harvest. Harvest of winter wheat and rye is well underway with spring cereals soon to follow. Some of the early-seeded canola fields are also being cut into swaths.

That brings us back to that dark cloud.

The escalating labour dispute between Canada’s two major railways and unionized workers with the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference has set the stage for either a lockout or strike as of Aug. 22.

The Canada Industrial Relations Board ruled recently that a disruption in rail service is not a threat to public health and safety. Therefore, rail service is not considered “essential” under the specific conditions outlined under the Canada Labour Code.

The public safety might not be at risk but the agricultural economy sure takes a beating, not to mention other sectors relying on rail to supply their businesses.

More than 70 per cent of the grain produced in Western Canada is exported and 94 per cent of that volume moves an average of 1,500 kilometres by rail to reach port.

Prairie farmers rely far more heavily on exports and railways than competitors in other countries. U.S. grain farmers, for example, export less than half of what they produce and 46 per cent of that moves by barge and only 38 per cent by rail.

As well, Canada’s grain-handling network, which never boasted the same elevator storage capacity as the U.S., now relies more on just-in-time deliveries to a few high-throughput facilities.

In other words, if the grain can’t get on a train, it stays on the farm and when its granaries are full, it must be stored in the field — often in piles where it is at high risk of waste and spoilage.

August isn’t typically a peak month for grain deliveries directly into the elevator. They start ramping up in September, which creates pressure on the system to keep things moving.

As well, labour disruptions in the past have been short-lived. A background paper filed with the Library of Parliament earlier this year cited three railway labour stoppages since 2019. The longest was two weeks.

However, the issues creating this impasse won’t likely be solved easily or with higher wages. The parliamentary backgrounder outlines how railways are faced with an aging, mostly male workforce and having trouble finding enough new recruits to run their trains.

Attracting workers from underrepresented groups, such as women, is proving difficult because the nature of railroading isn’t conducive to work-life balance.

Yet one of the railways’ proposed solutions to their labour shortage is to make their existing workforce even more mobile, shifting workers around to temporarily fill in shortages elsewhere in the network. That makes achieving a work-life balance even more out-of-reach for employees. So far, the union isn’t budging.

The galling thing about all this for farmers is that they foot the bill for a stoppage — not the railways; they still get their business whether they move the grain now, or months from now. Any demurrage charged by ships waiting at port are passed back to the farm in the form of higher handling costs.

Even if the work stoppage is short, it can take months for the transportation system to get back on track.

So, if you see puffs of blue smoke rising from those combines churning through this year’s harvest in the heat, it might just be coming from the cab instead of the engine.

Laura Rance is executive editor, production content lead for Glacier FarmMedia. She can be reached at lrance@farmmedia.com