News Release

UTU and BNSF Sign Agreement to Create New Era in Rail Employee Safety

CLEVELAND, Ohio, and FORT WORTH, Texas, March 19, 2002:

The United Transportation Union (UTU) and The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company (BNSF) today signed an agreement that will launch a new era in railroad employee safety programs.

Through the agreement, a new safety culture will be introduced that focuses on the active participation of employees and UTU and BNSF leadership working as a team to create a safer workplace. The agreement also establishes an approach to discipline that further stresses training and counseling instead of punitive discipline.

“This agreement challenges and changes traditional employee/management relationships by substituting training and counseling for punitive discipline in most cases of rules violations," said UTU International President Byron A. Boyd, Jr.

The agreement provides for UTU-represented safety people to assure that the agreement’s procedures are being implemented and interpreted uniformly across BNSF’s 33,000-route-mile system. Safety forums at different BNSF locations will address conditions that have to be corrected to improve safe production, replacing the previous reporting, cataloguing and investigative process. Workplace coaching, counseling and retraining will replace the existing discipline process for non-repetitive and non-serious rules violations.

“This agreement, the first of its kind between the UTU and a large railroad, represents a fundamental change in our approach to safety for operating employees,” said M. David Dealy, BNSF’s vice president, Transportation. “Both UTU and BNSF will focus on root cause analysis and corrective action to prevent injuries caused by behavior as well as injuries caused by environmental conditions.”

“This process worked because of a team effort involving BNSF's top officers and UTU general chairpersons, who were determined to introduce a new safety culture,” Boyd said.

The UTU is the nation's largest railroad union with 125,000 members in the U.S. and Canada. UTU members are employed by freight railroads, Amtrak, commuter railroads, bus companies and airlines and include railroad brakemen, conductors and locomotive engineers.

A subsidiary of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation (NYSE: BNI), BNSF operates one of the largest rail networks in North America, with 33,000 route miles of track covering 28 states and two Canadian provinces. BNSF is an industry leader in Web-enabling a wide variety of customer and supplier transactions. The railway moves more intermodal traffic than any other rail system in the world, is America’s largest grain-hauling railroad, and transports enough coal to generate more than 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States.

BNSF Headquarters
BNSF Railway Company
2650 Lou Menk Dr. 2nd Floor
P.O. Box 961057
Fort Worth, TX 76161-0057
Phone: (817) 352-1000