Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast for his monthly segment. He discussed Rail Safety Week, which was held September 21–27, aviation safety and the TSA privatization effort.
On rail safety, he said this year's Rail Safety Week was different from prior years because the Railway Safety Act amendment passed the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with a large bipartisan majority. It represented meaningful progress, even though comprehensive legislation has been pending for nearly four years. He also addressed the emergence of AI in freight rail systems at CSX and Norfolk Southern, as well as the industry's tendency to treat any safety requirement as a financial impediment.
On aviation, he discussed the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), the secondary barrier requirement for cockpit doors that remains only partially implemented on new aircraft, and the Trump administration's plan to expand the Screening Partnership Program from a handful of airports to more than 300.
Greg Regan said this year's Rail Safety Week stood apart from previous years because something actually happened in Congress. The Railway Safety Act amendment passed the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with a large bipartisan majority. Regan said the vote demonstrates a genuine appetite among lawmakers to address the safety concerns that have been accumulating for years in the freight rail system.
The problem is that meaningful action has been delayed since the East Palestine derailment in early 2023, and a committee vote is not a law. The Class I railroads — Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and the others — are fighting the proposed reforms aggressively, spending significant money to prevent their passage. Their position, as Regan characterized it, is that they are perfectly capable of regulating themselves and that any externally imposed safety requirement is a financial burden that hurts their stock returns.
That attitude reveals how the industry thinks about accidents, Regan said. It’s a cost of doing business. For every East Palestine, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of unreported derailments that happen in rural areas away from populated communities and never make national news, he said. East Palestine was a reminder that derailments also happen near where people live, with real consequences for public health and community safety. Regan noted that a comparable accident in Washington, DC, where population density is far higher, would be catastrophic.
The common-sense reforms at issue — standardizing wayside defect detectors across all Class I systems, mandating a minimum two-person crew, and improving how defect alerts are communicated to train crews — are not expensive, Regan said. The industry's opposition to them makes its priorities clear, he added.
Next, Regan addressed AI on the railroads with the caution of someone watching something early-stage that could become significant quickly. AI programs are already operating inside the systems of CSX and Norfolk Southern, he said. They are not yet visible to the workers on a day-to-day basis, but they are present and growing.
The long-term direction the industry is pursuing, in his view, is toward AI managing more of the systems that currently require trained crews, and eventually toward eliminating or drastically reducing the need for those crews. The time to address AI is now, he said, before the technology reaches a stage where it is operationally embedded and the conversation about worker protections becomes much harder. Early engagement with how AI is being deployed in transportation systems, what it can and cannot do and what role human workers must maintain is the only way to avoid the outcome where it is too late to push back, Regan said.
The Transportation Trades Department marked the 25th anniversary of September 11 with a post calling for continued implementation of aviation safety measures recommended by the 9/11 Commission. Regan discussed two specific issues.
First, the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, which covers workers who suffered adverse health effects from the recovery and cleanup operations in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, is now solvent and guaranteed, Regan said. It took significant effort over the years to reach that point, but the fund is in good shape, and the workers who sacrificed during that period will be taken care of.
Second was the issue of secondary cockpit barriers. This is a physical secondary barrier between the cockpit door and the passenger cabin. It was one of the key recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. Regan said the requirement has been on the books for years but applies only to newly constructed aircraft. Existing aircraft are not required to be retrofitted. The result is a partial implementation that leaves the large majority of the commercial fleet without the protection. It is a relatively inexpensive modification, he said, and there is no compelling reason it has not been applied to the existing fleet.
The issue Regan described as most frustrating is what he called collective amnesia about the pre-9/11 security model. The 9/11 attacks demonstrated the failure of a fragmented, privatized airport security approach, he said. The TSA was created as a centralized, standardized federal response to that failure. Now the Trump administration is moving to reverse that direction through a program called the Screening Partnership Program.
The Screening Partnership Program currently operates at roughly a dozen airports, including San Francisco and Rochester, New York. At these airports, private security contractors perform screening under TSA oversight. Regan described the oversight as “a little bit loose.” The Trump administration wants to expand that program to more than 300 airports, including a large majority of U.S. commercial airports.
Regan said this is how piecemeal privatization works. It starts with a limited program that sounds manageable, then expands to hundreds of locations. The end result will be something that looks very much like what existed before 9/11, he said. Currently, there is not much congressional appetite to implement the full plan, but there have always been members who believe the private sector is inherently better at delivering security than the federal government, Regan said, adding that the push will continue.
He said the workers who provided centralized, standardized, federally accountable airport security for 25 years are the reason aviation security in this country is meaningfully different from what it was before those attacks. Going backward, he said, is not a direction the country should want to go.
More information on the Transportation Trades Department AFL-CIO is available at ttd.org.
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