By Alex Benzegala
Panhandle Post\
Earlier this week, reports of furloughs at BNSF in Alliance circulated on social media. Panhandle Post has requested BNSF for an exact number of the furloughs and divisions, and those have been denied. BNSF issued a written statement to Panhandle Post on Thursday about the situation and furloughs. Here is the statement from BNSF and Kendall Kirkham Sloan, Director of External Communications of BNSF:
We work continuously to align our people and resources with customer demand to deliver the industry-leading service our customers expect. This is a necessity for any network business to optimize the operation and run as efficiently as possible. While the underlying economy currently lacks clarity, BNSF is pursuing and capturing growth in several areas. We have an imbalance of employees where growth is occurring among some of our mechanical work groups.
We have team members in locations on the network where there isn't sufficient work and simultaneously not enough team members where the growth is occurring. Work groups must be readjusted to ensure we have the right people in the right place at the right time to best serve our customers' current transportation needs and be positioned for future growth. There is an urgency as we are seeing this growth now and we want our existing employees to have the opportunity to do the work. To accomplish this, BNSF has offered location transfers with incentives targeted to those locations where there are open positions.
BNSF has also offered craft transfers for mechanical employees to be retrained for other open positions on the BNSF network. There are currently several hundred open mechanical and engineering positions on our network. Our hope is that we can reallocate personnel through these incentive programs, so BNSF continues to grow with our customers.
Kendall Kirkham Sloan
BNSF Director of External Communications