Norfolk Southern Railway is a name that many of you are likely not to be too familiar with, unless you spend a lot of time thinking about how the things that you buy get from where they were to where they are. So for those of you who are not that familiar with the company lets begin by talking about how Norfolk Southern Railway  has chosen to describe itself before we talk about the layoffs to come, “Norfolk Southern Corporation is one of the nation’s premier transportation companies. Its Norfolk Southern Railway subsidiary operates approximately 20,000 route miles in 22 states and the District of Columbia, serves every major container port in the eastern United States, and provides efficient connections to other rail carriers. Norfolk Southern operates the most extensive intermodal network in the East and is a major transporter of coal and industrial products.”

Sadly the company is getting ready to cut back on about 200 workers as part of a mass layoff action. The company is letting the workers go in order to cut back on costs as the company faces fiscal challenges. Job cuts of this size are enough to qualify as a mass layoff action under the current federal guidelines. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program collects reports on mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.” The only good news is under the terms of a mass layoff action is that the workers must be given several weeks of notice before they are put out of a job.

Interestingly in a recent release the company did not talk about the job cuts, but instead focused on a different aspect of their business. Here is an excerpt from that most recent release, “Norfolk Southern CEO Wick Moorman and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley joined federal, state, and local officials and business leaders today for the opening of the Birmingham Regional Intermodal Facility in McCalla. The $97.5 million facility, located on a 316-acre site adjacent to the Jefferson Metropolitan Park, is a critical component of Norfolk Southern’s multi-state Crescent Corridor initiative to establish an efficient, high-capacity intermodal freight rail route between the Gulf Coast and the Northeast.”
For now the company has not said much about the terms of the layoffs. They have not said if they are going to be targeting specific positions in the job cuts and they have not, for the time being, outlined what kind of severance benefits they are planning to offer to the soon to be displaced workers.