Unions opposing the merger represent 66% of the combined railroad’s unionized workforce.
Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are claiming a “majority of unions” representing their employees support their proposed merger. The facts show otherwise: unions representing nearly two-thirds of the unionized workforce oppose it.
As of August 2026, the six unions opposing the merger, BLET, BMWED, BRS, IAM, TCU/IAM and TWU, represent 26,402 of the 39,828 unionized workers, or 66.29 percent.
“Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern have repeatedly been caught attempting to mislead regulators, elected officials, and the public,” said Stop the Rail Merger Coalition. “First, they attempted to hide numbers showing job losses and mischaracterized the positions of farmers. Now, they are trumpeting ‘majority’ union support while leaving out the inconvenient fact that unions representing two-thirds of their unionized workforce oppose the merger.”
The same scrutiny should apply to the railroads’ “Jobs for Life” sales pitch. All the rail unions were offered the same proposal and these six unions rejected it, arguing that it lacks the enforceable protections the Surface Transportation Board can impose and leaves UP room to shrink its workforce through attrition. Additionally, the “Jobs for Life” means “Jobs on UP’s terms” and UP has refused to commit that post-merger, workers can continue doing the same work they have been doing and in the same location that workers have spent their careers in. UP’s refusal reinforces that they plan to relocate thousands of workers and their families, in some cases hundreds of miles away, and will force workers to change positions to keep their job. If the worker refuses, UP will say that is the worker’s choice and “the Jobs for Life” guarantee does not apply.
It’s not hard to understand why stakeholders are not believing these promises. Last year, BNSF filed a petition with the aim of enforcing 30-year-old conditions from the 1996 Union Pacific-Southern Pacific merger. Union Pacific recently closed a rail-car maintenance facility in Palestine, Texas, cutting 57 workers, despite a contractual commitment with the town to keep those jobs.
And workers have reason to scrutinize promises about future employment. UP and NS eliminated 22,975 union jobs between June 2016 and June 2026, cutting their combined union workforce by 31.4 percent, according to a Teamsters Rail Conference analysis of STB employment data. UP and NS attempted to keep confidential employee data projecting 1,138 workforce reductions and 546 transfers from their proposed deal.
The math is straightforward: unions representing 66 percent of the unionized workforce oppose the UP-NS merger. No amount of creative counting changes that.
View the data here: