By Justin Franz
INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — Dennis R. Pierce, national president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen for more than a decade, will retire at the end of the year after losing his bid for reelection. He will be replaced by Edward Hall, a Union Pacific locomotive engineer in Arizona.
According to the BLET, 8,153 members voted in the election, with 4,331 votes for Hall and 3,822 for Pierce. But in a letter to members on Friday, Pierce stated that there had reportedly been an issue with the election that in accordance with union rules would have required a revote. It was unclear what exactly those issues were. However, Pierce decided that instead of putting the union through another vote he would instead retire and hand the reins over to Hall.
“My decision was not an easy one,” Pierce wrote. “Whether or not any member agrees or disagrees with the difficult decisions that I have had to make as National President, I have always put the membership and our Union as an institution first and foremost. For that very reason, I will not subject this Brotherhood to the further division that would be caused by a rerun election.”
Pierce began his career at Burlington Northern in Nebraska in the 1970s and became a locomotive engineer in the 1980s. He became involved with the union in the 1980s and was named a local chairman in 1991. Pierce rose through the ranks of the union in the 1990s and 2000s and, in 2010, became the first BLET president to win an election by direct vote of the membership. He was reelected in 2014 and 2018.
However, members’ opinions of Pierce apparently soured in recent months during the national contract negotiations. Pierce backed a deal negotiated by the Biden administration that, although it was ratified, was not popular with many members. Hall had made the national contract negotiations and the decisions made by the BLET’s president central to his campaign, stating “It is clear to me that the national membership is dissatisfied with our leadership and the decisions made by them.”
