CHICAGO (WBBM Newsradio 780) -- Amtrak food service workers, who say rail passengers don't want "airline food," rallied outside of Union Station Wednesday.
WBBM Newsradio 780's Bob Roberts reports the menu changes, that began last month on selected Amtrak routes, have cost 60 Chicago-based Amtrak food service employees their jobs, and more job cuts are expected as Amtrak moves increasingly to off-train food preparation.
"Less than five years ago, Amtrak spent $1 million to send them to the Culinary Institute of America to hone their fine dining skills, and now they're telling them to serve pre-plated food," said UNITE-HERE International Vice President Isaac Monroe, a 32-year veteran of Amtrak food services. "It's a bad idea."
Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari conceded that the nation's passenger rail network hopes to save "tens of millions of dollars" through the "simplified menus," but said he has found the quality of the food "pretty good."
Most of the preparation is done elsewhere, but the meals will still be "finished" by on-board personnel.
Magliari said Congress, which provides annual subsidies for Amtrak, ordered it to cut food service losses -- or else.
"Overwhelmingly, the largest cost of our delivering food and beverage service on the trains is labor costs," he said. "We've been working hard to follow the federal mandate. We have to show significant reduction in the cost of food and beverage service or there won't be any Amtrak."
The so-called "simplified dining service" was rolled out in mid-February on three Amtrak long-distance trains originating in Chicago: the Texas Eagle, the City of New Orleans and the Capitol Limited.
At the same time, Amtrak is trying to make dining service available to more passengers by offering continuous, staggered seatings instead of specific times and extended hours of operation. In a February newsletter to employees, Amtrak said that vegetables, potatoes and rice will still be prepared fresh on-board. The meals will be served on disposable plates with disposable plasticware instead of china and silverware.
As the changes are implemented in coming weeks on a number of other long-distance Amtrak routes, additional layoffs will occur.
Monroe said Amtrak could have saved at least some of the money in other ways.
"In all of our contracts...we have a clause that calls for a productivity council where members of management and members of labor will get together and set benchmarks and try to achieve savings," he said. "Amtrak has virtually totally ignored that clause."
Monroe accused the Amtrak board, all hand-picked by the Bush administration, of trying to find ways to drive away passengers and make the dismantling of long-distance Amtrak service a foregone conclusion.
"They tried this twice before and they've almost run themselves out of business, but those two times it was just poor management decisions," he said. "This time it's by design."
Magliari insists that service and quality are not suffering.
"I would say try it -- it's pretty good," he said. "Overall, this will be an improvement.
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