CN On Track to Hire Thousands

Thursday, July 08, 2010 09:56 AM

Prince George, B.C. - Canadian National Railway Co. plans to hire as many as 10 thousand people in the next five years as the company makes plans to fill vacancies created by retirements of its baby boom generation employees.

Nearly half of CN’s workforce plans to retire in the next 5 years, but how that will play out in B.C. or Prince George is not known. Opinion 250 requested information on the numbers of expected retirements in this region during that same time period, but the railway says it doesn’t discuss regional employment plans.

At the end of 2009, CN had a total payroll of 21,501 people.

Each year , the railway replaces , on average, about 9% of its workforce.

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Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2010 09:56 AM in News by 250 News

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Comments

Posted by: Palopu on July 8 2010 11:10 AM

Not sure what this means. If you replace 10,000 employees who retire, then you end up with the same number of employees.

You would of course have 10,000 60-65 year old retirees who would be on pension, and therefore that is a gain in the available money to be spent.

CN Rail has over 20,000 miles of track in North America, so if we are including those Railways that they own in the USA, etc; the 10,000 employees would be spread over a very large area, and would have little or no effect in the BC Northwest.

Posted by: gus on July 8 2010 11:45 AM

Is this a non-news story?

9% of 21,501 is around 1,935 employees/year or 9,675 over 5 years.

Is the 9% turnover normal for the past, or is that the annual turnover averaged over the next 5 years?

The real question is, if they currently have 21,501 employees, how many will they have 5 years from now?

Posted by: superdave on July 8 2010 2:16 PM

The plan is to have roughly the same amount of employees, hence the statement they are hiring 10,000 people to replace half of their 21,000 that were retiring because of the baby boomers

Posted by: gus on July 8 2010 4:15 PM

The reason I am questioning how many they propose to have employed at the end of 5 years is because of the last sentence in the piece.

"Each year, the railway replaces, on average, about 9% of its workforce."

It does not say: "In each of those next 5 years, the railway will replace, on average, about 9% of its workforce."

The sentence reads as if a 9% turnover has been normal for some years. If it is, then that will either:

1. continue to be the case for 5 more years, or
2. that normal attrition rate of 9% will not only coninue but will double as a result of abnormally high retirements coming shortly.

If the latter is the case, then they will be hiring closer to 4,000 new employees per year for a while.

Posted by: Andyfreeze on July 8 2010 4:34 PM

10,000...?
I also question that number!

Posted by: supertech on July 8 2010 5:24 PM

I'm waiting for the BC goverment to come along that will hand CN the money they paid and take the railway back. %#$%@@
Yankees!! They control the oil and the transport. We need a Canadian goverment who will toss em out or force them to give us Texas gas prices. This spring I was in Houston and gas was 1.00 to 1.25 a gallon.
Oil producing State ya think?