ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

RAILROAD WORK RULES DISPUTE

MONDAY, JULY 29, 1963

U.S. SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE,
Washington, D.C.

The committee met, pursuant to recess, at 7 p.m., in the caucus room, Senate Office Building, Hon. John O. Pastore presiding. Senator PASTORE. The hearing will please come to order.

Our witness is Mr. L. J. Wagner, president of the Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen. Will you identify your colleagues, and you may proceed as you wish.

STATEMENT OF L. J. WAGNER, PRESIDENT, ORDER OF RAILWAY CONDUCTORS AND BRAKEMEN; ACCOMPANIED BY HARRY WILMARTH, COUNSEL; AND C. F. CHRISTIANSEN, CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, ORDER OF RAILWAY CONDUCTORS AND BRAKEMEN

Mr. WAGNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, on my right is Harry Wilmarth, the attorney for the Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen, from Cedar Rapids,

Iowa.

Next to him is Mr. Carl Christiansen, who is the director of research for the Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen.

Senator PASTORE. We are very privileged to have you with us. Mr. WAGNER. Neither part has a statement. I will make the statement, and any questions that I feel they may be able to answer faster or better than I, I will refer to them, if there are no objections.

Senator PASTORE. All right, sir. You may commence.

Mr. WAGNER. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Louis J. Wagner. I am president of the Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen, an international railway labor organization which was founded in 1868 and has its headquarters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I am very appreciative of the opportunity to appear before your committee and express the views of our organization in respect to the joint resolution under consideration.

I will say at the outset that we are very happy that you have insisted on time in which to investigate this legislation. It would be most unfortunate if the Congress enacted new legislation in the field of railway labor relations in haste and without an adequate opportunity of considering its ultimate effect or possible alternatives. With due respect to the Interstate Commerce Commission, we believe that the proposed legislation must be recognized as an authoriza

tion to a Government agency to dictate the wage structure and working conditions of railroad employees by mandatory directive.

If it were to be enacted, we would be helpless to prevent this result if the carriers choose to force all the issues in this dispute to the orders of the Interstate Commerce Commission. This legislation may well bring a complete termination of bargaining by the carriers on the issues in the dispute.

You have been told that this dispute has been subjected to more than 4 years of collective bargaining without a settlement and that it can't be settled by the normal course of collective bargaining. We see it in an entirely different light.

In our view, collective bargaining has only been tried for a relatively short period of time. Even that statement is subject to qualification because there are major issues in this dispute which have received little or no discussion across the table and in which collective bargaining has been frustrated by the carriers because of their interest in settling other issues.

Let me review briefly the various periods through which this dispute has passed. When the carriers simultaneously served notices for contract changes on November 2, 1959, it was apparent that these proposals were of the most sweeping nature.

Our several chairmen, when discussing these notices with their management, attempted to ascertain what specific rules were involved. They were generally informed that every rule in our contracts was involved in the November 2 notices.

Some of the managements even told our chairmen that they themselves didn't know what all the notices might include. While local managements went through the motions of a few conferences, there was no real attempt to engage in collective bargaining as that term is usually understood.

Subsequently, it was agreed to refer both the carrier notices of November 2, 1959, and the organization notices of September 7, 1960, to national handling. Throughout this period, there had been no negotiations of any substance.

The Presidential Railroad Commission was formed on November 1, 1960, on the basis of an agreement between us. We understood that it would be a study Commission designed to accumulate facts and make recommendations as an aid to future bargaining. We have never proposed to ignore these recommendations. On the other hand, the carriers did sign an agreement with us that the recommendations of the Commission would not be binding. We had no intimation, therefore, that they would later assert that these recommendations must be treated as a finality.

The Commission made its report on February 28, 1962. Thereafter, the parties held meetings in the period from April 7, 1962, to May 17, 1962. On May 29, 1962, the National Mediation Board entered the meetings which continued until June 22, 1962. Throughout these meetings, the carriers insisted that a settlement would only be made on the basis of the recommendations of the Commission and refused to discuss settlement on any other basis.

Since the recommendations of the Commission were vague and general on many issues, the carriers' so-called acceptance of them coulu in no way be treated as a settlement proposal which could be written.

into an agreement. It was a bargaining position from which they refused to budge but it was not a settlement offer.

The fact is that in this period we received actual settlement proposals on only two specific issues. In June 1962, the carriers made a written proposal incorporating their interpretation of the Commission recommendations on the road-yard combination issue and the expense away from home issue.

While these two issues are of great importance to us they are perhaps relatively of less importance as compared to the revision of the entire wage structure on which the carriers have never made a written proposal to this day.

On April 4, Emergency Board No. 154 was created by the President. This Board convened on April 11, 1963, but held no hearings and made no formal record. Most of the Board's efforts were devoted to an attempt to mediate a settlement of the fireman issue. Accordingly the Board devoted only a relatively short time to mediation of the other issues in this dispute.

The Emergency Board reported on May 13, 1963. Negotiations were. resumed on May 20, 1963, assisted by the mediatory efforts of the Secretary of Labor and the National Mediation Board. Since then discussions have been confined mainly to the fireman issue and crew consist issue as it pertains to conductors and brakemen.

Mediatory assistance produced the first sign of progress on the crew consist issue. On May 31, 1963, the carriers submitted their first and only written proposal on this issue. It was not based on Board recommendations. In fact it retreated toward the carrier notice of November 1959. It suggested a campaign to repeal State full-crew laws. These laws were not within the issues before any board. It proposed that crew size, above a conductor and brakeman. be left to the unilateral determination of management. This suggestion has been rejected by all boards, including the Presidential Railroad Commission.

The carriers further departed from the Commission's recommendations in proposing that we agree that all train and line of road observations could properly be performed by less than a standard-size traincrew. Such a commitment was not only without support in the Commission's recommendations but was deemed by us to be untrue.

We also believed that it would be used by the carriers in the future to condemn and discipline every trainman who failed to make some particular train or line of road observation irrespective of the circumstances and irrespective of the strongest evidence of lack of fault. The carrier proposal of May 31, 1963, is particularly noteworthy insofar as it suggested a traincrew less than the generally prevailing standard number of a conductor and two brakemen in road freight service. The Presidential Railroad Commission found this to be the prevailing standard throughout the United States.

It is important to note that this number is not fixed by any national rule. Crew consist rules exist on some railroads and others have none. Even on railroads with negotiated rules, these rules frequently only apply on some particular division of the railroad.

Nevertheless, the standard crew size in road service is generally recognized as a conductor and two brakemen. In local freight service, however, the carriers themselves sometimes assign a third brakeman of their own volition in order to speed the service and on some

carriers a third brakeman is required by rule in local freight service. There are vital operating reasons for the standard crew of a conductor and two brakemen which were not seriously challenged by the carriers in the hearings before the Presidential Railroad Commission. On the contrary, they offered to the Commission the testimony of Mr. William White, a railroad president with long years of operating experience, who testified in a prepared written statement that although his railroad had no crew consist rules it nevertheless, of its own volition, used more than the standard-size traincrew "in the interests of safety, service, and efficiency."

In Mr. White's prepared statement, offered on behalf of all carriers, he expressed the opinion that even if the carriers were given managerial discretion to determine crew size:

Not very many freight trains or yard crews would be operated with a crew consisting of less than an engineman, a conductor and two trainmen.

On July 2, 1963, the train service organizations submitted a written. proposal to the carriers for the settlement of the crew consist issue which provided for recognition of the standard crew size of a conductor and two brakemen and further proposed that disputes concerning the provisions of the proposed rule governing the use of a greater or lesser number of brakemen be settled, if necessary, by a special board to be created under the provisions of the Railway Labor Act. The carriers rejected this proposal without explanation or discussion. However, during the recent proceedings before the subcommittee of the Presidential Committee on Labor-Management relations, information was transmitted to us that the carriers were now willing to recognize the standard crew size with certain modifications. The report of this subcommittee, which has been made a part of this record, contains the following statement at page 9:

On the question of the crew consist, developments since the report of the Emergency Board have narrowed considerably the area of disagreement. Based upon a proposal made by the Secretary of Labor on June 19, both parties have agreed in principle to a procedure for handling the problem. However, the brotherhoods proposed to limit its application to crew consist situations which deviate from the generally prevailing pattern of one conductor and two brakeThe carriers indicated that the brotherhoods' modification would be acceptable if it did not apply to certain classes of service; they referred specifically to branch lines, secondary main lines, and main lines equipped with newly developed or automated control equipment.

men.

In spite of the foregoing statement by the subcommittee we have not to this day received a settlement proposal from the carriers relating to the three items referred to by the subcommittee.

In the light of the foregoing facts, it is particularly ironical that we should now be accused of a failure to bargain and be under a threat of legislation providing for dictation by Government fiat in a matter which has been handled by free collective bargaining for more than a half century, and in which our very real bargaining interest has been recognized without dissent by any board. Crew size involves the personal safety of the men we represent. It also involves the safety of their jobs since an inadequate crew may lead to a failure to carry out operating rules and mean dismissal after years of service. The conductor is particularly vulnerable in this respect since he is frequently held responsible for an omission by any other member of the crew even though he is not in the immediate vicinity of the violation.

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »