Brotherhood Of Locomotiv Eng'rs v. Springfield Terminal Ry. Co.

210 F.3d 18 (1st Cir. 2005)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

In 1995 P and D negotiated a collective bargaining agreement for D locomotive engineers, conductors, and trainmen. The agreement specifically provided that union employees shall perform the work need to make up and move the trains and in its business of servicing industrial sidings. One such 'business of servicing industrial sidings' is switching, a service that rail carriers often provide for their customers on the customers' properties. D employees who are union members have historically provided this service to many of D's line-haul railway customers. In 1996, D proposed that the union members engaged in switching accept a twenty-six percent pay cut and less favorable working conditions. The memberships of both Ps rejected the changes. Despite the vote, D persisted in seeking a pay cut for switching work. D took a series of steps that resulted in ABR performing switching that had previously been done by Ps. ABR is a non-unionized company and D executed an agreement with ABR giving ABR joint use of some railway tracks, and D personnel trained two non-union ABR employees to use a leased track-mobile to perform the switching at the ABR wood products mill previously done by P. While joint use agreements of this type are fairly common in the railway industry, Springfield's next move was unusual. D then suggested to ABR that it truck its switching equipment from place to place so that it could perform switching work for various D railway customers that had previously used Ps for switching. Ps sued under the RLA. Ps claimed that D was using ABR to implement contested changes before RLA mediation procedures were exhausted, thereby violating the RLA's requirement that the carrier and union maintain the pre-dispute status quo. The district court ruled that the dispute was major under the RLA and D was attempting to evade the collective bargaining agreement by 'allowing a corporate relative not bound by the collective bargaining agreement to perform work covered by the collective bargaining agreement.' D appealed.