‘Rubber Room’ Duties Stretching Patience of SP Workers

I’ve been working on the railroad

All the live long day.

I’ve been working on the railroad

To pass the time away.

For the past two weeks, there have been about 100 clerical workers at the Southern Pacific who would give anything to be working on the railroad.

The clerks, scattered through California, Oregon and Arizona, have been paid more than $100 a day to do nothing. And it’s driving some of them nuts.

Make-work jobs are hardly a new phenomenon in the industry; for decades, railroad unions have been accused of featherbedding. But what makes the idling of the Southern Pacific clerks a little unusual, union officials say, is that it is the railroad’s doing.

Without explanation, the railroad late last month stripped the clerks of all duties, reassigned them to overnight shifts and ordered them to sit for eight hours a night--sometimes in offices lacking telephones, paper and pencils--with permission to do nothing but read the company rule book.

San Francisco-based Southern Pacific Transportation won’t talk about the so-called “rubber room” assignments, insisting that they are an issue for labor and management to discuss in private.

But officials of the Transportation Communications Union, which represents the clerks, are outspoken in denouncing the company’s action as an attempt to use psychological gamesmanship to effectively eliminate jobs in violation of a union contract and job security agreement.

“I can’t imagine any company willing to pay people to do nothing, especially when they have work to be done,” said Beth DeHart, district chairwoman in Tucson, Ariz., for the union, which until last year was known as the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks. “It’s a stupid method of management.”

The conflict is one that could arise only in railroading, an industry whose rich history has left behind a legacy of arcane--some would say archaic--work rules unlike those governing any other business.

A handful of those rules are keys to understanding the rubber-room controversy--so-called, according to railroad watchers, not only because the no-work jobs create stress but because workers can be bounced from one office to another at the railroad’s will.

One rule holds that a worker can, at any time, bump a less senior worker out of a job, as long as he is qualified for it.

Another creates an “extra board” from which substitutes are drawn to fill in for employees who are sick, on vacation or otherwise unavailable for their shifts. Extra-board slots, because they involve unpredictable work hours, generally are considered undesirable and are filled by junior employees.

In the clerks’ case, moreover, contract provisions guarantee all but the most junior employees jobs for life--jobs that can be eliminated only if a clerk agrees to be bought out by the railroad. And only a set number of jobs, agreed upon by the union and the railroad, can be eliminated in a given year.

Transportation Communications Union officials charge that the rubber-room jobs are a ploy by the SP to use the rules, effectively, to eliminate more jobs than the union has agreed to cut.

According to the union, the railroad figures that clerks assigned to no-work jobs will use their seniority to bump into real jobs with real duties. A domino effect will ensue, until workers who have clung to permanent jobs will have no choice but to bump onto the extra board. There, they will either fill slots the railroad has kept vacant--in violation, the union says, of its contract--or they will bump extra-board workers into the rubber room.

Either way, the union says, the company may ultimately succeed in eliminating jobs. If the extra board is filled by workers bumped from permanent assignments, new hiring that would otherwise have taken place will have been avoided.

And if workers are forced to languish in a rubber room, they may pressure the union in upcoming contract negotiations to agree to further job buyouts, said Robert B. Brackbill, general chairman of the union’s Southern Pacific division.

Brackbill said the union has an “unblemished” record in helping Southern Pacific to trim its work force, agreeing to eliminate 1,350 clerical jobs in the past two years.

Now, though, the union contends that the railroad has cut too far. “The fact is, we are short-handed, and they’re taking people who could be doing productive work and having them sit on their hands--and they’re paying them money to do it,” said DeHart, the Tucson union official. Union officials hope to persuade the railroad to abandon the practice.

A rubber room was set up in Los Angeles, union officials said, but all employees assigned to it bumped into other jobs after a few days.

In several cities, however--Tucson, Phoenix, Eugene, Ore., and Stockton and Roseville, Calif.--upward of 100 clerks have hunkered down to no-work assignments, insisting that they will resist what they consider an unfair gambit by the Southern Pacific, even if it drives them stir crazy.

“We just sit and talk,” said one of the 10 clerks assigned to the Tucson rubber room. Five of the clerks bumped into other jobs, but the other five are sitting pat.

“Last week they did install a CRT tube so we could gain access to the company’s training program in the computer,” said the clerk, who asked to remain anonymous because company rules forbid him from making statements to the media. “But we have no access to the program, so we can’t use it.”

While a no-work post might be some people’s idea of the perfect job, DeHart said boredom and the danger of being caught violating work rules while filling idle time make the rubber room assignments unbearable.

“The stress is incredible,” she said. “According to the rule book, the only thing you’re permitted to do while on duty is devote yourself to your duties. If you have no duties, there’s not much to devote yourself to.”