Rail Unions Lose Challenges on New Wage, Work Rules

A presidential emergency board Thursday ruled against rail unions on all issues that had led them to halt freight traffic with a strike three months ago.

Under the law, the nation’s unions have to live with the emergency board’s settlement and cannot wage another strike.

“They’ve taken us to the cleaners,” said Larry McFather, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.

The special board was established under legislation that Congress rushed to enact after 235,000 workers walked out on April 18.

The strike capped a three-year fight between 11 unions and the nation’s big freight carriers. The dispute centered on union rejection of recommendations on wages, work rules and health care made in January by another board, which President Bush had named more than a year ago to head off a strike.

When management refused to budge, workers walked out. The unions complained that the railroads were refusing to bargain because they knew Congress would bail them out.

Under the April legislation, if either side wanted to challenge the January recommendations, it had to prove that those recommendations were “demonstrably inequitable” or based on inaccuracies. The unions had challenged about 40 recommendations; all those challenges were denied Thursday.

The ruling said that “evidence and argument in support of the modifications was insufficient, in each and every respect, to rebut” the original wage and work rule recommendations.

The carriers all along had indicated that they could live with the January recommendations.

The bulk of the issues that unions appealed involved work rules, such as crew sizes and the 108-mile workday for over-the-road employees.

Rail workers, most of whom earn $30,000 to $40,000 a year, will now receive a lump sum payment of $2,000, presumably to make up for a wage freeze in effect since the old contract expired in July, 1988. More lump sum payments will be made, plus general wage increases of 3% on July 1 and in July, 1993, and 4% in 1994.