Union rules

In my experience on the SP there were regional variations in the rules, and a lot of local agreements especially with regard to pools. For example when I moved from California to Texas, I was surprised that whenever we ran short of engineers (which was frequently in those days) a road foreman (officer) could work the train without penalty. The poor road foremen rarely got any days off. Out in California that would have cost the railroad a timeslip (a days pay to the union guy not used) and a complaint from the union, and simply was not done...you ran the train when somebody with the right seniority was available, unless it was an emergency. I'm guessing the DRGW had an agreement that allowed other crafts to do the work so long as somebody with the right seniority did not lose any work. The union would not want to expand the pool because presumably it was not a guaranteed pool, so the junior guys would not have had enough work to make it worthwhile. I should mention these are general comments about railroad agreements, and I have no knowledge of the specific agreements at Durango or Alamosa. I wonder if there is any record of the general agreements and local variations that applied along the narrow gauge.

I checked with a friend who is retired from UP Labor Relations about the possibility these agreements would still be buried in some file at UP (a lot of old stuff does get saved because of the importance of precedent and history to current agreements). He said the DRGW agreements would have gone from Denver to San Francisco after the merger with SP, and then to Omaha after the SP merger with UP. He doubted anything would have servived in the UP files because when things were sorted out during the moves these agreements would probably not have any current relevancy.

My labor relations friend commented, "I certainly doubt the BLF&E would have entered into a formal agreement regarding who fills the fireman's seat when there is no BLF&E fireman available. What you speak of may just have been a historical practice, or a 'verbal agreement.' We used to say verbal agreements weren't worth the paper they were written on."

JBWX



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 09/09/2014 06:01PM by John West.