Northwest Mechanics picket Toledo RR Yards

Trains Magazine General Discussion
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Airline pickets set up at area railroad sites
(The following article by David Patch was posted on the Toledo Blade website on September 8. Jim Ong is the Chairman of the BLET Ohio State Legislative Board.)

TOLEDO, Ohio – The union representing striking mechanics at Northwest Airlines set up intermittent picket lines at Toledo-area railroad facilities for a second day yesterday, causing some reported disruption to rail operations.

Officials from the Airline Mechanics’ Fraternal Association said the action was intended primarily to rally support from railroad labor unions for their 18-day-old strike against Northwest, but claimed that the picket lines’ effect of keeping rail workers from reporting to their jobs was a legal secondary action under the Railway Labor Act, which covers both railroad and airline workers.

“We’re here just to put the information out about what we’re going through,” said David Doyle, an AMFA mechanic from Detroit who led a four-man picket line outside Norfolk Southern’s crew facility near Toledo’s passenger-train station at lunchtime yesterday.

“We just extended our strike to the streets that happened to be in front of those railroad facilities,” union president Bob Rose said in a telephone interview. “We appreciate the solidarity if someone chose not to cross the picket line.”

CSX Transportation Corp. and Norfolk Southern Corp., whose facilities in Lake Township and Toledo, respectively, were targeted, took a different view of the pickets’ legality. The railroads yesterday requested temporary restraining orders against the mechanics’ union in U.S. District Court in Cleveland.

Rudy Husband, a Norfolk Southern spokesman, said the railroad had done what it could to work around the pickets, including having train crews get on or off their trains at other locations around Toledo instead of at the train station.

Jim Ong, the engineers’ union’s Ohio chairman and state legislative representative, sai

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TRO issued in AMFA secondary picketing
CLEVELAND – Federal Judge Ann Aldrich on Sept. 7 issued a temporary restraining order requiring the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the UTU to order their members to cross the picket lines established by the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA) in AMFA’s dispute with Northwest Airlines.
AMFA, which has no dispute with railroad carriers, established secondary pickets at CSX and Norfolk Southern facilities in Toledo on Sept. 6.

Judge Aldrich ruled that BLET and UTU members must be ordered by their unions to cross AMFA picket lines at all locations where they are established on railroad properties.

Her ruling is based on case law stemming from court decisions following secondary picketing against commuter railroads in the Northeast by the International Association of Machinists as part of a dispute between the IAM and the now-defunct Eastern Airlines in 1989.

Judge Aldrich set a preliminary injunction hearing date for Sept. 21 in Cleveland.

September 7, 2005

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It sounds like the mechanics are clearly getting desperate, begging for support from any union who will listen. This is really getting sad that they can’t get any support their own coworkers at Northwest, the pilots and the flight attendants. Unfortunately their heads are on the block too. I’m afraid this is a sign of the times.

By the time the judge hears the case, this whole thing could be over. Look for action from the airline early next week.

Thanks for the info LC, the railroad part of the story hasn’t made the local news here (yet). Worlds collide.

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A tale of two RRs. One “works around the problem and keeps going”. The other “shuts down”.