BLE, UTU members sue UTU over secret deal with Grand Trunk

Members of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers on the Grand Trunk Western Railroad have brought a class action suit against the carrier and the United Transportation Union, claiming that UTU and GTW collaborated on a secret agreement that unfairly discriminated against BLE members.

The Duty of Fair Representation suit was filed on January 6 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division. The plaintiffs, trainmen members of the BLE, filed suit after learning of a secret UTU-GTW agreement that paid UTU members for their time claims but failed to do so for BLE members. The BLE suit seeks payment for their time claims equivalent to those UTU members received.

The BLE suit asserts that UTU breached its duty of fair representation by:

• Failing to consult BLE members prior to resolution of time disputes;
• Abandoning BLE members' time disputes without any rational basis for doing so;
• Discriminating against Plaintiffs on the basis of their membership in BLE by causing payments to be made to UTU members while no such payments were made to BLE members.

Over the past several years, both UTU and BLE trainmen have filed numerous time claims with the carrier. UTU, which holds the train service contract on GTW, was responsible for processing these claims. For many years, however, the UTU did not resolve them for either its members or the BLE trainmen.

According to the complaint, at some time during 1999, UTU reached a secret agreement with GTW management to resolve a large number of these time claims in the form of $2,500 payments to employees. While a substantial number of UTU trainmen were paid the $2,500 settlement, no BLE trainmen received payment for their time claims. In fact, the agreement was kept secret from BLE members.

Less than three weeks after the suit was filed in Federal Court, more than a dozen UTU members approached the BLE and asked to take part in the lawsuit, BLE General Chairman John Karakian said.

At the time the rumored settlement was paid, several BLE members had outstanding time claims that had been submitted to UTU and acknowledged by it. However, no BLE member was informed of the terms of the settlement, no BLE member was advised about the status of their time disputes, no BLE member has been informed that their time dispute has been resolved, and most importantly, no BLE member has been paid for their time claims.

"As the exclusive representative of persons performing work within its jurisdiction, UTU owed Plaintiffs and those similarly situated a duty to fairly represent them with regard to matters subject to collective bargaining," the BLE suit states. "This duty included the duty to refrain from discrimination against any person in the resolution of disputes including time disputes."

The BLE suit also states that GTW breached its contract with UTU and deprived Plaintiffs of the benefits of that agreement by contracting with UTU to resolve a dispute in a manner that discriminated against BLE members. ·

© 2000 Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers