(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, said his membership learned of the pickets when they showed up for work Tuesday at CSX’s freight yard in Walbridge, which was AMFA’s first local target.
“We told them if they feared for their safety, they should not cross that picket line,” Mr. Ong said.
Gary Sease, a CSX spokesman, declined to say how much impact the pickets had on CSX operations, but Mr. Ong said that for a while Tuesday, Walbridge Yard was “essentially closed down.”
AMFA’s 4,427 members at Northwest walked out on Aug. 20 rather than accept 25 percent pay cuts and layoffs of more than 2,000 workers. Northwest announced yesterday that it expected to resume talks with the union today, after telling the union Tuesday it would begin hiring permanent replacements Sept. 13 without a settlement.
An airline letter to AMFA said that even deeper cuts will now be on the table, because economic conditions have changed since Northwest’s last offer, made Aug. 18.
Pickets were gone from Walbridge Yard by yesterday morning, and the day’s last pickets left Norfolk Southern’s terminal on their own by early afternoon. Mr. Rose said he was unaware of the railroads’ legal maneuvers in federal court and declined to say when or if AMFA might stage another picket line involving area railroad operations.
Doing so, he said, “blows the element of surprise.”