(The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers issued the following news release on April 21.)
WASHINGTON — The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) today announced it filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the National Mediation Board (NMB), the government agency charged with administering the Railway Labor Act.
The Machinists Union lawsuit charges the NMB with violating the Railway Labor Act by refusing to proffer arbitration and release the parties from mediation in the IAM’s five year-old negotiations with the National Carriers Conference Committee (NCCC). The NCCC represents management for the nation’s freight rail carriers. A copy of the complaint is available at http://www.goiam.org.
“The NMB has held us hostage without a general wage increase for more than five years,” said IAM International President R. Thomas Buffenbarger. “Our members have the right to a fair agreement or to strike if an agreement can’t be reached. We have been shackled by an agency that has forgotten its purpose is to promote agreements, not prevent them. This charade has gone on far too long.”
More than 97 percent of IAM members rejected the carriers’ last and final offer in September 2003 and authorized a strike if necessary to reach an agreement.
“The National Mediation Board has become our biggest obstacle to reaching an agreement,” said Robert Roach, Jr., IAM General Vice President of Transportation. “This once effective agency is now dysfunctional and no longer serves the interests of workers, the carriers or the public.”
The complaint also alleges the NMB violated the Freedom of Information Act by not complying with repeated IAM requests for information related to the dispute. The IAM is asking the court to order the NMB to proffer arbitration to the IAM and the carriers in this case and order the NMB to disclose the information that has been unlawfully withheld from the IAM.
“If any railroad worker in the United States performed their job as poorly as the members of the National Mediation Board, they would have been fired long ago,” said Robert Reynolds, President of IAM Railroad District 19. “We are tired of being indentured servants to greedy railroads and useless bureaucrats.”
The IAM represents 8,000 Machinists covered by the NCCC National Agreement at Union Pacific Railroad Company, Norfolk Southern Combined Railroad Subsidiaries, CSX Transportation, The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company, Kansas City Southern Railway Company and all their subsidiaries. The Machinists Union was founded by railroad workers in 1888 and is the largest Transportation Union in North America. More information about the Machinists can be found on the IAM website, http://www.goiam.org.