CHICAGO — Major U.S. railroads have won a court order to block a strike by train engineers who protested a plan to assign freight-car switching work to a rival union, a wire service reports.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers said their contract was violated when railroads selected the United Transportation Union to switch freight cars between trains by remote control instead of engineers. A strike could have shut railroads that carried more than 26 million shipments last year, disrupting manufacturing and food production during a U.S. recession.
U.S. District Court Judge Joan Gottschall granted an injunction sought by Union Pacific Corp., Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Corp., CSX Corp. and Norfolk Southern Corp. The railroads plan to use remote control this year to save as much as $250 million by eliminating jobs, analysts estimate.
The ruling “is only one step in a very long process,” Morgan Stanley Dean Witter analyst James Valentine said. “It’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t get us closure on remote control, and it doesn’t give us closure on the contract negotiations.”
The National Railway Labor Conference, which negotiates contracts on behalf of the four railroads, declined to comment. The engineers union didn’t immediately comment.
The engineers said in court proceedings that they planned a strike when the other union’s members began using remote-control switching, the ruling said. Railroads said the contract lets them make agreements for new technology with a union other than engineers.
The rails’ bargaining unit and the United Transport Union released a joint statement after the court ruling saying they have agreed to start using remote control in pilot projects while terms for wider use are set. The statement said talks would cover issues such as safety, pay, training and severance terms for workers who lose jobs.
Kansas City Southern Industries, owner of the fifth- largest U.S.-owned railroad, has bought 50 remote controls, making the company the largest user of the technology, spokesman Bill Galligan said. Training classes will begin Monday, and the first equipment will be used two weeks later in Kansas City, the company’s headquarters.