(The following story by Glenn Maffei of States News Service appeared on the Boston Globe website on May 22.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amtrak confronted unions representing nearly half of its employees yesterday, leaving the future of a threatened one-day strike in the hands of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The nation’s second-highest court told lawyers on both sides that the central question that the ruling will address is whether a strike by 8,000 of Amtrak’s 21,000 employees would be a political protest, an act that would not violate the Railroad Labor Act, or an extension of bargaining between the railroad and the union.
For Amtrak to prevail, Chief Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg said, the passenger railroad must establish “some connection between the strike and the subject of bargaining.”
The threatened work stoppage, originally planned for last Oct. 3, had been on hold pending the decision of a lower federal court, which in December ruled for the union that the walkout would be a legal form of protest exempt under the Railroad Labor Act. Amtrak immediately appealed to the appeals court, saying the unions are threatening to strike because of stalled negotiations. The unions, including the Transport Workers Union of America, have agreed to delay a walkout until the court rules before September.
Dan Stessel, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the unions’ threatened strike is meant to leverage negotiations in their favor.
“They keep saying it’s about us trying to put money in our pockets, but we spent two years bargaining without doing anything like this,” the unions’ lawyer, Richard Edelman, told the court. “It has always been a political decision.”
Although Amtrak wants the court to enjoin the unions from striking, the railroad agrees with the reason for the political protest, that in recent years Congress has appropriated significantly less than Amtrak says it needs.
With no guaranteed annual funding from the federal government, the nationwide railroad, created by Congress in 1971 with the hope that it would become self-sufficient, faces annual funding battles. In February, Amtrak requested $1.8 billion for the next fiscal year while the White House proposed $900 million. From 1997 to 2002, Amtrak received an average of $1.1 billion in federal funding and $420 million in private financing.