The Third Division of the Adjustment Board, upon the whole record and all the evidence, finds that:
The carrier or carriers and the employee or employees involved in this dispute are respectively carrier and employee within the meaning of the Railway Labor Act, as approved June 21, 1934.
This Division of the Adjustment Board has jurisdiction over the dispute involved herein.
On November 28, 1994, the Organization filed the instant claim, in which it alleged that Carrier was violating Rule 1 Scope of the parties' Agreement by requiring General Yardmasters to perform clerical work of entering train information into the Carrier's computer. The Organization maintained that the General Yardmasters were entering "Crew Called," "Crew Arrived," "Scheduled Call Time" and "Delay" information into the computer for a daily computer-generated report known as the Situation Report In its denial of the claim, Carrier asserted that General Yardmasters on this property have always been responsible for producing the Situation Report; that clerical employees have never prepared this report; and, that the General Yardmasters have always used the A&S computer in connection with their work.
At issue in this case is application of Rule 1 - Scope. That Rule reads in pertinent part as follows:
The Organization notes that the Rule in question is a "Work and Positions" Scope Rule. Thus, system-wide proof of exclusivity is not an issue. (Third Division Award 29702). The Organization asserts that the work of recording the data of "Crew Called, Crew Arrived, and Scheduled Call Time and Delay" is work which belongs to Clerks, and not Vardmasters. Any mechanization of that work, therefore, does not remove the work from employees covered by the clerical agreement. In support of its position, the Organization also cites Third Division Award 26773.
The Carrier contends that as early as 1989, the General Yardmasters input all the data in question into the Situation Report by hand. It notes that the mere fact that the report was recently mechanized, so that the Yardmaster now "writes" the data in a field on a computer screen via keystrokes instead of filling in the blanks on a sheet of paper, is not a violation of the A&S clerical Scope Rule.
As the Board noted in Award 26773, the Scope Rule in the clerical agreement on this property is a "positions and work" Scope Rule. In that case, however, it was not disputed that the work at issue was work done by clerical employees before computerization. Rather, Carmen were given work of transmitting information which generated AAR billing, and the billing was undisputedly clerical work. By contrast, in the present case, generation of the Situation Report has traditionally been the work of Yardmastas. Moreover, evidence in the record confirms that Yardmasters previously entered by hand notations concerning crew calls and delays in the blanks provided on their work sheets, along with inbound and outbound train information. Form 1 Award No. 32173
In Award 26773, the Board stated, "the Carrier may abolish iclericall positions, but the work of those positions must be eliminated, not assigned to others either directly or in the instant case by indirect means." In the instant dispute, the Organization failed to demonstrate that the work in question was work normally done by Clerks, and was subsequently assigned "to others either directly or indirectly."
This Board, after consideration of the dispute identified above, hereby orders that an award favorable to the Claimant(s) not be made.