This Division of the Adjustment Board has jurisdiction over the dispute involved herein.

Parties to said dispute were given due notice of hearing thereon.

Although the initial claim was for two Claimants, one of them withdrew during the handling on the property.

The basic facts surrounding the surviving portion of the claim are undisputed. The Claimant was not called for the overtime service by the Carrier because he did not possess a Commercial Drivers License (CDL) which was required to operate the gang truck located at the gang's Valley City headquarters. After the Carrier's denial of the claim on that basis, the parties devoted the remaining handling of the on-property record to discussions about whether transportation alternatives existed that did not require the Claimant to have a CDL. In substance, the Organization and the Claimant maintained such alternatives did exist. Indeed, the Claimant's statement asserted that he was asked to use his personal vehicle to perform the same cattle-clearing work less than two weeks after the event in question. According to the Carrier, the only vehicle available at Valley City on the claim date required a CDL for its operation.

After careful review of the record herein, we find the claim to suffer from a fatal flaw, i.e., a word-by-word, line-by-line examination of the record confirms that nowhere in the claim or any of the appeal correspondence does the Organization, and/or the Claimant, explicitly assert that the Claimant had a right to be called for the disputed assignment based on some provision of the applicable Agreement. The only Rule cited anywhere in the record is Rule 29. But this Rule clearly confines itself to the subject of how an employee is to be paid when called for service outside of regular working hours. Nowhere does Rule 29 mandate any priority order about who is to be called in the circumstances of this claim.

Seniority rights such as priority order rights to overtime opportunities are created by collectively bargaining, and if such rights have been so created, they are customarily spelled out in the language of the applicable Agreement. It is the sole

burden of proof of the party asserting such rights to establish the specifics of the language and how it applies to any given set of facts. The Board has no proper authority to speculate or make assumptions about the existence or content of such Agreement language when it is neither cited in nor made a part of the on-property record.

Given that the record herein does not establish that the Claimant had a right to be called for the overtime assignment in question if qualified, we have no proper basis for concluding that the facts of this incident demonstrate a violation of the Agreement. Accordingly, we must deny the claim without addressing any other issues involving the Claimant's qualifications for the assignment.

Claim denied.

ORDER