Form 1 NATIONAL RAILROAD ADJUSTMENT BOARD

THIRD DIVISION

Award No. 43397 Docket No. SG-43831 19-3-NRAB-00003-160639

The Third Division consisted of the regular members and in addition Referee Andria S. Knapp when award was rendered.

(Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen PARTIES TO DISPUTE: (

(Illinois Central Railroad Company

STATEMENT OF CLAIM:

"Claim on behalf of the General Committee of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen on the Canadian National (formerly Illinois Central):

Claim on behalf of J.D. Matlock, for 13 hours pay at the overtime rate, account Carrier violated the current Signalmen's Agreement, particularly Rule 13, when on April 27 and 28, 2015, it used a junior employee to perform overtime service on the Claimant's assigned territory, and thereby caused him a lost work opportunity. Carrier's File No. IC-BRS-2015-0006. General Chairman's File No. IC-01015.BRS File Case No. 15423-IC."

FINDINGS:

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.

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

The Claimant, Signal Maintainer James Matlock, is the senior Signal Maintainer in the Carrier's Champaign Subdivision. On April 27, 22015, Trouble Ticket #IM2938264 was opened for an issue at Kinmundy. Signalman K. Clough was assigned to the call and worked six hours' overtime. On April 28, 2015, the Carrier called Signalman T. Poe to work on Trouble Ticket IM2937377 for an issue at Milepost 208.7; Poe worked seven hours' overtime. The Claimant is senior to both Clough and Poe, and the Organization filed this Claim on his behalf, alleging that the Carrier violated Rule 13, Overtime, specifically Rule 13 (h), when it assigned junior employees to the two Trouble Tickets in the Claimant's assigned territory instead of the Claimant. He was available to work both tickets but was not called.

"Rule 13(h) states:

Overtime on a position shall go to the regular assignee of such position. If the regular assigned employee is not available an adjoining assigned employee will be called."

The Organization contends that this is a straightforward violation of Rule 13(h), the language of which is clear and unambiguous. The Claimant is a regular assignee of the position and the work should not have been assigned to junior employees or adjoining assigned employees. According to the Carrier, the Organization has failed to meet its burden of proof to establish a violation of Rule 13(h) in several regards. First, the Organization failed to prove that the overtime was allotted to the Claimant's regular position, or to any one regular position. There are other Signal Maintainers assigned in the same territory during the shifts and times that the trouble calls were received. Second, the Organization failed to identify the adjoining assigned employee. Under Rule 13(h), if the regularly assigned Signal Maintainer is unavailable for overtime, the next step is to call an adjoining assigned employee. Third, Rule 13(h) has no seniority call language. It merely states that if the regular assignee is not available, an adjoining assigned employee will be called. There is nothing about seniority in the language of Rule 13(h).

This is one of a number of overtime claims arising from the Carrier's decision in 2014 and 2015 to reorganize its operations by merging small individual territories into larger ones. This is a variation of the issue, but with different facts, that was addressed by the Board in PLB 6785, Case 74: how should overtime be assigned after the Carrier merges a number of smaller territories, each of which has Signal employees assigned to it, into a single large territory with all of the Signal employees working within the unified territory? The parties' Agreement does not use the term "territory" as such to define the geographic area within which an employee works, but in the past Signal Maintainers were each assigned to work within specific geographic "territories" that were well known. Under Rule 13(h), the "adjoining assigned employee" was understood to refer to an employee in a geographically adjacent work territory. The reorganization merged a number of the smaller territories into larger territories, which could be hundreds of miles across. The new larger territories had several headquarters out of which groups of employees worked. The Signal Maintainer positions were re-bulletined as territory-wide positions, assigned to different headquarters. More specifically, Signal Maintainers were assigned to work three shifts and with different days off. The reorganization engendered a number of questions about how overtime should be assigned: in the past, with the smaller territories, it was easy to determine who the "regularly assigned" Signal Maintainer in each territory was, and who was geographically adjacent. With the larger territories, a number of Signal Maintainers could be assigned to perform work in any part of the larger territory, and it became almost impossible to identify who was "adjacent assigned employee" across a territory stretching several hundred miles.

In PLB 6785, Case 74, the Board analyzed whether Rule 13(h) or Rule 13(i) would apply to overtime assignments in the newly created larger territories. The Board found that Signal Maintainers in the new enlarged territories who were assigned to the same shift and schedule at the same location became part of a "group" under Rule 13(i) and that there could be multiple "groups" within a territory. Under Rule 13(i), overtime is assigned by seniority within the group, and if no one in the group is available, Rule 13(h) governs how overtime should be assigned outside the "territory."

In this case, the record does not indicate whether the Claimant was part of the group that was regularly assigned to perform the work in dispute. Without that information, it is impossible to determine whether he was the correct individual to whom the work should have been offered under Rule 13(i). Nor is there evidence that he was an "adjacent assigned employee" under Rule 13(h). The Organization has not met its burden of proof.

AWARD

Claim denied.

ORDER

This Board, after consideration of the dispute identified above, hereby orders that an Award favorable to the Claimant(s) not be made.

NATIONAL RAILROAD ADJUSTMENT BOARD By Order of Third Division

Dated at Chicago, Illinois, this 18th day of January 2019.