Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 17, 1991 TAG: 9104170314
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES BUSINESS WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
United Transportation Union officials in Roanoke received a telegram Tuesday from their headquarters in Cleveland saying: "You are to withdraw your members from service at 7 a.m. local time zone, Wednesday . . . and immediately establish picket lines."
UTU officials said their members will begin picketing 35 Norfolk Southern sites around Roanoke as soon as the strike begins, including the office buildings on North Jefferson Street, the old passenger station in front of Hotel Roanoke and the former Colonial American Bank building downtown.
"What we do is picket all the locations that our people might be required to report" to, said Percy Moore, general chairman of the UTU's enginemen committee. Each union draws up its own picket schedule, officials said, although in many cases the strikers will be walking "multiunion" picket lines.
Crews manning trains at the time of the 7 a.m. walkout will guide them to their scheduled destinations before going out on strike, Roanoke-area union leaders said. Yard workers and other hourly employees are expected to leave their jobs.
Unions were free to strike anytime after 12:01 a.m. today, the deadline for an extended "cooling-off" period between the nation's railroads and their 235,000 union workers. Union and rail officials have been deadlocked for more than three years over wages, work rules and health care.
Union and rail officials continue to insist that Congress will intervene in the dispute soon after the deadline and order the unions back to work for fear that a nationwide rail shutdown will deepen the recession.
"Consensus is that the committees will draft some kind of legislation to put us back to work and then put it to the House and Senate for a vote," said Dan Anderson, general chairman of System Council 6 of the International Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers. "That could take hours or days."
The White House, acknowledging a strike was inevitable, formally called on Congress Tuesday to rush through legislation imposing a settlement under the Railway Labor Act - the same process used to settle the last national rail strike in 1982 after four days.
The House subcommittee responsible for drafting such a bill scheduled a meeting for 8 a.m. today. "Things are set so that legislation [imposing a settlement] could be on the floor of the House as early as late Wednesday night," a Democratic congressional source said.
"We've got a very, very precarious economy that's just on its way coming back. We cannot afford to have that recovery interrupted by an unnecessary strike," Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner said Tuesday.
A nationwide strike is expected to immediately choke the flow of one-third of the nation's goods and idle as many as 550,000 other American workers who depend on rail-delivered goods to complete their jobs.
Union officials in Roanoke have accused the carriers of trying to orchestrate a rail crisis with the intention of forcing a lopsided agreement on the powerful unions.
Union officials steadfastly object to the recommendations of a presidential emergency board appointed last year to study the dispute. They say the board's proposals, issued in January, would be "totally devastating" to rail unions. Carriers criticized the board for not going far enough.
"It's just common sense: Nobody wins in a strike; you never regain what you lost," said J.L. Ensor, a longtime Norfolk Southern engineer who also is local chairman for UTU-E Local 559. "I don't mind being forced back to work. But give us a PEB board that knows what the hell they're doing.
Norfolk Southern - which last year moved about 11,000 tons of freight per day - announced last week that it would cease rail operations this morning should a strike begin. Union members dismissed the announcement, saying the carrier would idle its trains only for a short time.
Robert Auman, a company spokesman in Roanoke, would not estimate how the shutdown might affect the Norfolk-based transportation company. "It depends on the length of time," he said. "There is no way of knowing at this time."
CSX Transportation Inc., the rail arm of Richmond-based CSX Corp., said it will shut down if a strike lasts more than a few days.
The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.
by CNB