Let the furloughs begin

Not sure what is going on outside of my service unit, but UP has been laying people off since the begining of Nov. Currently there are almost 100 guys cut off, but all of the extra boards are out of guys no matter what day of the week it is. At the same time the company continues to misuse the AW board and call as many guys off of that as they need. The AW board amounts to nothing but a cheap extra board. Last word I heard was the general chairman is suppose to meet with company officals sometime in Jan. to serve notice and do away with the AW boards in order to keep the company from abusing them any further.

I spent the first 3 months after marking up on the AW board, so I know exactly what you are talking about, the second go round, I managed to stay off of it by riding bulletins and basically working all over the place, if they come around again, I'll be going to the Cutoff board, I made my mind up the first time around, that I wouldn't go back to the AW board.

AW Board? Looking at cutoffs here also... Hopefully i'm high enough not to be affected.

Please explain the AW Board.

It's an "Auxillary" board, basically you agree to be on call 2 days a week and you draw 8 days pay a month.

When I went on it, I thought it was a good idea at first, I thought we would be getting called out a couple times a month to cover yard jobs, turns out, we were getting called out nearly every week for road jobs, which typically meant being away for more than 2 days, not good if you're trying to hold another job.

hopefully i've got enough under me that I wont have to worry about it.


The union needs to step in and tell them that enough is enough and they need to find a place to put all these people they're hiring

powerpro69 wrote:It's an "Auxillary" board, basically you agree to be on call 2 days a week and you draw 8 days pay a month.

When I went on it, I thought it was a good idea at first, I thought we would be getting called out a couple times a month to cover yard jobs, turns out, we were getting called out nearly every week for road jobs, which typically meant being away for more than 2 days, not good if you're trying to hold another job.

When I was on the aw board if a caught a road job and it was going into my off days I would call the corridior manager and tell them I didn't protect mondays (if the engineer wanted to go home too). They would send a longhaul and bring us back home.

In the 80's I worked the Clerk's Extra Board on NS. You could count on getting cut off right before Christmas and staying off until February or March. You could forget about getting Holiday pay----unless you were called to work on those days and agreed. We had no "AW"---just Furloughed and that was it. However, you could work almost as much as you wanted to. You could accept the assignments you wanted, or simply be "out of place" for call (avoid the call clerk) as you were not required to protect assignments off the Furloughed list. Even if they DID catch you, you didn't have to protect. That was good! When the crew callers would call, and they were shorthanded, they'd almost BEG you to work! (Awright, but you OWE me big time! ) I'd usually work 2-4 days a week and disappear about Friday (if the incumbent marked back up) so they couldn't grab me on Saturday morning. If he didn't, you were stuck until he did, OR a senior clerk bumped you for it after 10 days.
Anyway, I really didn't notice any difference in my pay as I worked pretty regularly even when Furloughed. Sometimes I wondered why they cut you off each year when they seemed to need you as much as they did when you were marked up on the "Board.

Seems like UP does a lot like my company did--doesn't change that much, does it?

Gadfly

Same is true in my area too… I am on the AWTS board. At least they have something like that for us. But I wish I were working full-time.

Here is Chicago they continue to hire and all the newbys get sent to the bump board, mostly during the weekend when the board turns. Wish I knew the master plan but its crazy when we were getting out every third day off the extra board. Now its every other day.. NEED SOME WHITE GOLD OUT HERE seems to be the only thing to get those boards spinning..
Stan
CNW End of the line