Railroaders' Nostalgia > Railroaders (SP-C&E) Were your Timeslips Disallowed by Div Supt??

Time Correction Notice           3/14/78
Los Angeles

Referring to time return No2 train 274 dated 3/9/78 claiming re: 1'15" bean tie up

Please note items No 2&3 below          RG Thruston Div Supt

2 Time claimed in Column No 23 & 28 Denied. You have been allowed 176 miles,
2 lite miles, 55" FTD, I' M/U units and 2 meals.
3. Claim is not supported by agreement provisions and is denied.

I had a few denied when I was still with SP, and I contested many others while serving as Local Chairman in 1980-81.

>3. Claim is not supported by agreement provisions and is denied.

Boilerplate denial, issed by timekeeping over the Supt's signature (which doesn't mean he read it or even knew it was issued). I amassed a whole pile of these during my SP days, most of which go paid on appeal. It's the way the game was played.

>3. Claim is not supported by agreement provisions and is denied.

I'm certain that most of our timeslips did not conform to the provisions of the agreements that payroll had negotiated with the Glass House.

EO

SP timekeeping basically denied anything that wasn't your basic day to day stuff.  Sometimes the claim actually wasn't supported by the agreement and I would inform the claimant of this.  Most of the time I would file a claim with the Division Superintendent.  He would deny it, and I would forward it to the BLE General Chairman.  At the time, that was Leonard Foster.  He would then meet with Labor Relations and eventually, most legitimate claims got paid.  There were avenues for further appeal, but in the meantime, SP got to hold onto that money.  



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/16 18:46 by CPCoyote.

For the non-rails reading this post, it might seem that the railroads just denied time claims without reason.  The truth is that the labor agreements, especially those covering train and enginemen, were so incredibly complex that no one person could have been informed of all the "angles and curves" of the various agreements.  I was one of 5 trainmasters that opened the Santa Fe's new hump yard at Barstow in February 1976.  For some reason, I inherited the chore of answering the queries from the timekeeping folks over timeclaims for operations in the new yard.  Crews claimed extra pay for yarding their train in different yards, for moving their locomotives to the new diesel facilities in lieu of the old shop area, and for hundreds of other technical issues.  Actually, the Santa Fe negotiated agreements with each union before the yard opened covering their work and jusidictions between unions.  Despite this, the timeclaims rained in by the hundreds, and each one had to be individually answered within a time limit, or the claim ight have to be allowed without investigation.  
Time claims on any railroad had to be closely checked both to insure accuracy and to avoid establishing precedents.  In many cases, employees would claim anything they thought had even a remote chance of slipping through. 
I always felt this procedure, which comsumed a days work each week for one of the trainmasters (me?),  was a gross waste of time and money.  Fortunately, the work rules have been somewhat streamlined to eliminate sone of the paperwork burden.

Norm

Norman Orfall
Helendale, CA
TIOGA PASS, a private railcar

aronco Wrote:
------------------------------------------------------
> it might seem
> that the railroads just denied time claims without
> reason.  

And many a former (mediocre) railroad manager bacame a highly succesful Insurance Company Executives ?

RailNet802, owevaaaah

One former yardmaster that I hired to do budgets on the Rock Island said that the rule for timeslips was "Claim it, if they pay it it's a precedent".