To : JD Fitzgerald                                                   Lay Off                                                   May 20, 1998

Mr. Fitzgerald,

Ms Sandra L. Michael has put out a memo concerning lay offs from May 20^th to May 26^th.

• Board clerks can only refuse a lay off
• Only the chief clerk can lay off an employee and only Sick or Emergency.
  

1. No Personal Lay off or PL day requests
2. If employee is in pool they will not be laid off if 10 times out. The employee will have to call back when 2 or 3 times out.
3. If laying off Emergency employee must state the emergency.

Once again Crew Management has chosen to run the crew desk with an iron fist rather than working with the local committees and employees. No consideration has been given to allow reasonable lay offs and still have available personnel to run trains.

This happened in December then extraboards were cut for paying guarantees then we had manpower shortage in January.

I would not call this a disregard of SP&S Schedule and side letters, 1980 Crew Consist and the 1993 Crew Consist but a unilateral change in work rules.

Attached is the furlough list as of May 20, 1998 at 5 am. (28 people at the Vancouver Terminal)

JL Schollmeyer
Local Chairman 1637

cc: DE Rex
DL Stjohn
RK Heller

M. David Dealy
Vice President Operations-North

Mr. JD Fitzgerald
United Transportation Union

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:

Thank you very much for sending me a copy of your May 22 letter to Mr. Fleps regarding Crew Management policy.

Let me state clearly for the record that the instruction/policy that you quoted regarding lay offs from the Seattle Office was a totally unauthorized action on the part of one of our Crew Management employees which was not condoned or supported by the senior management of this company. It is not our intention to blatantly refuse anyone the right to lay off and after this internal memorandum was brought to my attention by General Chairman Bratka it was immediately canceled.

Our policy regarding lay offs, whether personal, personal leave or advanced, has not been changed. We did realize going into the Memorial Day Holiday that our vacations and approved lay offs were at a level which put us dangerously low on crew availability and as in the past we tried to take steps to preserve oar ability to satisfy our customers needs and expectations. It was because of this that an overzealous manager within the crew office at Seattle issued the memorandum you spoke of, which as I stated above, was rescinded as soon as its existence was made known to me.

If we need to discuss any of these issues further, I remain as always available to talk with you via telephone or in person to resolve these issues.

Yours very truly
(signed)
Dave Dealy